My Blog Archives

The GLAWS Editing Panel

I was honored to be asked to participate in a panel of editors addressing the topic “Beyond the First Draft: Editing Your Manuscript for Success” at the Saturday, May 18, monthly meeting of the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society (GLAWS), which meets in West L.A. This is the third or fourth time I’ve sat on a GLAWS editing panel, and it’s a lot of fun. One of my authors, John Fulford, four of whose books I’ve edited (so far), came with me. When I appear before an audience in edit mode (so to speak), I always wear my T-shirt that says I AM THE GRAMMARIAN ABOUT WHOM YOUR MOTHER WARNED YOU.

“the unpassioned beauty of a great machine”: A Recycled Essay about Recycling (a True Story)

Because we’re approaching Earth Day and every day I receive emails from nonprofits concerned with the green movement and recycling asking me for donations (which I often make), I decided to do a little recycling of myown today. The following piece is from a book I began in about 1990. The title was to be Finding Beauty: Cultivating a Fuller Awareness of the Hidden Beauty in the World Around Us. I wrote a bunch of essays, fairy tales and stories, and poems, found quotes about beauty in Bartlett’s, secured permission from the Oxford English Dictionary to quote their definition of beauty…and then I showed it to my literary agent. She shook her head. “Too esoteric. It’ll never sell.” After she retired, I took the manuscript to my second literary agent. He submitted it to half a dozen small publishers. No dice. Still too esoteric After he died, I showed it to my third literary agent. “Wiccan it up,” she said. So I Wiccaned it up. She gave it a try. “All the bookstores,” she reported back, “are gonna think it goes on the same shelf with makeup advice. Wiccan it up some more.”

Finding Newer New Goddesses (and how I name them)

Select. Copy. Paste. Voilà!

What is the solution to plagiarism? I think it’s simple—give credit where credit is due. Cite your sources. Make footnotes. If you use a lot of an author’s work, thank him or her in your acknowledgments. Don’t just do a Google search for your topic, find something that looks interesting (but may not be accurate), and steal it. If it’s good, summarize it. Quote one or two sentences if they’re so good or telling you couldn’t say it as well yourself, but cite the source for these sentences. Do your own work and work hard so it’s something you’ll be proud of. Do not select, copy, and paste.

Good Words, Bad Words--Which Do We Use?

The January 1 edition of my local paper, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, contained an article about Lake Superior State’s 38th list of words and phrases they’d like to banish from the English language. At the top of the list was “fiscal cliff.” I didn’t keep count while I was watching MSNBC or PBS or Eyewitless News, but I know that “fiscal cliff” was a really hot topic that I got really tired of hearing about. Also on Lake Superior State’s list are “double down,” “bucket list,” “trending,” “superfood,” “boneless wings,” “spoiler alert,” and “guru.”

Of course I have my own ever-growing list of words and phrases I’d like to ban, and I’ve been known to tell my authors not to use this or that word anymore.

A Midwinter Ritual

Did you know that Santa Claus is a shaman? He wears red and white and black, the three sacred colors of the ancient triple goddess, and he’s fat because he’s well-fed. (A traditional shaman once told me never to trust a skinny shaman; if his people don’t provide for him, he’s not doing his job.) Santa flies from the frozen north, where the Saami (or Lapp) shamans still wield their full traditional powers. He’s drawn through the air by magical reindeer whose antlers symbolize the surging force of life. The Christmas tree is the world pole. From Mongolia to the American Southwest, shamans customarily ascend the world pole to make their astral journeys. Santa knows everything, especially if we’ve been good or bad, and like karma itself, he brings us our just desserts. His gifts are the gifts of the spirit made material. His attendants, the toy-making elves, are the Old Ones who help the deserving and play tricks on the undeserving. Santa is not a god, but let’s honor him along with the solar gods and goddesses in our midwinter ritual.

Fun and games with a dead language

Nicholar Ostler writes that “Languages create worlds to live in, not just in the minds of their speakers, but in their lives, and their descendants’ lives, where those ideas become real. The world that Latin created is today called Europe. And as Latin formed Europe, it also inspired the Americas. Latin has in fact been the constant in the cultural history of the West, extending over two millennia. In a way, it has been too central to be noticed: like the air Europe breathed, it has pervaded everything:” (p. 20).

