Being an editor, every so often someone submits something that really surprises me. And it isn’t until I get to the end that I realized I didn’t take a breath the whole way through, this short bit was one of those times:

I found myself feeling not quite like myself. It was a good feeling. It can get extremely boring living in the same body for almost thirty years, after all. I was walking down the street, my mind empty Read the rest of this entry »

Feedback: the dread of every single writer who has ever lived. Just saying the word in my mind I feel sorry for all the embryos on their way to becoming human-beings, then children, then, finally, disconcerted-by-society adults, and then writers. Little do they know how valuable and crucially important feedback will be to their craft (not that that should be an embryos first priority, of course. Best to grow some limbs and organs first).

The truth is, most Read the rest of this entry »

Punctuation is a strange animal and the comma, especially, has always been hard to pin-down. This conversation came up multiple times while I was teaching overseas. Uniquely, the comma is one of the few punctuation-marks that can be used in any which way, and actually doesn’t have any specific rule—unlike all the other punctuation-marks, which should always be used within strict parameters: by that I mean that the comma can be put anywhere the writer wishes. The comma, more Read the rest of this entry »