Interview with: Christina Petrides
About Christina Petrides
Christina Petrides is a copyeditor, proofreader and self-described roaming editor who combines her editorial career with a passion for travel. Specialising in non-fiction, she works with authors across the travel, environmental, business and academic sectors while living and working around the world.
Q: Can you tell us a little about your editorial background and how travel became part of your working life?
A: Editing is my second career. My first was in the environmental sector, where I worked for around 15 years, mostly in London and with a couple of stints in other European cities for specific projects.
Travel has always been a part of my life. I’m a third culture kid (someone who has grown up in a mix of cultures), and with a parent working in the airline industry, travel in some form was my day-to-day reality.
How I married the two is another. longer story! Suffice to say, the wanderlust won and I retrained to be able to work while on the move – which is how editing became my new career. I’ve been working on and off the road since I left London in October 2017.
Q: You describe yourself as a ‘roaming editor’ rather than a digital nomad – what does that term mean to you?
A: I came up with ‘roaming editor’ after a slew of negative articles and publicity around the digital nomad life appeared. My branding was a way to distance myself from the negativity and misunderstanding, which was also what the articles were portraying.
Too many people think that digital nomads are those who only want to work for a couple of hours a day on a beach and party for the rest of the time. Nothing could be further from the truth if you’re a nomad.
To give you some context, take the challenges of freelancing (e.g. finding and retaining clients, doing your own marketing and admin as well as your work, networking, CPD … the list goes on) and that doesn’t even cover being employed as a remote worker, which has all sorts of other challenges. Now add on regularly making travel and visa arrangements, finding suitable places to stay and to work, and trying to set routines to stay fit and healthy.
Those of us who choose to be nomads do so because we love to roam from place to place while learning about different cultures and ways of life, discovering new foods and languages, and meeting like-minded people.
Very few nomads have the kind of job that means only working a couple of hours a day without a sizeable passive income or savings. So I find the term ‘roaming editor’ describes me more accurately than anything else.
Q: What drew you towards indie travel editing specifically?
A: Two things really. Firstly, editing someone else’s travel stories is another opportunity to get involved in travel: to learn something new about a place, an experience or a way of travel, while helping an author fine-tune their story.
Secondly, people who read indie travel books either want to travel more or, if they can’t, want to immerse themselves in a good travel story. It makes me happy to be able to contribute to anyone’s efforts to discover more about the world.
I also find indie travel writers to be inspirational people and clients. They’ve often overcome challenges to achieve their travel goal, and, in every case, they have found personal growth. I find that motivating to read, and editing these manuscripts may help reach more people who find it motivating too.
Q: Have there been moments where your travel knowledge or lived experience has helped strengthen a client’s manuscript in ways that go beyond the technical edit?
A: I would say that whatever our experience is, we use it to strengthen clients’ manuscripts, even if we don’t realise it. When I first started editing, I worked on a series of blog posts for another traveller. I had been to some of the places the author was writing about, often after he had been there, and I was able to advise how things had changed in that time or offer a woman’s perspective.
More recently, working on a travel memoir, I used my travel experiences to help the author with their descriptions, particularly of beaches. Anyone can google what a particular beach looks like and understand that not all beaches are described as white and sandy.
But it’s not as easy to express what the texture of different kinds of sand feel like if you haven’t walked on them: Does the sand clump between your toes or crumble away? What does it sound like when you walk on it? Does it even have a sound? How does a floury texture change soon after the tide has moved out and as the day goes on? What are the sounds and smells like around the area and do they enhance or detract from the experience?
It’s these sorts of details that can immerse the reader in a story: It may be a dreary day in a UK business park while the reader escapes into their latest book over lunch. But what they feel is that they’re walking along a dazzlingly white sandy beach that squeaks with every step, while scrunching their eyes against the brightness as they try to keep an eye out for the scuttling sand bubble crabs so they don’t crush them underfoot.
Q: Travel editing sounds like a very human and immersive area of work. What kinds of things are you looking out for when editing travel writing?
A: Reading is (or should be) an immersive experience, and part of a travel editor’s job is to avoid readers being pulled out of the experience. Take that lunchtime-reading example: As an editor you want to keep the reader walking along that beach for as long as possible, not come crashing back to the reality of a packed lunch in a business park. So when editing travel writing, it’s important to be alert for anything that can do that, such as boring, repetitive or incomplete descriptions and unrealistic examples or metaphors.
