Susan DeFreitas - Editor

In addition to serving a freelance editor, coach, and book strategist, I serve as a collaborative editor specializing in fiction with Indigo Editing, Design, and More.

My areas of expertise include plot, structure, and character, with an emphasis on effective strategies for revision. I believe that the role of an independent editor is not simply to improve the manuscript’s chances for success in the marketplace but to help the author achieve his or her unique vision for it.

My areas of expertise include plot, structure, and character, with an emphasis on effective strategies for revision. I believe that the role of an independent editor is not simply to improve the manuscript’s chances for success in the marketplace but to help the author achieve his or her unique vision for it.

A Great Length of Time

Joyce Cherry Cresswell

Awarded the 2017 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, this compelling novel tells the sometimes grueling, sometimes humorous story of a woman in a man's world. Assigned as a nurse to a hospital ship during the Civil War, Dr. Rose Barnett hopes someone will apprentice her in the modern art of surgery. But she has more to learn than how to amputate the ruined limbs of Union soldiers. Confronted by her o... read more

Awarded the 2017 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, this compelling novel tells the sometimes grueling, sometimes humorous story of a woman in a man's world. Assigned as a nurse to a hospital ship during the Civil War, Dr. Rose Barnett hopes someone will apprentice her in the modern art of surgery. But she has more to learn than how to amputate the ruined limbs of Union soldiers. Confronted by her o... read more

Open Country: A Civil War Novel in Stories

Jeff Richards

2015 will bring to a close the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and timed to this momentous occasion, the publication of a striking debut novel by Jeff Richards, told in eighteen interwoven stories. Set during the Civil War and inspired by the true tales of Aden Price and Thomas Jermyn Walker Price, father and son veterans of the Civil War and Richards ancestors OPEN COUNTRY: A Civil War Nov... read more

2015 will bring to a close the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and timed to this momentous occasion, the publication of a striking debut novel by Jeff Richards, told in eighteen interwoven stories. Set during the Civil War and inspired by the true tales of Aden Price and Thomas Jermyn Walker Price, father and son veterans of the Civil War and Richards ancestors OPEN COUNTRY: A Civil War Nov... read more

Grayland

Maddie DeLange

After her sister’s suicide, Marina Magaña struggles to get through each day. Stuck in a dead-end job, stalled out of college, and falling out with friends and family, her world is stagnating, drained of color. She’s lost and doesn’t know where her life is headed.One day she finds a mysterious locket, and soon after, a mysterious figure—the gray man—appears. Marina doesn’t know what to make of ... read more

After her sister’s suicide, Marina Magaña struggles to get through each day. Stuck in a dead-end job, stalled out of college, and falling out with friends and family, her world is stagnating, drained of color. She’s lost and doesn’t know where her life is headed.One day she finds a mysterious locket, and soon after, a mysterious figure—the gray man—appears. Marina doesn’t know what to make of ... read more

Joel Suzuki, Volume One: Secret of the Songshell

Brian Tashima

Joel Suzuki gets a huge surprise when he bumps into his favorite rock star while walking down the street. You see, this particular rock star – multiplatinum bandleader Marshall Byle – is supposed to be dead. Joel gets an even bigger surprise when Marshall makes him the offer of a lifetime: the chance to become a rock star himself. There's a catch, of course, but this one is a little different.... read more

Joel Suzuki gets a huge surprise when he bumps into his favorite rock star while walking down the street. You see, this particular rock star – multiplatinum bandleader Marshall Byle – is supposed to be dead. Joel gets an even bigger surprise when Marshall makes him the offer of a lifetime: the chance to become a rock star himself. There's a catch, of course, but this one is a little different.... read more

Fortress of Angels (Holimoren Book 1)

D Dean Boom

Dar is a wizard’s apprentice, a young man with a safe, obvious life before him. It's a respectable position in the world of Holimoren, and it never occurs to him that it should be otherwise until he is ambushed, kidnapped, and impressed into an army so far from home he's never heard of it. In this new brutal reality he must serve - or be beaten. He must obey orders - or else.He must defend him... read more

Dar is a wizard’s apprentice, a young man with a safe, obvious life before him. It's a respectable position in the world of Holimoren, and it never occurs to him that it should be otherwise until he is ambushed, kidnapped, and impressed into an army so far from home he's never heard of it. In this new brutal reality he must serve - or be beaten. He must obey orders - or else.He must defend him... read more