Collecting Witches

My collection currently hovers—note that I use that verb on purpose—at between 340 and 350 witches that range in size from an inch tall to as big as a Muppet. I’ve done witch censuses around my home, so I’m pretty sure I’ve got them all counted. But “one never knows. Do one.” (Thank you, Fats Waller.) Some of my witches are expensive works of art, some are authentic collectibles, some are majorly cheap and tacky. That’s OK. I cherish them all.

Need to practice writing? Write a blog or two.

And so today, I’m sitting here doing what the authors whose books I edit do: I’m pulling words out of my head and pushing them out through my fingers to my keyboard. I type awhile, then I stop and read what I just typed. Then I go, Oh.My.God, that doesn’t make sense at all. I immediately start editing. When I wrote a sort of blog for a friend a few months ago, the subject was writer’s block. In it I said (cross my heart) that I don’t believe in writer’s block. That’s true. I don’t get blocked. Well, sometimes I procrastinate. Sometimes I have other important things to do. Like wash dishes. Go to the bathroom. Comb the cats. Eat lunch. Take out the trash. (I think I’ll do that right now. Back in a minute.) I used to know people who sharpened pencils and rearranged their bookshelves while they were procrastinating. If you’re really good at, the list of things you can do that are not writing is endless.

Grammar Fussbudgetry

Grammar Nazi? No. Grammar fussbudget? Hell, yes. When what you write is full of grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors—and probably logical errors, too—then, unless you are writing for willfully ignorant people, your credibility goes way down. If you state your argument or develop your plot with gooder English, then your credibility goes up. I guess I’ll just spend my life as a kind of Editor of La Mancha tilting at the windmill monsters of badder English. I’m dreaming an impossible dream of good writing.

The Shamanic Narrative of Tigger’s Bounce

My guest blog this month come from my friend S. Kelley Harrell. Kelley's an urban shaman who lives on the opposite edge of the continent from me. We became friends on a listserve. I read her new book, Gift of the Dreamtime, which is now out in its second edition. It's a terrific book. I hope you'll read it, too. Here's Kelley--

The real truth about those "senior moments"

I’m starting to sort of identify with those infamous bandits that confront Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) in the 1948 movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre. You know the guys I mean—“Badges? … We don’t need no stinking badges.” Substitute “senior moments” for “badges,” and we’re there. Somebody can’t remember something, so they laugh and say, “Oh, it’s just a senior moment.” I don’t need no senior moments.

If we listen to W.S. Gilbert, maybe we can improve our government

I think I know how to solve the political problems of the U.S. (and maybe the world). Pay closer attention to W.S. Gilbert. You surely know Gilbert and Sullivan, the Victorian gentlemen who wrote satirical operettas about the topsy-turvy worlds of sailors, pirates, aesthetes, a women’s college, Titipudlians, ghosts, and fairies. 

One of my favorite operettas is Iolanthe (1882). It’s the plot of this operetta that reveals the solution to our political mess in the U.S. in 2012. Gilbert’s primary target is the extremely conservative upper house of Parliament, the House of Lords, also called the House of Peers. The only qualification for membership in the House of Lords was to have been born the son of a lord. If you were a peer, you were a member. No intelligence was required. (The famous pirates of Penzance turn out to be “young lords gone wrong.” A lot of young lords went wrong—gambling, carousing, dueling, raising hell—though few of them became pirates. See almost any Victorian novel.) The Lords, who probably never read any of the legislation proposed by the Liberal Party, could veto any bill passed by the Lower House. Are you seeing any parallels yet between Gilbert’s dysfunctional government and our own? Like the totally unqualified Tea Partiers who got themselves elected in 2010 and now rage against any kind of compromise with the Democrats in Congress?

Blogorrhea. Blogolalia. Veroblog and Blog-o'nuts. What's all this then?

BLOGORRHEA. I just made this word up. (Well, I haven’t seen it anywhere else.) It’s related of course to logorrhea, an “excessive flowing of words,” which is related to diarrhea, which comes from dia, “through,” and rhein, “flow” via Middle English, Latin, and Greek. 

