She's also the Content Editor for "The Bruja" and "Dread Harvester." If you think that means she was heavily involved in all the terrible things that happened to her fictional doppelganger, Aubree Harvester, you'd be completely correct.
What exactly is a Content Editor? It's a type of language professional. Someone who works with an author to throw gasoline on the kindling of their work. Behind every bestseller you love is someone like Athena -- suggesting different words, pressing the author to re-write a specific paragraph or chapter over and over again until its just the right shade of perfect that the content demands.
Working with Athena Driscoll is both a pleasure and a pain (and having been friends with her for nearly 10 years I can promise you that this is true of just about any activity she's involved in.) She's incredibly talented at what she does, a life-long reader and artist she has a keen eye for the dramatic, the narrative, the characters. More importantly, Athena & I have a similar vision for horror. Neither one of us is interested in monsters or jump scares or pointless gore. We both want to dismantle your mind & imagination, take out all the moving pieces and show them to you. Do you have any idea how lucky I am to work with someone who thinks that way?
Inversely, of course, Athena is also a relentless stickler for perfection. She is, absolutely dedicated to details, and she will not let a single aspect "slide." The second chapter of "Dread Harvester" was re-written twenty-four times at her demand. Halfway in, I was feeling pretty sick of this. I was tired, my brain couldn't parse the needs of the chapter anymore, and my imagination was running dry. I just wanted to be done, I wanted to cast the Novella aside and move on to other challenges. Athena would have none of this however and pressed me forward until the fiction could stand up to the rest of the content. "Good enough" wasn't good enough -- it had to be the "best."This is the power of a Content Editor. They press us (as authors,) to ignore our very human demons (or at least put them on paper,) they force us to be our "best," and they never listen to our excuses. That being said, working with Athena Driscoll is a pleasure and a pain, but absolutely a blessing.
Please purchase yourself a copy of "The Bruja" & "Dread Harvester" this weekend, and make sure to follow Athena on Instagram, Etsy, and Facebook!
