Thirty years
Professional legal secretarial, document production and transcription work for firms in London, including some of the top City firms, and across the wider UK and Ireland, working to solicitors' standards of accuracy and discretion.
About
Who types your manuscript
Me. Only me. Every page, personally — nothing is subcontracted and nothing is sent offshore.
Maxine Collins
I have spent thirty years as a legal secretary, document production technician and transcriber, working for solicitors' firms across London — including some of the top firms in the City — as well as the wider UK and Ireland. It is exacting work: accuracy matters absolutely, deadlines are real, and confidentiality is not a policy but a habit. That is the discipline I bring to a manuscript.
Alongside that I trained in palaeography — the reading of historical handwriting — and I transcribe wills, deeds and parish registers from as far back as the 1550s. It means the handwriting that defeats other typists rarely defeats me. A shaky late hand, pencil gone silver with age, insertions crammed up a margin: this is ordinary work.
I'm also a trained copy editor, having completed the three core courses with the CIEP (the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading). And I write. Literary and historical fiction, mostly, in the evenings and at weekends, for the pleasure of it. That matters more than it sounds. I know what standard manuscript format is. I know how a chapter should break and how dialogue should sit on a page. I also know what it is to hand over something you have spent years on, which is why I take the care I do.
I work from West Sussex, and I take on a limited number of manuscripts at a time so that each one gets proper attention.
Why
Why I started The Manuscript Desk
Because I write myself, I know exactly what it is to reach the end of a manuscript and realise the writing was never the hard part — it's what comes after. An agent, a publisher, a self-publishing platform: none of them will look at a handwritten book. Until it's typed, nobody can read it but you.
I set up The Manuscript Desk to put my own two trades to use for other people's books — the reading and the writing — the way I'd have wanted someone to treat mine.
The short version
In brief
Trained palaeographer
Historical handwriting from 1550 onwards, through my other practice, Heritage Script. Difficult hands are the speciality, not the exception.
A novelist myself
Which is why your manuscript comes back looking like a book, and why I understand exactly what you're trusting me with.
How I work
- I type what you have written. Your voice, your spelling, your punctuation. I'm not editing your book and I won't quietly improve it.
- I don't guess. If a word genuinely can't be read, it's marked so you can decide. A confident wrong reading is worse than an honest gap.
- I keep you posted. Batches arrive as they're finished; if something is going to be late, I tell you before the date, not after.
- I take on few projects at once. Which sometimes means a wait, and always means proper attention when your turn comes.
- What you send me goes no further. Not to a subcontractor, not to a portfolio, not into any online service. It's typed on my own machine and deleted when we're done.
Tell me about your manuscript
I'd be glad to hear what you've been working on, and what state it's in.