I’ve noticed quite a lot of blogorrhea. I receive a lot of it via email. I’m sure you do, too. I don’t know quite how I got on all those lists, and I don’t read every blog I receive every morning, but I find the ones I read interesting. Since late last year, I’ve been writing more blogs, not only this monthly blog for my website but also regular blogs for Feminism and Religion. Take a look. I think you’ll find blogs there to enjoy, too. But I think I must be their divergent thinker; they’re all wise and earnest, and here I am writing parody.

Charlene Proctor, The Oneness Gospel

March seems to be my pay-it-forward month. I was invited by a friend to write a guest blog for her site, which I did (and she’ll post it next week), and then when my friend and former client, Dr. Charlene Proctor asked me to help launch her new book, The Oneness Gospel, which I edited, I said, “Sure!” I’m not sure how long Char and I have been friends. I think we first “met” on line, and then we met in person when she came to speak in Orange County, where I lived before I moved to Long Beach. She and I had several very interesting conversations about the Goddess, and then in December, 2008, she phoned to ask me to edit her new book. “But it’s about God,” she said. “Are you up for a book that talks about God and the Bible?”

What's in my head today?

What’s in my head today? Well, contrary to what a few guys have said, there’s not nothing in my head. There is in fact quite a lot of something under this bleached, spiky hair. It’s almost always music and words, but not necessarily the words that go with the music. Today, for example, it’s the high parts of the Queen of the Night’s “kill Sarastro” aria from The Magic Flute. I don’t even like opera, so why this aria?

Welcome to 2012

Here we are, four days past the beginning of Aquarius, and I always try to write my blog a day or two before the sun enters the next sign. I sure missed it this month! Why? I’m glad to say that I’ve been busy. I’m editing new books for two new authors. One is a bloke in England who’s writing about how to improve your life. He’s giving some good advice. The other is a physician who has enduring interest in the energy of X-rays and MRIs and other medical apparati. (OK, that would be the proper plural of apparatus if apparatus were a Latin word. I like it better than apparatuses.) This physician is also interested in healing energy. He’s had encounters with the Edgar Cayce folks, attended Jack Houck’s spoon-bending workshops, and met a lot of other people who do energy work, mostly in holistic healing. Me, too. I once got a kiss on the cheek from one of Cayce’s sons, and I’ve bent spoons with Jack. And I’ve been editing for the American Holistic Health Association, whose president and founder, Suzan Walter, has been my friend since 1981 when we met at a Women In Management meeting. I’m also still editing the memoir of the solo violinist, who has had an extremely interesting life, and an author whose book I last worked on in 2006 is now coming back for more editing.

Happy holidays!

I went to the Circle of Aradia’s Yule ritual last night. It was the 40th anniversary of Z Budpest’s invention of Dianic Wicca, and Z was there as an honored guess and she and I had a nice little chat. It was also the 25th anniversary of the Circle of Aradia, founded by Ruth Barrett, the best ritualist I’ve ever worked with. It was good to see Ruth and a whole bunch of other women I haven’t seen for various reasons in five or ten years. (None of us, of course, look any older.) Among the 200 or so women in attendance was a journalist for (I think) a website in the San Fernando Valley. She was looking very bewildered at the circle casting and the dancing and chanting, so because I don’t dance, I went over to her and spoke with her for a little while. “What’s going on here?” she asked. After I explained that I in no way represent COA in any official capacity, I spoke to her about the ritual year and the Yule celebration.

How to sell more books??

When I decided to self-publish Secret Lives, I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work. I’m having an interesting adventure. Also investing a fair amount of money in the adventure. I’d like to sell more books and make a return on that investment. I suppose I could summon up some Great, Universal Mind Power and project it into the heads of every pagan or witchy woman on the planet. Buy Secret Lives. Buy Secret Lives. Buy Secret Lives. Mind Power? Yeah. Right. Like Universal Mind Power works. So I keep working on PR.

