About Holly

My first professional writing gig landed in my lap when I was thirteen years old. I wrote and edited copy for a local access show, which sounds a lot cooler than it actually was. That said, it did give me an impressive resume point and paid tens of dollars a month. It was an early introduction to the concept of working for exposure. Or, less charitably, child labor.

Throughout school, I was the weird kid who could always be found with notebook and pen, a heavily dog-eared paperback, or both. In the Stone Age (before e-readers), I was known to carry numerous books with me so I had options when deciding what to read. At some point, I must have decided that starving artist sounded like a fun profession, because when I got to college, I majored in English (emphasis in Creative Writing) and minored in religious studies. I picked up the odd editing gig here or there before landing at Lyrical Press as a line editor. From there, I would go on to Mundania, then joined Samhain Publishing in 2012.

After Samhain closed in 2016, I decided to ease into freelance editing with a handful of incredibly loyal authors who were going to self-launch. More than a decade later, I’m fortunate to still work with many of these authors, in addition to the numerous authors, agents, and publicists that have become both friends and clients. The good thing about working for yourself rather than a publishing house is the ability to become genre agnostic when selecting projects, so I’ve worked in pretty much every genre under the sun.

As it turns out, starving artist is more a romantic than practical career path. To afford frivolities like food and shelter, I spend my days as a marketing copywriter.

When I’m not working on a writing or editing project, I’m usually at the movies with my husband or snuggling my dogs. Likewise, I publish my own books under the name Holly Denise, and spend an unhealthy amount of time on Elysian Fields Spuffy Fanwork Archive, which I helped found in 2006 and currently own/manage. Because as much as I enjoy original worlds, I love the community provided by fandom, as well as the lack of storytelling limitations.

Yeah, I write a lot of Spuffy fic. I was very clever and disguised myself well over there under the name Holly.

Since editing isn’t my full-time job, I am selective about the new clients I work with. Please reach out if you’re interested and we’ll see if we’re a good match.