Author Interview with Barbara Ardinger

Today we're talking with Barbara Ardinger, author of Secret Lives


FQ: The characters are so funny, at times, among the beauty of what they’re saying and doing. Are any of the characters specifically based on you and/or your friends?


Before anything else—many thanks for your lovely review. As an author yourself, you know how gratifying it is when a reader gets your work.


There are tiny bits of me and nearly everyone I know in the characters of Secret Lives. I suspect that I am most like the Goddesses two “thoughty” devotees, Cairo and Brooke, but I think there must be some of me in Bertha, too. I’ve been a bit of a rebel all my life. Brooke grew up in St. Louis, so did I, she and some other characters went to college at Southeast Missouri State in Cape Girardeau, where I earned my B.S. and M.A. Though the university changed the name of the team and mascot some years ago, I renamed the school Sagamore State after the old mascot, “Chief Sagamore.” Brooke’s avoidance behavior in Chapter 19 echoes things I did in a similar circumstance. The story about the trip to the Ozarks in the VW bug is true—we stopped in a small town and they didn’t know where to put the gas in the car. Other characters contain hints of people I know, and some of the people mentioned (especially in the chapters about Jacoba’s breast cancer) are real people, some with their names changed. Frances J. Swift thinks and talks like every corporate memo I ever read (and I’ve read a lot of corporate-speak). I think it’s this verisimilitude that makes the characters seem so real.


FQ: There are many who see the hideous treatment that our beloved family members are receiving in retirement homes. Is this a subject you would really like people to ‘get’ when they read this novel?


It certainly is. I have known people—most of them elderly women like Sarah—who were sold out of their houses and parked in shabby places like the Towers. For a few months while I was writing Secret Lives, I was a companion to an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s. She and I made a good team: she was talking to invisible people and I was watching and listening to invisible people. After my grandfather’s death, my grandmother lived with her two living daughters—a month here, a month there, a month back again. Sophie echoes my grandmother when she says she never knew where to call home. (Gramma finally found a place in a senior citizens’ village near St. Louis.) Hannah’s nightmares about the floors falling out of her mother’s house are taken directly from nightmares I had after my grandfather died. I have also seen physicians give very poor care to old women, though that is—thank Goddess!—changing today.


Twenty years ago, elderly women were still at the bottom of the social totem pole. The metaphysical Great Chain of Life, which was a popular paradigm during the 18th and 19th centuries went sort of like this—mud (earth), women, noble animals (the lion), men, angels, God. Well, we neopagans and witches are very grounded. Our religion is an earth-based religion. It’s said we worship the ground we walk on. I was also present several times when we constructed a labyrinth on the beach at Laguna Beach; Cairo’s story is a true one.


FQ: You speak about various areas of study such as, numerology, astrology, and even the Theosophical Society. Are you a researcher on these particular subjects? Or, studied them in college?


I read a lot. I’ve studied these topics and more. My numerology teacher at the time I started writing Secret Lives (1990) was a French woman born in Egypt whose accent made Maurice Chevalier sound like Walter Cronkite. (Does anyone recognize these two men’s names?) I spent several years as a member of Edgar Cayce’s association and even got a sweet kiss on the cheek from one of Cayce’s sons, who was an elderly man. I’ve tried to learn astrology, but I just don’t speak the language. Thankfully, I have a dozen friends who are experts and explain things to me. I have read much of the early New Thought literature (written around the turn of the 20th century and earlier) and much of the literature of the late 19th-century Occult Revival of Europe. Bits and pieces of all these things are given in the novel. Rev. Donnathea is an entirely admirable mainstream metaphysical teacher. I’m sure we’ve all met teachers like Rev. Debbee and students like Gwennie.