Dialogue and Dialect, Part 2

As an editor, one of the issues I often address with my authors—both those whose mother tongue is American English and those who are coming from other mother tongues—is how their characters talk. Many of my authors start out writing dialogue that is stiff and unnatural. It’s like they’re writing the stilted alien dialogue we heard in the sf movies of the 1950s. But characters in books need to talk like real people. How they talk helps readers know about them without our having to write lots and lots of exposition and description.  

Dialogue and Dialect--Talking Gooder English

As an editor, one of the issues I often address with my authors—both those whose mother tongue is American English and those who are coming from other mother tongues—is how their characters talk. Many of my authors start out writing dialogue that is stiff and unnatural. It’s like they’re writing the stilted alien dialogue we heard in the sf movies of the 1950s. But characters in books need to talk like real people. How they talk helps readers know about them without our having to write lots and lots of exposition and description. 

Publishing is an Educational Experience

Educational Experiences, of course, teach us those famous Life Lessons. Like don’t come back to the dorm at midnight after a cast party because when I was in college the housemother locked the dorm and you have to crawl in through a basement window. Which I did a couple months into my freshman year. I was grounded for a week. Like don’t believe everything an actor tells you. Like don’t cut class. It took me until graduate school to learn that lesson. Today, forty-odd years later, I am still having Educational Experiences. The big one? Publishing Secret Lives, of course. As of September 8, I have released my beloved crones and their friends to the world. The novel is now for sale on Amazon.com and the Kindle conversion is in the works. I’ll investigate B&N pretty soon and start a Nook conversion, too.

Keeping busy until Secret Lives comes out

I only allow myself to buy books and DVDs during even-numbered months. On August 1, therefore—and before 8 a.m.—I opened the catalog whose pages I’d been folding down for several days and logged on to its website. Click, click, click. OH. YEAH. SECRET LIVES. What I wanted was to be able to hold the book in my hands on my birthday last month. That didn’t happen. Then I thought it would be a book by mid-August. Well, Mercury is retrograde … so I’m working (really hard) on going with the flow.

It's My Birthday

Today is, as they say, the first day of the next year of my life. Yesterday was my birthday. So what did I do? I started the day by getting my car washed. The second thing I did for my birthday was take two slices of red velvet cake with me to visit my friend Anniitra. Then I did something I do maybe once a year. I went shopping. And I also spent an hour or so yesterday replying to birthday greetings on Facebook. With nearly every “many thanks,” I also asked, “Have you been to my Secret Lives page yet?”

My Writing Process

I’ve been thinking about this blog for more than a week. Usually, I have it written by now and just have to post it when the sun moves into the next sign. Not this time. It’s not that I can’t think of anything to write about—I always have a dozen ideas bouncing around in my head. It’s not that I don’t have time. I’m self-employed. I can work any eight or nine days of the week I want to. I can work any 28 or 29 hours of the day. Well, actually, I don’t work quite that much. By mid-afternoon most days, I get up from this chair, pick up a novel from my stack of books, and read with my eyes closed. I live like a cat for an hour to give my biological clock time to refresh.

I’m not complaining about being busy! What if all I had to do was watch daytime TV? The thought makes me shudder. This month, I am editing for my authors, writing for three Llewellyn annuals, and proofreading the pdf file of my new novel, Secret Lives, which I hope will be a Real Book by the end of July. 

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

I drove up to UCLA a few nights ago to see the Reprise Theater Company’sproduction of Kiss Me, Kate, which is one of my favorite musicals. As you no doubt know, it’s a backstage retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with songs by Cole Porter. I was humming “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” for a week before I saw the show, and a week later, I’m still humming it. I don’t have permission to print the lyrics here (and I’m not about to commit plagiarism), so I invite you to spend five minutes watching it on YouTube  Turn your sound up loud. The song is sung by the two gangsters who … well, if I give you the whole plot, it’ll fill up this blog. They sing it in front of the curtain while the scene is changed behind the curtain. The song is hilarious. The stanzas are puns on the titles of Shakespeare’s plays. “Her clothes you are mussing” is rhymed, for example, with “Much Ado About Nussing.”

Having been a Shakespeare scholar (well, I earned my Ph.D. with a major in English Renaissance literature with an emphasis on the drama—which means Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and that bunch), I really like Shakespeare’s plays.

