My Blog Archives

Change Is Highly Overrated

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.

Even Editors Have Lives

Even editors have lives away from the computer. As compulsive about my work as I am, sometimes I actually stand up and walk away. I even turn off the computer. That’s what I’ll be doing next week when I move from this apartment to a new one in a beautiful older building near downtown Long Beach. I like Long Beach. It has architecture. Beautiful old Craftsman cottages and stucco houses also dating from early in the 20th century. As I’ve been telling my friends, though, I gotta get outta this building.

Domineditrix

The doctorate is called the terminal degree. I hold a Ph.D., so that makes me terminally educated. Right? It’s my degree in English that gives me the knowledge and skills to be a good editor for inexperienced authors. And it’s my punnish—drat, Word keeps trying to change “punnish” to “punish”—sense of humor that endears me to my friends and authors. At least that’s what they tell me, and since they say it with a straight face, I gotta believe them. Right? About that “punnish.” It’s a pun, of course. Some people think puns are punishing, but you and I know that wordplay and punning are the highest (and, not being personal or “roasting” people, the kindest) form of humor. You’ve got to be smart enough to “get” the pun or play or words.

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I don’t spend all my time editing books for writers who don’t want to embarrass themselves in print. I’ve written books of my own. I write these blogs. I write a regular column for SageWoman magazine. I also write book reviews.

Back when I was earning my master’s degree in English

Back when I was earning my master’s degree in English at Southeast Missouri State University, I worked as a secretary to five psychologists. A joke in the Department of Education and Psychology at the time was that the (about to retire) president of the university had recently announced that he “believed in psychology.” As Dr. Greg Dickey (still my friend forty years later) kept saying to anyone who’d listen, “What’s to believe? Psychology is something that exists. It’s not something you believe in or don’t believe in.” I think it’s the same with astrology. Whether we believe in it or not, it still exists.

Right Brain, Left Brain, Write

Back in the Middle Ages—well, the 1980s and ’90s—when networking groups were being invented, I was a member of a southern California organization for professional women called Women In Management (WIM). WIM was founded in the late ’70s by Dr. Helen Diamond and had seven chapters around Los Angeles. I served as program chair for the Orange County chapter, then later became corporate VP for public relations. Being a member of WIM was enormous fun (and a lot of work). I met some exceptional people and once got to carry a genuine Olympic torch around the room for one of our speakers.

Restarting Creativity with the New Year

I like to start the new year restarting my creativity. Not just in my work with the authors whose books I’m editing, not by making resolutions—stop eating junk food, be nicer to my neighbors, wash the kitchen floor … you know the drill—but by doing something creative. Since childhood, creativity has always been important to me. I was forever writing stories, drawing pictures, running around with my little Brownie camera (yes, I had a real Brownie), inventing games. It seems like half the events in my life turned into stories. When my brother joined the Boy Scouts, I had to write a story that I called “My Life as a Boy Scout.” I tried to sell it to Boys’ Life. Early rejection slip.

Occult Adventures with Walter Troll & Other Invisible Friends

This article was published in Circle Magazine in the winter, 2002, issue. Yes, it really is a true story, though I did change some names. I also put Rev. Debbee (not her real name) into one of my novels.

Back in the olden days, 25 years ago, when I was young and exceedingly naïve concerning the invisible worlds, I was a practicing Unitarian and a technical writer. Evidently, some higher being thought that made me good fodder. First, one of my friends told me that the things suddenly started happening were not “just my imagination.” Those colored balls zipping around the room were real. There were no coincidences in the universe. Next, I fell in love with a man who worked by day as an engineer. He also did automatic writing, and his “control” had convinced him that he had a Great Mission To Accomplish In This Life. He believed it. I came to believe it, too.

Getting Organized

Overture. A decade ago, I used to think that drumming was the best thing there was. I drummed at rituals and took classes and taught classes. But then the venue where I was part of a regular weekly drumming circle closed (now it’s a hyper-vegetarian restaurant) and the people I drummed with moved away. I sold my ashiko (a drum slightly smaller than a djembe) and most of my frame drums and gave away my other doumbek. Now I live with cats, and I believe that purring is the best thing there is.

Act I. When I say, “Let me be your editor,” and an author says yes and sends me his or her book, one of the issues we often discuss is organizing. I’m editing a dissertation at the present time, for example, and have suggested to the Ph.D. candidate that he reorganize and put all the discussion of his qualitative tests together and all the discussion of his quantitative tests together. He wants me to do this for him, but that’s way beyond my scope of work as an editor, so while I’ll help him, I suggested that he get with his committee and get their advice.

Organization is important to both fiction and nonfiction.

How the Outdoors Got on Us

Back in the Olden Days, when the world was a whole lot fresher (not to mention cheekier) than it is now, the people lived in the City of the Goddess. They were sensible people, beautiful people, smart people, golden people and—because they stayed in the city—they were Civilized People. They were much beloved by their Urban Goddess, who gave them Every Civilized Comfort, and so they lived in clean, comfortable homes and did the things civilized people have always done: they read books, they went to plays and concerts, they entertained their friends with home-cooked meals and home-bred conversation. They did every creative golden thing they could think to do.

Now these civilized people who lived so peacefully in the Olden Days were ruled by the Two Daughters of the Goddess of the City, Comforta and Cleanessa. Comforta and Cleanessa were the Co-Queens of the City and lived at the Ritz, where they enjoyed all the amenities of city life—haute cuisine, haute couture, and haute tub.