And I’ve known some very thoughtful Theosophists who would read my version of the transmigration of souls and laugh out loud. Theosophy posits the theory that life—a soul—arises in the mineral kingdom, moves to the vegetable, then to the animal, next to the human, then ascends to the angelic realm. I write in the FREE READER’S GUIDE on my website that Madame Blavatsky, the circle’s familiar, was born in the fluorite mine and moved to a mugwort bush. (These are both associated with mental power.) Next she was a Russian bear (the real-life occultist was born in Russia,) then she was the famous occultist and author. Next she became the cat in my novel. People might think she’s going backwards, but we need to remember that catus felis, the domestic cat, is the highest form of life on the planet. After her nine lives as a cat, Madame Blavatsky will start climbing up the nine levels of the angelic hierarchy. Yes—this is nonsense. But that’s the point of parody!


FQ: Being allowed to “make the choice you want to make for yourself” where death is concerned presents a scenes which are truly beautiful. Do you believe that this should be an option for all?

I believe that a person facing death should not be kept “heroically” alive with tubes and drugs and machines. If it’s time to go, then a person should be allowed to have a dignified death. I learned this as an AIDS volunteer and when some close friends died. This is why our women celebrate Sarah’s life and create sacred space for her to make her choice. They don’t do anything to encourage her or discourage her.


I also think I accept the fact of reincarnation, though I’m not totally sure. I’ve had spontaneous views of a couple of my earlier lives and believe them; at the same time, I do NOT believe that I was Cleopatra in an earlier life, which I was told because I wrote my doctoral dissertation about her. And two of my boyfriends were Caesar and Antony?? I think not! I’m very curious to know what happens when someone who dies “wakes up” in another realm, but even though I love the movie Ghost, nobody really trustworthy has come back to tell us.


FQ: The debates that arise from your novel such as God versus Goddess and The Church versus other religions are extremely strong. Can you offer readers a bit of information about these tough subjects, and how you feel about these debates that still go on?

As I—and many other neopagans—see it, the Goddess is the grandmother of God. The basic situation shown in the prologue is accurate and true. People were living in an egalitarian civilization in Old Europe when Indo-European horsemen arrived from the Caucasus Mountains and the Russian steppes bringing their sky, solar, storm gods with them. This is documented in the work of Marija Gimbutas and others. Lucia Birnbaum, another respected scholar, writes that the earliest people walked out of eastern Africa before 50,000 BCE taking their “black mothers” (black ancestral goddesses) with them. They turned left to populate Asia and went north and turned left to populate Europe.


We neopagans are not out to do battle with other religions. We do not proselytize, we do not seek converts, we do not preach to the masses. There are, of course, a few fundamentalist pagans who will have nothing to do with the standard-brand religions, but I’ve never heard of any neopagan jihadists or evangelists. I keep hoping we’re working up to a critical mass and that we’ll bring more lovingkindness to the planet. That’s why I write about pagan festivals and gods and goddesses in my last nonfiction book, Pagan Every Day, where I also write about Christian saints, Jewish holidays, Muslim prophets and events, Mormon history, Black Islam, and holidays from the Eastern religions.


FQ: I was very proud to see that all characters are given their voice in this novel. From witches to horrific doctors to the subject of lesbianism - this really feels like a novel promoting choice in everything. Is this a correct statement?


Yes. Choice based on intelligent observation and clear thought is a good thing. We have free will and e can make life choices. But we always need to consider the unintended consequences of any choices we make.


FQ: When your shaman is resting on her staff, the picture of many women and men resting on their canes in their elder years pops into mind - reminding me that this is the generation with the power, intelligence, and history that we should be honoring and not tossing into homes. Are you an advocate for senior citizens?


A formal advocate? No. But I’ve met many elderly people and listened to their stories. I’ve spent time in “old folks’ homes” and modeled the Towers on several of them. I also believe Santayana when he says that if we don’t remember history we’ll be condemned to repeat it. I read the newspaper in the morning and watch the news on TV, and I keep thinking the U.S. is heading in the same direction as some earlier fallen empires. We need to listen to our wise elders. Of course, some of our elderly people are not wise, so it’s a matter of distinguishing between those who know history and those who don’t, those who are wise and those who are demented. It would be good if we could keep the latter out of government.


