My wife is my best editor

This is my 100th post on this blog, and I think it's fitting to recognize and thank the amazing woman who's the editor behind just about everything I write. She reviews the vast majority of what I write before I publish it.

I don't submit my blog copy to an LLM for polish. I dictate it and clean it up or type it straight out in Obsidian. I use Harper for general spelling and mechanical advice, but her eye is invaluable as I shape my pieces.

At this point, we've been married for 11 years. She knows how I think. She knows my story. She knows what I care about deeply. And I trust her.

She readily admits that she doesn't always understand the technical aspects of what I write about nor does she really care about technology, but that's OK and works out to my favor. I always want to make the nerdy stuff accessible, and if I can make it easy for her to understand, then I'll probably invite more people into the story.

Writers can't be too precious about their words. Even if I think I've achieved peak cleverness, her feedback takes me out of the clouds and sets me back on Earth, where readers live. She recently told me that I tend to use "actually" a lot. And she's actually right. I ended up cutting almost all of them in the piece.

She also knows when I haven't pushed a piece far enough—when I haven't truly laid my heart out on the line. And she's kind enough to tell me. She knows this work matters, and her comments show how much she cares. When I go back into those pieces and trace the vein that leads to my heart, I often realize I was avoiding specificity because I didn't want to feel the pain of sharing those details or entering into those memories. But those details separate platitudes from wisdom, distant safety from radical authenticity. If I feel the tug of heartstrings while writing, I imagine my readers will too. She helps me take the risks I know I need to take but sometimes avoid out of self-preservation.

There are very few things that I publish without her input—a handful of blog posts here and there, my LinkedIn posts, etc. But pretty much everything else longform passes under her red pen first. I'd rather push my publish date back a week or three and have her perspective than ship things blindly.

Our marriage is built on trust, and sharing my work with her is just one more way that we've built that trust over time. Letting her edit my work highlights how much I value her opinion. It keeps me humble and open, because my pieces are invariably stronger after implementing her suggestions. It also lets her into some of the nuances of my work in a way that's hard to share in conversation.

No AI model could ever have the context that she has on my life. And there's no one who I trust quite as much with my words. Thank you, Jordyn, for sharing this work with me.