The Lure of Procrastination

I always write my blog when the sun enters a new sign. It’s an easy signal. This month, I had the best intentions to meet this semi-deadline, but then I got busy. Two or three of my authors announced deadlines of their own—“I gotta get this book in print,” one of them said—and then I decided to do some editing of my own work.

I never object to being busy, of course. First, Income Is Useful. (That’s one of my mantras. The other one is Breathing Is Good.) Second, any work I do beats daytime TV. Third, editing and writing keep my brain sharp.

Be prepared

Like everyone I know, I’ve been watching the news about the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear threat in Japan. As awful as this disaster is, though, it’s nothing new. Just think about the years since the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Droughts all around the world. Forest fires all across Russia. The earthquake in Haiti a little more than a year ago. The eruption of the volcano in Iceland. The recent earthquakes in China, Chile, and New Zealand. Tornadoes up and down the Midwest. Blizzards and floods all winter long, heat waves all summer. (One day last October, there was a late heat wave in Long Beach. The temperature outside was 113. I swear it was 110 in my apartment.) 

You watch the news, you see a survivor standing in a devastated landscape. No matter it it’s been a tsunami, an earthquake, a wildfire, or a tornado, where there used to be a town, now all that’s left are mud and stacks of lumber and cars on roofs. This survivor used to have a life. An ordinary life. Survivors used to own homes and cars, furniture and appliances. They had food in their cabinets. They had clean clothes. They could take showers. And now? It’s all gone. I heard an interview of a man in Japan who said he needed to take a bath. He was standing next to an enormous mud puddle that had been his house. It just breaks your heart.

Talkin’ to myself all the time. Or, how to write a blog without really thinking about it.

I suspect that nearly everyone on the planet has an on-going conversation, rant, or lecture going on in their head nearly all the time. It’s that famous monkey-chatter the authors of the popular meditation and other metaphysical books admonish us to banish from our minds. We are forever rehearsing what we’re going to say to someone, delivering that riposte (which we didn’t do in real life) that wins the argument we lost in real life, asking questions for which we need good answers, talking to ourselves about something we saw on TV.

With writers, of course, it’s not always random thinking, arguing, or chattering. We’re composing in our heads. If it’s not in our own voice, then the characters in our novels are talking to us and we’re listening to them. We’re probably also watching them. Nearly every novelist I’ve ever met or whose work I’ve edited has told me that the characters just take over. Sometimes they’re hard to direct. Impossible to boss around. That’s certainly true of my work. As I tell the authors whose novels I’m editing, however, I am—and we are—still in charge of gooder English. Our characters can talk any way they want to, but we the authors are the ones in charge of spelling and punctuation.

A friendly way to start a new year

The news broadcasts are telling us the homes of one million people have been foreclosed and taken by the banks in 2010. This is one million individual people, every single one of them facing a ruined life and possibly nowhere else to live, many of them in bankruptcy. It’s too much to hold in my head. But I can tell the story of one of these one million. My friend Melina (I’ve changed her name) lost her house in the crash and the crunch.

I met Melina about ten years ago at a metaphysical church to which I was donating some plants. When I walked in, she was screwing the legs on a little table. We introduced ourselves, and that was the beginning of our friendship. Melina is a professional woman, self-employed like me. But she provides a service that people have apparently decided is a luxury they can forego in this economic climate, and so her income has sunk and sunk and sunk. In December, 2009, while she was still in her house but under threat of foreclosure and eviction, we had some long phone conversations in which I tried to bring her out of her depression by telling her to keep warm and wear socks. (In that context, socks became magical bringers of comfort.) Her roommate had just moved out, so there went half of each month’s mortgage payment. Melina tried legal remedies and nearly got to keep her house, but in the end, all her legal appeals did was make the process longer. Last fall, she finally started packing for real. Friends helped her, and pretty soon nearly everything she owned was in a big storage unit. When a professional colleague offered her his spare bedroom, she accepted … but she hasn’t got any of her stuff with her. We all need our stuff, right? Melina is an intelligent, beautiful, proud woman. Her life is nearly unendurable. It’s heart-breaking.