FQ: Do you hope that the next generation comes to realize that they are being handed down the power to fight the evil that seems to be becoming more and more rampant every day?

I don’t like to use a word like “evil.” There’s a lot that’s lousy in the world—all we have to do is watch Eyewitless News to see big and little wars and gangs and crime. There are gangs in Long Beach. The scene that opens Chapter 1 echoes threats that women get all the time. My hope for the younger generation is that they learn to kind to other people and learn to make choices that are useful and helpful to themselves and other people. But our kids have a lot of awful history to overcome.


FQ: Who do you believe are some of the strongest women from history? I know that you mention Hypatia - THE librarian (my favorite) - is she among the toughest? And, do you believe that strong women will continue to be ‘taken-down’ even after all this time?

The list given in Chapter 25 names a lot of my heras. (“Hera” is the feminine form of “hero.”) The women are identified in the FREE READER’S GUIDE on my website. Cleopatra of Egypt was the subject of my doctoral dissertation. Zenobia was a Syrian queen who led a failed revolt against the Roman Empire. Hypatia really died as described. Pope Joan may have been real. Eleanor of Aquitaine was married to and imprisoned by Henry II. Tamara was the “king” of Georgia in the Caucasus at the end of the 12th century. Everyone knows about Joan of Arc. Queen Jinga Mbandi was an Angolan queen who tried to drive the Portuguese out of her land. Harriet Tubman was an African American humanitarian who used the Underground Railroad to take slaves out of the South and worked for women’s rights after the end of the Civil War. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a Mexican nun and poet. Clara Schumann was the sister of Robert Schumann and is believed to have written much of the music he took credit for. Isadora Duncan is said to be the creator of modern dance. Hildegard of Bingen and Dame Julian of Norwich were medieval Christian nuns and mystics. St. Theresa was a Spanish nun, mystic, saint, and reformer of the Carmelite Order. Mother Theresa was an Albanian Catholic nun and founder of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India. Simone Weil was a French philosopher and social activist who is said to have starved herself to death in sympathy with the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. Susan Griffin is the author of Woman and Nature (1979), a beautiful and important early feminist work. My intention with this list was to name women who have been overlooked in most of the history books.


FQ: I have to know… I love Madame Blavatsky - who is the cat based on?

The cat is sui generis, one in herself. For purposes of the plot, I wanted a powerful, smart-alecky character, but why did this character have to be human? A talking cat, along with the magic, is part of the magical realism of the novel. I also thought about the familiars that witches have traditionally lived with. She looks like one of my earlier cats, but none of my cats have ever spoken English. She’s a realistic feline because I live with two Maine coon cats (Schroedinger and Heisenberg) and observed their behavior as I wrote. But my cats don’t dance the lambada or sing songs from Marx Brothers movies, either.


FQ: On a personal note: I read in your Author’s Note that acquisitions departments over time have said to you that no one will want to read about crones, goddesses, and magic - I truly believe that you will prove them all wrong in 2011. 



Many thanks. Twenty years ago, no one was the least bit interested in senior citizens, especially not in old women. As the boomers begin to retire, however, “old age” is increasingly important. Just look at the ads on TV—“cures” for menopause, Viagra ads, ads for retirement villages. We can also look at some recent history. Jessica Tandy won her Oscar at the age of 89. The Golden Girls was a popular TV show. Older actors like Chloris Leachman and others are still working. In the U.S. Congress, many of our female senators and representatives, like Nancy Pelosi, might be of retirement age, but they’re not nearly ready to retire. Two of our three female Supreme Court justices are nearly old enough to be crones (Sotomayor is 57, Kagan is 51, Ginsburg is 78), but they’re smart and active. The door of respect of older women is open a tiny crack now. I’m hoping to give it a shove and open it wider.


