She came recommended to me through Smunchy Games. We chatted, and I asked her my most important question: “Where do you stand on the Oxford comma?”

She fired right back: “How many spaces do you put after a period?”

Asked and answered, and we knew we’d get along.

She did a quick test-edit of a few thousand words of the manuscript, and named her price. I told her that was unacceptable and doubled it. Good work is worth paying for.

In any case: Meet Emily!

Revised by Emily

Emily Blain is a detail-oriented perfectionist who gets way more annoyed than she should about errors in supposedly professional publications. She graduated from Luther College in 2012 with a liberal arts education, a music major, and an education minor. Since then, she has worked as an administrative assistant and Communications Director in addition to teaching private music lessons.

After moving and leaving her part-time job in spring 2018, Emily decided to combine two things she enjoys (proofreading and gaming) into one grand new business venture. While she originally planned for Revised by Emily to be a general proofreading business specializing in board games, she quickly realized that there were far more games being designed than there were editors/proofreaders available to analyze the rulebooks. She started “cold calling” designers, mostly via Facebook message at first, offering to look over and edit their games. Her first project was the Greek board game Theosis which successfully funded in July of 2018. This has blossomed into the first of multiple ongoing partnerships with various game companies.

Prior Work

Emily also works closely with Sky Relics Games. Sky Relics completed their first Kickstarter in January of 2018 and is inches from the finish line of getting the game out to backers. They are also working on their second game, Relic Hunters, a co-op dungeon crawl, and Emily is excited to be in on this one from the ground level. She took a prototype to Protospiel MN in January 2019 and got a little bit of experience on the design side of things! Despite feeling like her brain was full to bursting every night, Emily had an incredible time and loved getting to meet more designers and hear their perspectives on game making.

Emily’s newest long-term partnership is with Smunchy Games. Her first project was the novella, Paths: A War Drum of Death. When Sean, the author, told her it would be available at Barnes and Noble, she was more than a bit nervous and surprised, but it was a great experience and a project she’s very proud of. That collaboration expanded into the Paths RPG materials which will be coming to Kickstarter in April 2019.

In her free time (yes, despite multiple ongoing projects, she makes time for fun!), Emily enjoys playing both board and PC games with her husband and friends. Their current favorite tabletop games are Spirit Island and Aeon’s End: Legacy. She always relishes smashing all the things to bits with her Warhammer as Gurdis, her D&D 5e Dwarf Fighter. She’s also looking forward to the day when she can play more games than just “Go Away Monster” with her adorable two-year-old daughter!