After 12 years of working together, my dear friend and editor, Andria Flores is leaving my writing team to focus on her business as a freelance editor and writer. I want to publicly thank Andria for her friendship and for taking me from a baby writer to where I am today, for being there on all the pit stops on our journey since 2012 from publishing a book, a quote journal, and writing an ebook, to holding leadership conferences, and many other exciting projects we did together to impact Christian leaders.
As I reflect on our journey together, I have nothing but feelings of gratitude to the Lord for connecting us. We were introduced through a mutual friend, Jen Aiken. Jen, still a wonderful friend, built my first website and did all the design work for my WesMD brand when we converted from my original brand, Aspire To Lead.
I met with Andria for the first time at a local Chick-Fil-A. I shared with her my dream to inspire and grow leaders as I had immersed myself to grow in leadership. She shared with me that her dream from a young age was to be a writer. She had been in the corporate world, then a homemaker, and she was just embarking as a full-time writer, editor, and eventually an author. As she was stepping into her dream, I was honored to be one of her first clients. As a matter of fact, Andria was featured in a magazine a few months ago in which she told her inspiring story. You can read it here at Canvas Rebel.
Seeing Andria grow as a writer and helping me grow as a writer has been a beautiful process to witness. I remember the days when she and I would discuss my writing voice. I would ask her, “Andria, what is my writing voice? How do I develop that? Do I like my voice? Do others like my voice?”
Andria gave me the best advice: “Just write. Your voice will develop.” So just like a teenager—unsure, awkward, obsessing about the pimples he’s sure everyone is staring at—I slowly developed my voice. By God’s grace, today, I sit down to write with no such doubts. While I still feel the burden and responsibility to express what may be a blessing to others, I have fewer jitters about the writing process, and I credit Andria for helping me through that.
And so, I want to dedicate this article to honor Andria and appreciate her work. If you have been blessed by some of my writing, then you have been touched by Andria’s work as well.
As I am deepening my commitment to give you more content and ramping up our offerings with paid options, Andria does not have the availability to devote the time required as she has commitments to other clients. On that note, if you have editing or writing projects and would like to connect with Andria and her team, I invite you to contact her here.
Next week, I’ve invited Andria to publish a guest article about her perspective on the writer-editor relationship, and I look forward to that. Thank you, Andria, and thank you, leaders, for allowing me to share this transition with you as we continue to learn and grow together on our leadership journey.