To learn more about Secret Lives please read the review at: Feathered Quill Book Reviews.

Administrativa: The Found Goddess of Yahoo Groups

Here's another post from Barbara Ardinger, book editor extraordinaire.  First, before the article, Barbara would like to introduce her "Found Goddesses":

Finding New Goddesses

You have no doubt noticed that spiritual and religious writing is almost without exception Highly Serious. The standard-brand monotheistic holy books, mainstream metaphysics, Eastern wisdom, channeled "wisdom," books on philosophy and meditation—hardly a smile in any of it, never a giggle. "This is Deep Thought," the earnest and learned ones seem to be telling us. "Our Religion Is Nothing To Laugh At."

Why not? What on earth (or in the various heavens and hells) is so holy that we can't make fun of it? That's why I started Finding new goddesses. What are Found goddesses? They're made-up deities, goddesses who cope with issues not even dreamed of in ancient Greece or India or the northern lands. Please note that I didn't invent Found goddesses. Morgan Grey and Julia Penelope coined the idea in 1988 for their wonderful little book, Found Goddesses. Their first Found goddess was Asphalta: "Hail, Asphalta, full of grace:/ Help me find a parking space."

Now, here's Barbara's thoughts on "Administrativa":

Here is Administrativa. It’s 7 a.m. She’s sitting at her computer, parsing posts and picking the ashes out of the lentils. It’s noon. She’s still sitting at her computer, nibbling on the bread crusts the friendly doves have brought her. It’s 7 p.m. She’s still sitting at her computer, nibbling on some nice cabbage soup the friendly mice have delivered. It’s 2 a.m. She’s still sitting at her computer. The owl from down the block is fanning Administrativa’s cheeks to help keep her awake so she can do her eternal job of keeping track of what’s doing what to which group. If she looked into a magic mirror instead of at her monitor, the voice in mirror would laugh and say, “Dudette, you are majorly fair. Have an apple?

Administrativa takes her work Very Seriously. “Snip and clip,” she tells the girls in the group, “so people who get digests don’t have to read a whole month’s worth of posts just because it takes you twenty-seven day to reply to something you think you read.” She looks at the list again. “Do not forward anything from this list to any other entity on the planet,” she types. “We do not want anyone to know what we know.” She considers a thread she has been following. “Stay on topic!” she writes. “Do not post your banned Craig’s list ads on this list.” Administrativa follows all threads and reads all posts. She is seven times more attentive to her lists than those grumpy, lazy, thoughty, sleazy little men were to that sleepy little girl. Administrativa is helpful and kind and gently uses her virtual whip to keep everyone in line. She can spin the dimmest post into pure golden prose. She has a quantum brain and actually understands what everyone is writing. She is always doing cutting-edge research and is able to present new ideas for discussion.

Thank you, Administrativa. You keep our fingers happy. You explain social networking and HTML. You tell us where we can put our attachments. You share clarifications that we can collectively consider. You neatly snip away the non-text portions of our posts. You reply to our naïve questions promptly and without obfuscation. Thank you, Administrativa. You are never trivial.

Create Your Writing Space - Part 2

Here's part 2 of Barbara Ardinger's guest post on creating a writing space.  Part 1 ran on August 11, 2010.

What are your basic needs? Do you start with paper and pencil? Then perhaps you need a desk or table and a chair that’s comfortable, but not so comfy you’ll doze off. Do you start at your computer? You can’t be staring at that monitor all the time, so what do you want to rest your eyes on between phrases or paragraphs? A tree like mine? I also have a calendar with nice art, my framed Ph.D. diploma, a drawing of a woman writing what may be a journal, and two goddesses, Green Tara and Sophia, who is Holy Wisdom. (Well, let me be honest: there’s also a Muppet-sized witch nearby, and she’s wearing a red button that says Cherish Your Agent.) What can you hang on your wall near your computer that inspires or comforts you? Maybe you want some friendly houseplants. And do you have a good desk chair with adequate back support? It’s hard to write well when your lower back is screaming at you.

