Come in, come in! You’re welcome here.

✏️ Guide your vision to the page. The Rolling Editor’s Desk

Enter the joyful, freeing practice of guiding your writing from draft to polished vision.

In the Be Your Own Editor workshops—based on a 20-year editing career—we talk about the joy of moving from draft to polished vision by applying to our own works in progress strategies & exercises I’ve used to help more than a thousand writers say what they mean to say.

Paid subscribers get

• Access to all workshops, slides, exercises, and resource lists

• Priority when submitting to guest post

• To support independent writing

• Everything else free subscribers get

Founders get

• All that plus a quarterly update

• Discounts on one-to-one polishing help (coming in the fall)

Free subscribers get

• Previews of workshops that’ll get you started

• Access to the 24-hour ASK & GIVE chat thread (where people have helped each other find road songs, hotels, museum discounts, and more)

• Weekly posts that enable you to:

💫 🎧 Read or listen to mine. The Rolling Writer’s Desk

It’s best to take guidance from someone whose work you love. Sample mine in Walking the East Coast, about a seven-month trek by foot, living out of a backpack; in stories from other roads; or in posts from my current path, A Message in a Body, posts on understanding a progressive diagnosis.

🕸 Meet awesome people

One of the best reasons to go on the road is all the people you’re able to connect with. Through monthly interviews, collaborations, curations, or essays, meet amazing humans from the road, writing life, and everywhere in between. Don’t miss the collection of stories about people, often strangers, showing up for each other.

🔥 Get featured

Have a story of helping or being helped by a stranger? Submit it. (Guidelines: 800 words or less, not yet published on your stack; we’ll cross-post.) BYOE workshop participants and paid subscribers prioritized. Or email me if you want to collaborate in any way.

Join a community of nearly 700 in a space that fosters connection & showing up for each other. Help guide where we roll next.🍃

Hi, I’m Holly Starley

I’d love for us all to fall madly in love with ourselves and to know nothing human is alien to us. I believe we’re all connected by mycelial-like strands good writing can make shimmer. I write and edit and teach editing and roam to find myself in the beings we share this world with, in you, and for that glorious rush that comes when words pour between us and we see each other, ourselves anew. I’ve lived nomadically out of a backpack, on a bike, in an RV, in a truck, and in a van. Much of my writing comes from those treks.

Applying to my own work the same techniques I used during two decades of editing other authors’ works in progress has made writing and polishing from one draft to the next a joyful practice. It sets me free to create with audacity, knowing I have the skills to shape that creation its best version possible. And I can show you how to do the same.

• Over 20 years, I’ve edited more than a thousand manuscripts, from memoir to fiction to self-help and more. Whether as a developmental, content, or line editor, I’ve seen my job as helping authors transform works they’ve knitted from the fibers of their beings into the best versions possible.

• Before that, I was briefly an award-winning journalist.

• I’ve also worked as “book doctor” (partial ghost writer) and collaborator on many projects.

• I’ve written copy for clients ranging from question-answering systems to bloggers and influencers to nonprofits.

• I’ve served as managing / assigning editor for a handful of micro publications.

And here’s the current hub of both the editing and writing desk, Ruby, the DIY van

There’s plenty of room! My Living Room Is the World. The solar’s on the roof. The views are all around (they’re Magic). And our people are where’er we go (which is to say all the people, even when it’s tempting as hell to “Other”).

Climb aboard.🍃

The Rolling Desk logo and art was created by the amazing Alexandra Rickards, a talented designer and overall badass. Keep her in mind for artsy projects of sundry types.