A few days ago, I decided to see if I could find any movies about editors, so I went to Google and typed in that phrase. The top responses were: “The Magic of Movie Editing,” “Video Editing Software,” and “The Year in Movies from The Editors of the Atlantic.”

Then I checked for “movies about writers” and found: “IMDb Top 45 Movies about Writers,” “Newly Updated: 260 Movies about Writers and the Writing Life,” “20 Greatest Movies about Writers” and dozens more like that.

One link led to Wikipedia, where I discovered that “films about writers” led to 141 total pages scattered across seven subcategories but that “the page films about editors does not exist.”

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Editors work mostly in the background, doing whatever they do and rarely getting more than a line of thanks in an author’s acknowledgements—if even that. Even a lot of writers don’t understand what editors do.

So I’m excited to get the chance to join with three other veteran editors next week to discuss what editors do and how they do it for members of the Ventura County Writers Club.

I’ll be on the panel with Greg Elliot of Agoura Hills, author, editor, screenwriter, and writing professor; Monica Faulkner of Los Angeles, an editor and publishing consultant for more than 20 years, and one of the founders of the Los Angeles Editors and Writers Group; and Shelly Lowenkopf of Santa Barbara, former executive editor for several California publishers.

Each of us will be speaking about a different aspect of editing and how editors work—or can work—with writers, and I’m looking forward to learning from these three. I plan to talk about what authors can do to make their editors want to go the extra mile for them—a topic I hope to examine in depth in this blog next month.

So, if you’re near Camarillo on Tuesday, July 9, come and get a look at some real live editors and hear a bit about what we do. It’s clearly not the stuff movies are made of; nevertheless, it should be an entertaining and information-packed evening.

You can find all the details about Tuesday’s meeting and learn more about the Ventura County Writers Club at www.venturacountywriters.com/.