Do you like to eat or drink while you’re working? How far away is the kitchen? Do you have a nice coaster for your cup? Room for a little plate? I drink Coke all day, but I don’t eat while I’m working because I’ve discovered that crumbs in the keyboard are counterproductive.

What else do you keep on your computer table or desk? Is the printer within easy reach? Where’s the paper? Is your cup of pencils, scissors, Sharpies, etc. within easy reach? I have two small stacks of paper, right and left, under paperweights. One is mostly printed sample formats for book reviews, and there’s a map of London on top. The other is printed emails, including notes from authors with specific requests or instructions (like the list of words one author wants capitalized in her book). I also have a tube of hand cream and a little desk lamp.

Do you work in silence or do you want music? When I was in graduate school, I was reading works like The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and the plays of John Dryden, all of which demand enormous concentration, so I learned to crave quiet and solitude. Even today, as I edit at the comma and semicolon level, I prefer peace and quiet. But I know some writers like music. If so, are your speakers properly positioned? Are your CDs within reach? And how close is the telephone?

Finally, how much is going on around you? I know it’s fashionable to boast that we can multitask with ease, and I myself have done decent work while sitting on a bench at the mall while I was waiting for a friend, but I firmly believe that we do our best work when we are not being interrupted all the time. How private is your writing space? You’re allowed to get up, of course, while you’re working on your novel or self-help book, but I can assure you that you’ll do better work if you’ve got a clean, well-lighted, reasonably quiet writing space. If you’re serious about writing, create—or improve—your space now.

Create Your Writing Space - Part 1

I moved on June 26. The last time I moved was nine years ago, so you can imagine how much stuff I had to pack—countless books in seven or eight bookcases plus my 8'x10' demountable wall unit, my collection of 312 witches, furniture, clothes, more tchotchkes than I care to count, the whole kitchen, all the art I hang on my walls. Facing all that packing, I fell into a funk. Well, gee, I moaned, I’m an author and editor—I don’t do physical labor. I called the moving company, the guys moved me, we got my computer hooked up, got my cable TV hooked up, got my all-region DVD player hooked up, got the cats settled, more or less. (Let me give public thanks to my son and daughter-in-law for their help, too.) But then they left me alone in my new apartment. Everything I owned was in boxes. Lots and lots and lots of boxes. I had mountain ranges of big boxes full of books in the living room. Piled three high. One of my cats turned into a mountain goat. (The other cat took up residence on my bed for three days until she discovered her favorite fuzzy blanket on her favorite chair.) I had to dodge boxes when I wanted to get into the bathroom. The boxes in the bedroom blocked the windows and the closet.

I unpacked the last box on July 31. As my son remarked, it took me three weeks longer to unpack than it had taken to pack. Well, that was because I had to figure out where to put every tchotchke, every book, every dish, every DVD, every piece of art. Not to mention my underwear, the cats’ food, and my toothbrush and my microwave.

But the main reason unpacking took so long—aha! Now I’m getting to the point of this blog—is that I couldn’t just stop working while I was unpacking. I had to build myself a new working space, an immediate oasis (to mix a metaphor) in the mountain range of boxes. Where I used to live, I looked out the window to my left on a dusty concrete patio and wall. One of my new neighbors there had begun letting her dog do its business on the patio, and people were stealing the potted plants. (To learn more about why I moved, see my June blog on my website. http://www.barbaraardinger.com/articles/2010/06/19/even-editors-have-lives/ ) Where I live now, I’m on the second floor and I look up from my monitor directly into the branches of a lovely green tree. (But don’t ask me what kind of tree it is.)