On Collecting

Yesterday I did a witch census in my new apartment. I picked up a pad and pencil and walked around. Marching en masse across my filing cabinet: 46. On top of the tall bookcase in my office: 14. On top of my hutch: 23. On the floor under the hutch: eight, plus the Muppet-size witch sitting on the nifty chair I bought at Goodwill. In the kitchen: eight, including three Barbies in their original boxes. One is Samantha from Bewitched. My definition of “witch” is pretty broad, so I counted four of the eight or nine rubber duckies in the bathroom and most of my cat witches (well, they are wearing pointy hats). On one wall in my bedroom: 25. On the shelves above my bed: 19 + 13 + 3 + 12. It’s a sort of headboard. When I look up, I see witchy feet. On the black bookcases in the living room: 22. I count and recount because—cross my heart!—the girls move. Census results: 326 witches are living in my apartment, not counting me and the doll in the pointy hat who rides in the back seat of my car (with her own seatbelt). I sent the census results to my friend, Margaret. She wrote back that I’ll need to stop collecting when I hit 500. I should live that long.

The New Age is right: everything is connected. And musical theater proves it.

When I told my friend Allene I was going to write a blog about musical theater, she said, “That’s pretty esoteric.” “Over the years,” I replied, “I have edited a number of really interesting books on esoteric topics.” There’s all the metaphysical books that prove the universe is holographic and everything is connected. Well, gee, I can write esoterica, too. One of my favorite things in all the world is musical theater. Let’s go to an alternate universe where musicals are real life and the people in them are as real as you and me and see what happens.

Here's my political blog

This is my political blog. You could probably guess it was coming. Unless you have, as they say, been living in a cave, you know there’s an election on November 2. My guess is that even hermits and anchorites these days have cell phones and iPods, so they get to watch all those awful attack commercials, too. When I see one coming on, I hit the mute button on my remote. We’re supposed to be living in a modern civilization. Whatever happened to civility?

Well, what happened is that the Republicans and the Tea Party are unhappy with President Obama. (Yes, I know: that’s a vast understatement.) Back in the Rove/Cheney/Bush days, Republicans thought they were gonna be in charge forever. It didn’t happen. But last year they grabbed our political narrative in their poison fangs and relentless claws and have been ripping it up and trying to kill it ever since.

Balance and the Ballet

I don’t often like what’s on TV, unless (intellectual snob that I am) I find a good concert or documentary on PBS or a good movie on Turner Classic Movies. The other night I watched The Red Shoes on TCM. This is the famous 1948 J. Arthur Rank (does anyone else remember J. Arthur Crank from Electric Company? But I digress) film starring Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, the ballerina; Anton Walbrook as the ballet impresario, Lermontov, aka, the devil; and Marius Goring as the composer, Julian Craster. The film, which was beautifully restored in 2008 by UCLA, is based on the 1845 “fairy tale for adults” by Hans Christian Andersen. This is a scary story about a poor girl named Karen.

Reading (and Writing and Editing) Novels

As I said last month, when you move, you move things around as you unpack them. I found a whole lot of books I hadn’t seen or read in several years. Setting up new bookshelves gave me a good opportunity to put old books in new places.

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.

Blog 0410

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.

Beauty Asleep

Once upon a time, approximately now, there was a hard-working, highly principled man who was Lord Mayor of the megalopolis. The Lord Mayor lived, but spent very little quality time, with his wife, Queenie, and their prepubescent daughter, whom the media had affectionately dubbed The Princess. Queenie, who had once earned a juris doctor degree, had upon her husband’s election to his high post retired from her voracious practice at the legal clinic and devoted herself to philanthropic and occasionally quixotic endeavors. Having observed that the people do not tolerate professional first ladies, Queenie now focused her considerable energy upon only two targets: raising The Princess to be a bright, assertive young lady and raising the hopes of the homeless women who flowed back and forth through the megalopolis, a tide of tearful crones.

You Were Warned ...

One of my favorite T-shirts proclaims I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you. When people see it, I watch their lips moving as they read it and think about it. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes. Some people don’t get it. What’s not to get? I think it’s the “about whom.” People are haunted by junior high and the English class they sat in and sort of paid attention in, and reading my T-shirt they think about the rules they didn’t quite learn.