Outside of my professional life, I’m a musician, have always loved gaming, and I try to be a decent father. But this page is about what I do for my living. I try to do things that I live for, just as much as I do them to live on.

Management

I am the Business Network Manager at Envato. Realistically, this role has more in common with an Editor-in-Chief role than a Product Manager role. I oversee a network of sites that we currently refer to as the Business Network, including FreelanceSwitch, WorkAwesome and the Netsetter.

I don’t like to think of my job as a management job, but that’s essentially what it is. I work with a team of people to test new ideas, measure their success, make changes, fail quickly when we must, and ensure that the products–in my case, publications–I’m responsible for are always growing and changing, even if they’re perfectly profitable in their stagnant state. While I come from a web content background–both creating it and editing it–I spend my time at work with not just content, but marketing, user experience, product development, education and a whole bunch of other fields that impact the mission and success of what we do.

The bottom line isn’t money. It’s providing people with accessible and affordable–if not totally free–education that would be prohibitively costly in traditional venues, and getting that education to the people who need it.

Editing

At university I studied journalism, and thus my editing training was in news editing. Though I’m not involved in the production of news professionally, that education did hold me in good stead for producing web content that holds attention. The Internet has changed the structure of so many types of content that would normally, in print, adhere to a totally different set of standards, to instead be written in a style that resembles news: short, punchy, free of redundancy.

(I’m afraid this site is my respite from that. Expecting that style of web-friendly writing here may disappoint.)

Outside of that education, I had a great mentor who didn’t so much teach me the nuts and bolts of editing as the attitude and attention you should bring to the piece. It’s not something they teach very well in universities, not least of all in journalism where every job’s a rush-job. In a nutshell, if I may oversimplify, editing is about taking multiple passes of a work, each one deeper than the last, keeping oneself receptive to incongruities in the text that catch on a reader’s attention like a hook in a fish’s mouth, dragging one out of the flow of the water.

In case someone was going to ask, I’m not currently doing nor taking editing work. I need a good long break from it.

Writing

I spent a few years making a comfortable living as a freelance writer before I eventually moved into the editing field. Writing was my first passion, but, like editing, I think I need a good long break from it.

I specialized in productivity and business writing, usually of the instructional kind, social media optimized content (yes, those list posts that the cool kids love to hate), and later on, audio tutorials.

At some point I’ll compile a few links to my old work here, though it might take me a while–they say that every time a creator produces something new, they find it harder to look at their preceding work. It’s certainly true in my case.