Welcome to My Wordy Life
For as long as I can remember, I've been besotted by words, in love with
the English language. My parents read to me (as I read to my son) practically
from the moment of my birth, and when I learned to read, I always received
books for Christmas and my birthday and had finished reading them within
the week. I still have some of my childhood books: old editions of
Little Women,
Grimms' Fairy Tales, Andrew Lang's fairy books,
Hans Brinker,
The Wizard of Oz, all the Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books. My mother
was a member of the Literary Guild and because she never got around to
sending the post cards back, I got to read her books, too. (I learned early
on how to climb up and get the ones on the top shelves.) She gave me her
official permission to read
Gone With the Wind when I was eleven. Boy, was that an eye-opener
for a naïve little girl! My parents also bought my brother and me
The Book of Knowledge; I read straight through all twenty volumes.
Yeah. I have been, as they say, bookish all my life. Today, of course,
I spend most of my time editing and writing.
Let Me Be Your Editor
Learn about the skills I offer as a freelance editor. I invite you to
explore this web site and see what I've written and what I can do to help
you write your own book or article or thesis. You can read samples of my
novels (including a so-far unpublished one) and short fiction elsewhere
on this site. Read excerpts from my books, a few of my magazine articles,
and some of my poetry. If you want to write a book of your own, comment
on my books or other work, or talk about Shakespeare or musical theater,
please send me an email.
Note: if you like my work and want to use it, please do
not just copy and paste. As I have to explain from time to time to
an author whose work I'm editing, copying and pasting someone else's
copyrighted work without their permission is
plagiarism. Which is against the law. Which can get you an F in your
class. Which can get you prosecuted. It's usually easy to get permission
to reproduce someone else's copyrighted work:
just ask. If you want to reproduce anything on my site anywhere else,
please send me an email and ask. I'll no doubt tell you I'm honored that
you like what I've written and then tell you how to give me proper credit.
What's New
I'm adding new material to this site when the sun sign changes every month.
What's new this month? My blog about change. Even though I'm a political
liberal, I tend to think change is highly overrated. But I moved, and that's
a big change in my life. Four new dates from
Pagan Every Day, including my take on the sun entering Leo, the
Anglo-Saxon calendar, the sun god Apollo, and the Green Man. I'm still
unpacking. I'm planning to add new Found goddesses a bit later.
Come back next month and see what's new!
New Blogs, New Stories
As I tell people, ideas just keep sleeting through my head (I stole this
phrase from Terry Pratchett -- thanks, Terry) and sooner or later I get
them down on paper or into the computer. That's what I'll be doing as I
update this web site every month. Watching the sleet.
Posted on
July 25, 2010
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Read full article
Yes, it’s ironic—I spend my days sitting here at my computer making changes
as I edit work by my authors and my own writing. Edit, edit, edit, change,
change, change. Please do not verbize nouns. Subjects and verbs need to
agree, and so do nouns and the pronouns that go with them. Avoid clichés.
How can you/how can I say this better? More clearly? How can we rephrase
this sentence or paragraph to make it more accessible to our readers who
don’t live in our heads with us?
Well, yeah, sometimes change is useful. I gotta admit it. I’m a sort of
living changemaker. At the same time, though … I moved a month ago and
I’m still looking at boxes. Not so many, thank Goddess.
