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Nomination!

December 8, 2008

Congratulations to Philippa Ballantine — her novel Digital Magic has been nominated for a Sir Julius Vogel award. I was privileged to work with Pip on Digital Magic, so this is exciting on a personal level, as well. She’s a great writer and podcaster, and it’s always a treat to work on a novel with [...]

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How many spaces?

December 4, 2008

How many spaces should you put after a period? In this electronic day and age, this editor’s preference is for one space, please. Hitting the spacebar twice after a period is something a lot of us (of a certain age) learned in school. It’s a hotly debated topic, mostly because it’s a practice that becomes [...]

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Professional Opinions

December 1, 2008

This morning, I went for a haircut. It wasn’t a very good haircut. It was mediocre, maybe, at best. The problem I had with it was that my stylist didn’t want to express any opinions. I would say, “I’d kind of like a change. I’m thinking about doing this, but I’m not sure how it [...]

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Acknowledgments

November 24, 2008

The Acknowledgments page of a book is where the author gets to thank all the people who helped along the way and added their professional or moral support toward getting the book into print. Some publications, such as professional journals, don’t allow personal acknowledgments, but they’re common and expected in books. The Acknowledgments page is [...]

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The Really Important Proofreading Marks

November 20, 2008

Today, a classic: Oh, if only. via Geist:Comix.

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WriMo

November 17, 2008

Here’s a timely question I’ve received for the middle of November: How do you feel, as an editor, about NaNoWriMo and other writing activities that stress quantity of words and sheer output over things like, say, quality, or editing? The answer is, I’m all for them. (As long as they don’t take away from your [...]

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Sadistic tools

November 13, 2008

I don’t advocate this for a serious writing project (see: Kamikaze Mode, below), but as a tool for writing exercises, I think it’s brilliant. Meet Write or Die, a cruel and twisted little application that nudges you when you get distracted and stop typing. You set the delay interval, and you also choose your consequences, [...]

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Why they call it “work”

November 10, 2008

Q: What do you do when you have to work on a book you don’t really like? A: Your best. There are several differences between reading for pleasure and reading for work. When you read for work, you have to read more carefully and thoroughly. As an editor, I’m on a mission to catch errors, [...]

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Dash it all!

November 6, 2008

I’m beginning to think that the em dash is the least understood of the punctuation marks, and that the fault isn’t with writers. It’s with computers. If you’re joining words or separating syllables, you want a hyphen. If you’re describing a range of values, times, or scores, you want an en dash. An en dash [...]

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We type, ergo…

November 3, 2008

If you work at a computer for eight hours a day for a large company, in a large office, there’s probably an ergonomics consultant or coach, or at least a set of standards that the company conforms to, in order to make sure that workstations are set up in such a way that they foster [...]

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