At the same time, if you’re not feeling drawn into the story as an editor, the reader is likely to experience the same hurdle, so there’s often some developmental element to the work: What more can the author say about what they are describing?
And this is where travel experience can help with editing. If you know what something is like or how it feels, you can help an author to describe the experience better. This ties in well with the CIEP’s ethos of editorial work being ‘more than words.’
Q: What are some of the realities of working remotely while travelling that people might not always see?
A: Being a roaming editor is not always an easy lifestyle. Things can go wrong with travel, accommodation, workspaces, Wi-Fi – you name it – so you have to be adaptable. It helps to be able to think a couple of steps ahead, have a few what-if scenario solutions up your sleeve and build plenty of time into meeting your deadlines.
You also have to deal with time zones and time differences. You might be editing and come across a problem and need an answer from your client before you go much further, but it’s their middle of the night. So you have to wait. You could be jet-lagged or have food poisoning, but a deadline is a deadline.
But on the flipside, all those problems melt away when you’re doing something you love.
Q: Has living and working in different places changed the way you think about communication, storytelling or language?
A: Travel opens up new experiences and ways of seeing the world, but it’s easy to slip back into our day-to-day routine and way of life when we arrive home and forget what we learned.
Moving from place to place keeps much of that closer to the surface, and having a better understanding of a culture or way of life helps with how I approach a manuscript. It also helps when working with authors from other countries and cultures, and those for whom English is a second or third language. And that goes beyond travel editing.
Take a business or academic writer, for example, who is writing in English as their second language but whose culture and first language are more genderised and with a more rural way of life than that of their audience. Being able to provide targeted context of both why you are recommending a change and how it differs from what they know can make the process smoother.
Similarly, understanding why they’re expressing themselves in a certain way can make your life easier as an editor. We might see how something could come across as offensive or confusing to the reader when it is not the intention, and that can help us communicate our recommendation or a rewrite more effectively.
Q: How does your personal experience of travelling influence the way you approach editorial work?
A: As well as influencing and informing the language elements of editing, travel also prepares you for dealing with the unexpected. Those last-minute travel schedule changes (like that email from an airline informing you that there has been a timetable change, which could have a knock-on effect for onward travel) become easier to plan for and handle when they do happen because I’ve built in some buffer time.
The same applies to editing. All my clients know I’m a roaming editor, so they are used to an email from me letting them know of black-out dates because I’m on a long-distance bus, or a nudging email confirming that they’re still on schedule to send me their manuscript. More often than not, that spurs them into letting me know their timetable has slipped or to send it to me early so I can work on it on the flight or at the airport.
It has also led to me being more tuned into the publishing process and how my role fits into the wider work an indie author has to do – from making corrections to design, layout, printing (if hard copy) and publishing – and how meeting my deadlines or being flexible to fit in with their workflow makes their life easier.
Q: Do you think editors benefit from bringing their wider life experiences, interests and passions into their work?
A: Absolutely! Whatever experience or passion that may be. If you love what you do, you come to work with enthusiasm. You are more likely to be up to date with industry news and updates because it feels less like work. It may even help you widen your social circle, which is beneficial way beyond editing, and work for both your mental and physical health.
That said, it could mean a finer line in striking the right work–life balance. Where does the workday end and downtime start? Something to be aware of and work on if, like me, you can be a bit of a workaholic at times. The way I’ve tackled it is to work more when I’m at home base and take on fewer big projects when I’m on the road.
Q: What would you say to editors who are interested in combining their editorial career with a particular passion or specialism?
A: What’s that saying? Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
If you enjoy what you do, you will be more enthusiastic about your work, and that comes across in everything you do: how you interact with clients and colleagues; how you tackle a job (especially if it’s a tricky one); and how you stay up to date with things.
For many, editing is a vocation rather than just a job. If you are lucky enough to combine that with everything else that gets you out of bed in the morning, is there any better way to pay your bills?
It took me a couple of years to build my business and to become a confident roaming editor. If you want to combine your passion or specialism with editing, go for it. Set yourself a realistic goal to work towards and keep chipping away at it. It can be daunting at first, but I promise you that things will start to snowball and before you know it, you are a … insert your own title here … in my case, a roaming editor!
Q: What do you enjoy most about the way your work and lifestyle connect?
A: One allows me to do the other and vice versa. Editing allows me to travel because I can work from anywhere, while travel gives me the opportunity to see the world, learn about different people and cultures and, perhaps most importantly, meet people with a similar mindset and way of life, all of which I can apply to editing.