http://sundragonediting.com/blog Thoughts About the Editing and Writing Life Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:46:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Where have all the hyphens gone? Nearly every day, everywhere I look, I see these little spaces where there should be hyphens. In the community newspaper, in national advertising, in Jeopardy clues, on product packaging, and of course on the Internet, the hyphens have somehow been left behind. Just yesterday, I ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/03/03/lament-for-lost-hyphens/ You never know quite what you’re going to get when you put your business online and invite queries from anyone who happens to stumble across your site. It was almost exactly two years ago that I started planning Sundragon. I published the site with a sense of excitement tempered with ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/03/01/electronic-civility/ Editing is not always about spelling and punctuation. Sometimes an editor has to get inside a writer’s mind, wade into a sentence or paragraph whose true meaning is cleverly hidden within phrases and structures that make absolutely no sense. The editor enters the murky world of creative spelling, misplaced modifiers, ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/02/26/zen-and-the-art-of-editing/ I love commas. They’re such tiny things, but their power is immense. Okay, “immense” is probably an overstatement. Let’s start by agreeing that commas are important and move on from there. My love of the humble comma extends to the serial (or series, or Oxford) comma. For those of you ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/02/24/a-little-bit-of-comma-love/ Nobody’s perfect. Editors generally like things to be perfect, and some of us experience a certain queasy feeling when we realize an error (even a tiny one) has slipped by, but at some point we all have to admit that we make mistakes. Humility is a beautiful thing. So, in ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/02/22/the-humble-queasy-editor/ “Kids today can’t spell and don’t know how to write a simple sentence. It’s because of all that texting they’re doing—all those newfangled abbreviations, no punctuation. They’ll all end up with rotten brains and broken thumbs, and the language catastrophe will culminate in 2012, when (according to the Mayan calendar) ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/02/18/the-end-of-language-as-we-know-it/ It’s been a sad week for me. It’s also been a little less busy than usual, and it’s all because I lost my favorite freelance job late last week. For a little over a year, I’d been writing a comedy blog based on a fictional dog character for a nonprofit ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/02/03/losing-my-favorite-job/ Sometimes editors (and others) can be unimaginative, boring old coots. I was reminded of this uncomfortable fact just moments ago as I was leafing through Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins (by Theodore M. Bernstein). My little eye fell upon the entry for “land on water,” an innocent and useful phrase that has ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/02/01/taking-things-literally/ So many authors dream the dream: Write a book, get picked up by a major publisher, pocket a hefty advance, watch readers snatch your book off bookstore shelves and wait for hours just to get your autograph, meet Oprah, meet the screenwriter who will help you turn your book into ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/01/27/self-publish-or-perish/ When I was quite a few years younger, I read only “serious,” “grown-up” books. Now I’m old enough (barely old enough, mind you) to admit that was a stupid, boring way to approach my reading life. These days I have a rule: For every grown-up book I read, I have ... http://sundragonediting.com/blog/2010/01/25/percy-jackson-the-olympians/