A Rough but Inspiring Week

martin-richard

This has been a less than stellar week. After the bombings at the Boston Marathon, I was worried beyond belief about a few folks from my former stomping grounds that I hadn’t heard from. Since our internet was out at the farm and I wanted to just get away for a night, I drove up [...]

Essential and Non-essential Elements

bookflip

For this post, I thought I’d concentrate on a comma issue that can cause problems for writers. The rule I’m speaking of is the one that states nonessential elements should be separated from the rest of the sentence with commas before and after the element in question. Unlike most other comma issues, this one involves [...]

Words That Can Get Us In Trouble (In the Age of Spell Check)

spell_check

This week, I’m revisiting an issue I covered a while back. I’m mentioning it again because it seems to come up more often than you would think. As most of us know, spell check can’t read minds. We’ve probably all ran into situations where we’ve butchered the spelling of a word and spell check has [...]

Hey, Look! A Post About Commas

comma_1-13

For my first post of 2013, I thought I’d cover an issue that I mentioned back in 2011.  I’m brining it up again because it seems to cause a lot of confusion out there in author land. I say that because it’s one of the things that I often run across. It’s the issue of [...]

Reading Your Work, Pre and Post Editing

reading

As an editor, I’m sometimes startled by what I find on the pages that scroll across the screen of my laptop.  Of course, that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. A second set of eyes is always a good thing when it comes to the fiction that our minds spew onto the page. As an [...]