Friends, Family, and Future

I just returned from a week-long Texas college exploration trip with my soon-to-be 17,  soon-to-be high-school-senior son. Covering more than 950 miles on the ground in six days, we toured three Christian universities; savored Tex-Mex, Texas-sized burgers, Texas...

Blessings from Burgers

I had two goals in mind when I set up Burgers for Bill as a part of the Alzheimer’s Association’s The Longest Day Campaign: (1) to raise some money to battle this brutal disease; and (2) to give friends and family a chance to remember and honor my father. And I’m...

Finding Help in a Festival of Choices

In 1996, my husband and I took our four-year-old son to the first-ever Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The main draw for us was a chance for our son to get to meet some of the characters from his favorite PBS shows—none of us remember now which ones. The event,...

Sharing a Full House at ACES 2014

What a great few days at the 2014 convention of the American Copy Editors Society! I was lucky enough to present a session, “Learning to Speak Scholar,” where I got a chance to share some of the things I’ve learned while working with academic writers in the past 20...

BB Guns to Muumuus: All in a Week’s Work!

One of the best things about working as an independent editor is the wide variety of material I get to read, and glancing back at some of the words and ideas I’ve looked up in the past few days simply makes me smile. I can’t help it; I think words are fun. This...

Can Editors Find Love?

A few months ago, I wrote the Top 10 ways to Make Your Editor Love You. It only seemed fair to write the flip side, giving editors some tips for How to Make Your Author Love You. The tips for editors were published in the September/October issue of The Freelancer, the...

Grateful Writing

This morning, it clicked. After 30 days of simply following best-practice advice, today, I finally get it. Last month, I made a personal commitment to spend five minutes each morning writing in a “gratitude journal.” I set the timer on my phone, pick up a notebook...