Although it’s said that Shakespeare did his writing backstage or in the tavern, and Jane Austen is said to have written her novels at a table in the same room where her family was entertaining guests, and Ernest Hemmingway (for all I know) wrote in the bullring or the bar, ordinary writers like you and me need a clean, well-lighted space to work in. Writing is hard work. Don’t make it harder on yourself by trying to work where you can’t reach your dictionary when you need it, where it’s so noisy you can’t concentrate, or where you’re interrupted before you can get two consecutive sentences down.

Learn more about Barbara and the services she offers writers by visiting her site: BarbaraArdinger.com

Meeting Deadlines - Part 2

Here's part 2 of Barbara's Ardinger's article on "Meeting Deadlines."  Part 1 was posted on Tuesday, June 1.



At the same time, I was also talking to another author about deadlines. He’s a lawyer who took my novel-writing class at a local university three years ago, then hired me to edit his novel—which I love—about angels and demons in Brooklyn. He had deadlines to meet in his legal practice and was putting off work on the novel. I want him to rewrite the last several chapters to a more satisfactory ending, so I send him noodges from time to time. He’s promising me now that he’s going to reset his deadlines.


How do these authors meet deadlines? How do I help them? We start by adapting a technique I learned when I was a secretary to five psychologists: learning by successive approximations. That means you take your best shot at something and get a little bit done. Then you take another best shot and get a little bit more done. You keep pecking at it (to change the metaphor) until you’ve eaten the whole thing. You can’t take one giant bite and finish it. You go at it a bite at a time. As a writer facing a deadline, you write a sentence at a time. Two sentences. Three. A paragraph. Two paragraphs. It’s not a new concept, of course. There’s a wonderful, hilarious movie, What About Bob? (1991), starring Richard Dreyfus and Bill Murray, that illustrates the process of learning by successive approximations: they call it taking baby steps. And of course the twelve-step programs tell us to take it one day or one step at a time. It also helps if you have a daily planner and write a goal—one paragraph, one chapter—to meet every day. Or you do what my author did an set preliminary (self-imposed) deadlines that impel you step by step toward the big deadline. That’s how you finish your book in time to drive across three states to deliver it to the publisher at eight o’clock on a Monday morning. (My author did it! I was glad to hear that she took someone with her to keep her awake on the freeways.)

And me? I edit one sentence at a time. Sometimes one word, one misplaced (or missing) comma, one well-turned phrase, one misused semicolon or cliché at a time. And when I have a deadline of my own—hey, is this blog late??—I also do it one step at a time. My first step is composing the first couple paragraphs in my head in the middle of the night and remembering my golden words long enough to get to my computer and get them out through my fingers. At which time I see that they’re merely brass. I rewrite them. Edit my own work. Rewrite a lot. (Which is what I’m doing right now.) So far, I have never missed a deadline.

Meeting Deadlines - Part 1

Here's another great article by Barbara Ardinger, freelance editor.  If you're looking for somebody to edit your book, please consider Barbara.  She does a fantastic job and she's a lot of fun to work with (and professional too!)  Visit her website to learn more: Barbaraardinger.com

Part 2 will be posted on Thursday.

Meeting Deadlines

I sold my life to one of my authors a couple weeks ago. She had a deadline, and it was my job to help her meet it: she had to deliver a hard copy and a CD of her book to her publisher on Monday, May 17. Like nearly all of my authors, she’s really smart, but she’s not a good writer. In fact, toward the end, she was copying her old PowerPoint presentations into the book and turning her bulleted lists into paragraphs and charts. Her topic was a good one—no matter whether it’s our personal or professional life, it’s our relationships with our family, friends, and colleagues that make our worlds work. I don’t remember if she used the word “networking” in her book, but that’s what I learned thirty years ago when I was a member of women’s networking groups and met people who are friends to this day. In her book, my author gives guidelines for establishing, building, and nourishing relationships that will lead to success.

