One easy way to save your copy editor time and you money (and make her love working with you) is to professionally format your manuscript before sending it in. At this stage, your editor doesn’t want fancy fonts or unusual formatting (no matter how fun those things...
Welcome to the first post in How to Break Grammar Rules in Fiction, my regular segment that explains why grammar rules exist so you can know how to break them like an artist. On the chopping block this week: sentence fragments.
Professional editing is an important investment for the future of your book. It can also be a big investment, and a lot of authors are surprised by how much editing ends up costing. I’ll clear the waters here so you can know what professional editing costs, how...
Every time I get a new editing inquiry from an interested author, one of the first things I do is make sure that my services are a right fit for the author’s writing and publishing stage. There are so many different editing services and different names for each...
Have you ever wondered about the rhyme and reason behind punctuating descriptive phrases? Why do we use a hyphen in “a well-built house,” a comma in “a strong, stable house,” and no punctuation at all in “a big red house”? Speaking of which, why does it sound weird...
You may be surprized to learn that there is a piece of punctuation that people get really up-in-arms about. It’s called the Oxford comma, or the serial comma, and there are a lot of people who are very passionate about using it. I used to be one of those people,...
Writing a piece of historical fiction can be daunting. Here are some researching principles to help you navigate the plethora of information out there.
I recently read a tweet from a writer who was thrown into a state of self-doubt because she disagreed with something her grammar checker identified as wrong. As a language nerd (commonly known as a copy editor), I love it when proofreading software keeps me from...
Group writing exercises can help get us writers out of our own heads and bring our creative energy into a social situation, which I think we all need sometimes (even introverts like me). So, here are some writing exercises I learned from the Thin Air writers’...