Remember when networking was so popular there were networking groups everywhere you turned? I was living in Orange County, California, during those days and I belonged to networking organizations like Women In Management and breakfast clubs in which members gave each other job leads and I gave speeches on creativity to a dozen different kinds of groups in the OC business … [Read more...]
Concise Writing
As I tell the authors whose books I edit, it’s relatively easy to write a whole book. You just do a mind dump. Then you hire me to help you clean it up. It’s that “cleaning it up” part that becomes a challenge. We tend to love our words, especially all those nifty adjectives and adverbs we find in the thesaurus and stuff into our sentences. But bloated sentences tend not to … [Read more...]
Get a Good Computer Keyboard
Sometimes I think I’m the only person on the planet without a BlackBerry. I must be the only person who doesn’t sit in restaurants or theaters or coffee shops texting to my friends. I’m really boring, I guess—when I’m sitting at a keyboard, it’s right here, and I’m sitting here because I’m writing something I want people to read. Some of the authors whose books I’m editing … [Read more...]
Basic Writing Tools – Dictionaries
<A HREF="http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Ftheidealady%2F8010%2F80124e56-a72b-4c0b-9dee-d592aeb61c50&Operation=NoScript" … [Read more...]
The Elements of Style
I don’t even know how long I’ve been sitting at this computer, or the computers before this one, or the typewriter before the first computer, or the legal pad before that. I was the only member of the Creative Writing Club in my high school to have a new story every single week. In college and graduate school, I kept writing. Mostly term papers, of course. I still have all my … [Read more...]