Still Here — And Deeper in the Work Than Ever: A 2026 Year-in-Progress Update

If you've visited this site recently and wondered whether I'd gone quiet, I understand the impression. The truth is the opposite: the first weeks of 2026 have been among the most intellectually productive — and honestly, the most demanding — of my career. I wanted to take a moment to pull back the curtain, share what I've been working on, and explain why all of it is making me a sharper developmental editor and publication coach for the researchers I serve.

The Book Is Real, and It Is Nearly Finished

In late 2025, I signed a contract with Routledge for a book titled Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss. This spring, I am deep in the revision and expansion of that manuscript, and the experience has been genuinely transformative — both personally and professionally.

The book draws on phenomenological research I've conducted with bereaved individuals who experienced synchronistic events during their grief — meaningful coincidences that seemed to communicate something from beyond the ordinary. Each chapter centers on a different type of loss: life partner, grandparent, parent, child. The theoretical framework weaves together Jungian depth psychology, contemporary grief theory, attachment theory, and continuing bonds research into something I hope will be useful both to clinicians and to readers navigating their own losses.

As of late February 2026, I have completed full drafts of five chapters — on pet loss, partner loss, grandparent loss, parent loss, and the grandparent chapter — and have begun planning the child loss chapter, which I expect to complete in March. The manuscript is currently within reach of its contracted word count, which means I can see the finish line. I aim to submit by June 15, 2026.

I share this not to make it about me, but because I think it matters for you to know: your editor is also a writer. Not a former writer, not a writer in theory. A writer right now, in the middle of deadline pressure, navigating peer reviewer feedback, managing a complex reference list, working with an IRB, collaborating with a foreword author, and discovering — regularly — that the process of writing a scholarly book is humbling in ways no one fully prepares you for.

What I Am Learning by Being on Your Side of the Desk

There is something clarifying about sitting with your own manuscript when you have spent years sitting with other people's.

I have learned again, up close, how disorienting it is when you realize a chapter has grown too long, or that a theoretical section is pulling focus away from your central argument. I have experienced the particular anxiety of looking at 55,000 words of research notes and trying to decide what stays and what goes. I have felt the temptation to keep adding literature because surely more sources means more credibility — and the wisdom of recognizing when more sources means less clarity.

I have navigated the integration of peer reviewer feedback that asked me to broaden the cultural scope of the research. I have made structural decisions about chapter order that ripple through every cross-reference in the manuscript. I have had to trust my own voice even when theoretical frameworks I admire point a different direction.

All of this is the lived experience of writing a book. When I work with a client on their dissertation or their first journal article, I am drawing on a body of editorial knowledge — but I am also drawing on this. The empathy I bring to your work is current. It is not from a decade ago.

Editing Work This Year

My editing practice has been lighter this season than in previous years, by design, as I have protected my writing time to meet the Routledge deadline. That said, I have been honored to complete several meaningful projects.

In early January, I completed a comprehensive formatting review of a doctoral dissertation for a CIU PhD candidate. The project involved a close and systematic review of all 33 tables, alignment verification across every bullet list in the document, spacing corrections throughout, and a full citation cross-check using www.reciteworks.com. The dissertation was delivered on schedule and the client expressed satisfaction with both the scope and quality of the work.

In the same period, I completed a final copy edit of an article being prepared for submission to the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies — a conversion from a dissertation that had gone through multiple revision cycles. The final version was delivered to both the journal editor and the author, ready for submission.

These projects reminded me why I do this work. A well-formatted dissertation represents years of someone's intellectual and personal investment. An article ready for submission represents the beginning of a research contribution's life in the world. Being trusted with that is not something I take lightly.

I have also continued to develop new client relationships, with several doctoral students now in early conversations about editing support as their programs progress.

The IJTS Special Issue on Transpersonal Grief

One of the professional threads I am most excited about this year is my role as special topics editor for an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies focused on transpersonal grief. This role invites submissions from scholars working at the intersection of transpersonal psychology and bereavement — a terrain that is rich with emerging research and underrepresented in mainstream grief literature.

The submission deadline for contributors is June 30, 2026. If you are working in this space and considering submitting, I would welcome the conversation.

Why I Am Telling You All of This

I want JHMES to be more than a service provider. I want it to be a place where researchers and writers feel seen — where the person on the other side of the editorial relationship actually understands what it costs to write something true and rigorous and worth publishing.

The academic writing life is not glamorous. It involves early mornings and missed social events and the particular desolation of realizing that a section you worked on for three days needs to be cut. It involves the strange pride of a sentence that finally says exactly what you mean. It involves IRB paperwork and reference lists and the bureaucratic machinery of scholarship.

I know this because I live it. That is what I bring to your work.

If you are in the middle of a dissertation, a journal article, a book manuscript, or a grant proposal, I would be glad to talk with you about where you are and what kind of support might actually help.

Here's to getting the work done — one page at a time.

Jennifer Hill, PhD, is the founder of JHMES (Jennifer Hill Manuscript Editing Services), a developmental editing and publication coaching practice serving post-doctoral researchers and early career academics in psychology and related fields. She is the author of the forthcoming Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss (Routledge, 2026/2027) and serves as special topics editor for an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies on transpersonal grief. She holds a doctorate in transpersonal psychology and a certification in motivational interviewing.