Super Born: Seduction of Being

Keith Kornell

Super Born: Seduction of Being, a fabulous new sci-fi, fantasy novel by Keith Kornell follows a single mom in Scranton, PA, who suddenly develops superpowers and the journalist who discovers her heroic, high-flying antics. Follow her as she struggles to balance her superpowers with her duties as a single mom, questions morally and ethically the immensity of her newfound skills, and wrestles wi... read more

Super Born: Seduction of Being, a fabulous new sci-fi, fantasy novel by Keith Kornell follows a single mom in Scranton, PA, who suddenly develops superpowers and the journalist who discovers her heroic, high-flying antics. Follow her as she struggles to balance her superpowers with her duties as a single mom, questions morally and ethically the immensity of her newfound skills, and wrestles wi... read more

Super Born 2: World on Fire

Keith Kornell

This second book in the Super Born Series continues the romantic comedy set in a Sci-Fi background as in the first book. The main heroine must reconcile her fascination with her growing powers, maintain her relationship with her daughter and family, while advancing her wildly erotic relationship with the Journalist who supports and protects her.

This second book in the Super Born Series continues the romantic comedy set in a Sci-Fi background as in the first book. The main heroine must reconcile her fascination with her growing powers, maintain her relationship with her daughter and family, while advancing her wildly erotic relationship with the Journalist who supports and protects her.

The Stingwisher: Cigar Smoking Jerks from Outer Space

Loren Blowers

The humorous misadventures of an LA party girl abducted by tobacco loving jackass-teroids. Bianca Lombardi is living on the edge. With excessive drinking and drug use about to destroy her life, she vows on her twenty-first birthday to clean up her act. But a cigar smoking jerk from outer space and a voluptuous prostitute with an axed off face arrive unexpectedly to derail her plans. Abducted b... read more

The humorous misadventures of an LA party girl abducted by tobacco loving jackass-teroids. Bianca Lombardi is living on the edge. With excessive drinking and drug use about to destroy her life, she vows on her twenty-first birthday to clean up her act. But a cigar smoking jerk from outer space and a voluptuous prostitute with an axed off face arrive unexpectedly to derail her plans. Abducted b... read more

Think Zebras

Kathryn D. Scott

A lowly virus, a disturbed mind, and an internal power struggle. A common illness is killing the elderly in Revere County, but Mary Campbell, the nurse supervisor for the understaffed Communicable Disease Control Unit, is told not to worry. The increase in outbreaks is likely due to a new strain of the virus circulating in the United States. But something feels wrong. Mary senses she’s overloo... read more

A lowly virus, a disturbed mind, and an internal power struggle. A common illness is killing the elderly in Revere County, but Mary Campbell, the nurse supervisor for the understaffed Communicable Disease Control Unit, is told not to worry. The increase in outbreaks is likely due to a new strain of the virus circulating in the United States. But something feels wrong. Mary senses she’s overloo... read more

Count the Mountains

Pamela Lindholm-Levy

Linnie Ann Adams and her father leave Illinois for Denver expecting abundant rewards from a gold mine investment. All too soon both the stock and Linnie Ann’s father die, and she is left penniless and without prospects. She agrees to assist a mining town doctor in Rhodochrosite, Colorado, where explosions, cave-ins, barroom violence, childhood epidemics, and home childbirths fill her days. As ... read more

Linnie Ann Adams and her father leave Illinois for Denver expecting abundant rewards from a gold mine investment. All too soon both the stock and Linnie Ann’s father die, and she is left penniless and without prospects. She agrees to assist a mining town doctor in Rhodochrosite, Colorado, where explosions, cave-ins, barroom violence, childhood epidemics, and home childbirths fill her days. As ... read more

City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales

City of Weird conjures what we fear: death, darkness, ghosts. Hungry sea monsters and alien slime molds. Blood drinkers and game show hosts. Set in Portland, Oregon, these thirty stories blend imagination, literary writing, and pop culture into a cohesive weirdness that honors the city’s personality, its bookstores and bridges and solo volcano, as well as the tradition of sci-fi pulp magazines... read more

City of Weird conjures what we fear: death, darkness, ghosts. Hungry sea monsters and alien slime molds. Blood drinkers and game show hosts. Set in Portland, Oregon, these thirty stories blend imagination, literary writing, and pop culture into a cohesive weirdness that honors the city’s personality, its bookstores and bridges and solo volcano, as well as the tradition of sci-fi pulp magazines... read more