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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl...
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Bad Editors: Employer Red Flags to Watch Out For When Seeking Copyediting Work

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J. Jonah Jameson, the editor everyone loves to hate, in  Marvel Knights Spider-Man The internet is teeming with people and companies marketing ultra-competitive editing and proofreading services. For the UK market alone, there's Dissertation Britain, British Proofreading, London Proofreaders, Oxbridge Editing, Cambridge Editing... and ever on. Quantity doesn't denote quality, however (Oxbridge 'connection' or no), and such a competitive landscape inevitably breeds unscrupulous individuals who run their businesses like the editing equivalent of a sausage factory. I should know – I worked for one early in my editing career, after all (my ex-employer would probably even agree with this assessment; he 'hilariously' referred to the company as a 'sausage factory' on more than one occasion). While their services might be comparatively cheap, you wouldn't want to pay for a manuscript with the editorial integrity of reconstituted mystery meat (this could act...
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We Need to Talk About the Reality of Life on the UK Welfare System

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'That constant humiliation to survive. If you're not angry, what kind of person are you?' – Ken Loach, director I've tried not to dwell on my time on the welfare system, which remains one of the darkest points in my life. However, even though I've now been in full-time employment as a copyeditor for around two and a half years, the spectre of unemployment hangs over me. Working at a small but busy company that has previously let go of a coworker due to financial strain and knowing talented, hardworking individuals who have met the same fate, the prospect of being made redundant is never far from my mind. As my time after graduation has shown me, sometimes one's best efforts don't count for much.
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'Excellent Telephone Manor Required': How NOT to Write a Job Advert

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Sometimes, the thing that got to me the most  about the job-hunting process  wasn't the existential dread of drifting purposelessly through life. Nor was it the employers who never called when they said they would, like fickle dates. It wasn't even the  rigorous hoop jumping I was subjected to each week to secure my paltry Jobseeker's handout . Nope. Sometimes, after a hard week's jobseeker grinding, the thing that really irked me was the desperately bad writing that pervades so many job adverts.
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