First Post~

Hi! I’m not much of a blogger, but here goes. I’m Mariah Bryant. I turned 31 years old today. I live on a farm in Central Virginia.

I’ve just opened myself up to freelance editing and working with individual authors and publishers aside from Tapas Entertainment, which recently shut down as a result of its parent company’s wishes. I’d been planning to make this move (to working directly with authors) since 2023 when I started offering free beta reading on Twitter (now X). I’ve spent the last year taking classes, chatting with other editors of various backgrounds and industries, and fortifying myself with the trade knowledge needed to offer authors help confidently.

At Tapas I started out as a typesetter, a skill I learned while studying the best practices of sequential art (also called visual storytelling) at SCAD. It involved placing English text on webtoons translated from Korean. And it was fun, but after attending a rigorous art school and then trying to publish my own webcomics, my wrist was giving me plenty of warning that its longevity—my carpals, specifically—was eroding.

Find my webcomic, Six-Petal Pyramid, on WEBTOON and on Tapas’s app (while it still exists until March 2027).

In high school I’d breezed through AP English, and storytelling had always been my lifeblood—I wrote about a dozen novels in grade school, including some notorious fanfictions—so I took Tapas’s editing tests and passed. I was immediately brought on as one of three full-time contractors (a senior position at Tapas) leading their newly established webnovel localization division. During this time I worked with some of the kindest and most generous editors who taught me the ropes: Heidi Ward, Auburn Scallon, Ryan Levere, and Roran Thorne.

Heidi Ward’s patience with me, answering extremely specific questions about punctuation at any hour of the night, developed me into the editor I am today. I’ve memorized multiple style guides but I also return to them every time I make a nuanced text correction in order to share those resources with the authors, translators, editors, and typesetters I work with.

Roran Thorne’s encouragement and praises made me into a researching machine, if I weren’t one already (actually let’s be honest, I did do a LOT of research for that webcomic!). They could have protested that I was being too pedantic and causing trouble for the team whenever I presented research to declare terminology incorrect, but Roran is equally as appreciative of effort as I am. I became an in-house expert on regency peerage titles and terms of address for nobility during this period.

When I presented Auburn Scallon with queries on when to defer to the original text versus when to enhance the text with a more accurate term, they helped build my confidence. It was still a bold move to assert that certain direct translations were incorrect, and I led many teams on terminology witch-hunts, but it must have been for the best, because my bosses thanked me for my attention to detail.

When the company that owns Tapas canned the webnovel division in summer 2025 (a year before they liquidated Tapas altogether), my job was preserved and I got moved to the webtoon division, where I edited translations of Korean and Chinese webtoons, still as a full-time contractor. The job was more line editing than it was copyediting, often involving “recasting” or rewriting sentences for clarity and flow. Editing a webtoon takes almost four times longer than editing a chapter of a novel, by the way; it probably has to do with checking the artwork for flaws and comparing the English text to the original Korean or Chinese.

I took great pride in my work no matter what it was I worked on. Company schemes sometimes left me in tears because whenever a title was canceled or jettisoned, hours and hours of my sincere and devoted attention went with them. I do not to this day know what will happen to all the hundreds of series I worked on, and whether they will disappear into the ether, or only be hosted on Kakao’s platform in Korea.

Tapas’s closing didn’t come as a complete shock, though, as you might can glean from the issues noted above.

Seeing disaster coming, I had the chance to apply to other industries and jobs … but living in the middle of nowhere as I do, an hour from the closest city, and dealing with chronic migraine and C-PTSD which presents as severe anxiety, OCD, and sleeping disorders—working remotely is means of survival for me.

It’s also an economic boon to bring income into my poorer, rural community from outside sources. So with the scarcity of remote work nowadays, in 2026, my options are to spend $10 a day on gas to commute to the city to make $10 per hour, or find another way to make my living online.

It would bankrupt me entirely to move into the city proper, or any other city in any other state, though I wish that weren’t the case (I’d love to live in New England or in the Appalachian Mountains)!

And so, with 31 years of experience being a creative (most of which I admittedly didn’t get into today), I’m seeking the thing I’ve sorely missed the most over the last five years:

Authors.

Late nights and 10-day sprints to polish an author’s work at Tapas. Grueling audits to determine what an author meant when the translation is unclear. Knowing I didn’t have to bother the typesetter to fix a sound effect, but doing it anyway to honor the author’s vision. All for authors I’ve never met, never spoken to, and will probably never know. That’s the biggest caveat of working on translated materials: the number of people and miles between me and the person whose creativity I’m honoring.

When I did beta reading for authors on Twitter (X), and later in some of the classes I’ve taken, working with authors proved to be my favorite part of any job I’ve ever done. I have a knack for it, I’m told, and even if that weren’t the case, it brings me an incredible amount of joy.

Books without authors are nothing. Believe it or not, you are the driving force behind your book—not the words. Not the characters. You.

This is a rare chance, freelance editing, for me to get to support you directly, one on one, because in so many publishing pathways, an author never meets all their editors.