I develop relationships with nearly all of my authors, so when this author asked me to be available to her that week, I said, “Sure. You’ll get top priority.” She’s on the east coast and I’m on the west coast. I checked my email more often than usual, and she sent chapters as soon as she finished them. If I was working on another project, I clocked out of that one and clocked in to this author’s. (My timesheets always show when I begin and end work on any given day on any given book I’m editing.) A couple nights that week, I didn’t turn my computer off until nearly eight o’clock … which was eleven o’clock for her. That’s proof that authors work hard.

What did we do to meet her deadline? First, she set a self-imposed deadline. She told me she was planning to leave her home at two o’clock Monday morning and drive up the coast with her manuscript and CD to arrive at the publisher’s front door at the start of business. During the week, facing her self-imposed deadline, she emailed chapters, parts of chapters, and front matter and back matter to me. For a couple days, the same chapters went back and forth several times as I edited and she rewrote and I edited again. Since I know something about her topic, I asked questions, made suggestions, and added sentences that clarified her examples. This was in addition to making sure her subjects agreed with her verbs, her introductory clauses and phrases agreed with the subjects of the sentences, her punctuation was correct, and her paragraphs and ideas flowed logically from one to the next.

Stop by Thursday for the rest of this helpful article!

Writing the Right Words - Part 2

Here's part 2 of Barbara Ardinger's informative aricle about selecting the correct words.  Part 1 was posted on April 5, 2010.  Barbara is a master at selecting the right words so if you're in need of an editor, please check out her services.  Visit her at: BarbaraArdinger.com

Writing the Right Words - Part 2

The French have a phrase for what I’m talking about: le mot juste. The right, perfect, appropriate word. No matter what I’m writing—even this blog—I’m looking for the right words. Occasionally I turn to the thesaurus, but using the thesaurus can lead to other detours on the road to writing the right words, especially for inexperienced authors. We get too many choices! My guess is that it’s the thesaurus that leads my authors down a wordy primrose path. It gets them into trouble. It’s gotten me into trouble, too. When I was in high school, I was the only member of the creative writing club to have a new story every week. One story—now remember, I was a 15-year-old girl living in suburban St. Louis, Missouri—was about a woman in Alaska who was being stalked. She narrated the story. She did a lot of thinking. I dove right into Roget: “think, reflect, cogitate, deliberate, contemplate, meditate, ponder, muse, ruminate, speculate” … well, you get the idea. I used nearly every synonym. Then I came to “opine.” All these years later, I can still hear a friend’s voice: “Opine???” As I know now, ordinary people seldom opine. Judges, maybe; politicians, perhaps; philosophers, indubitably. So nowadays I tell, beg, order, and plead with my authors to stay out of the thesaurus. The synonyms, I tell them, are never exact. There are always shades of meaning. That’s exactly why English has such a big vocabulary.

When I was writing a book review (The Throne in the Heart of the Sea) for Feathered Quill a couple days ago, I wanted to characterize the way the prophet Elijah spoke to the people. First I used “preached.” Not what I wanted. He did more than preach. I’ve always thought Elijah was a nasty old man, so I tried “harassed.” Still not right. It seemed too active, as if he were chasing them while he was yelling at them. I broke down and opened my thesaurus. “Harangued.” Le mot juste.

As we endeavor to write the right words, we also need to keep learning new words. One way to do this is by reading good writing, both fiction and nonfiction, by authors recognized as literate and skillful. Watch the ways they put words together. Look at how their sentences are constructed. Do they slavishly follow the rules of grammar and usage we learned in our eighth-grade English class? Do they ever break the rules? For what purpose? In what contexts? What’s the effect? Finally, there’s a perfectly splendid web site called A.Word.A.Day that we can subscribe to and receive a new word via email every day. Subscription is free. www.wordsmith.org   Sign up and learn new words and read the thought for the day. That’s a good way to get more right words and become a smarter writer.

Writing the Right Words - Part 1

By: Barbara Ardinger (please see Barbara's bio at end of post)







As we know, English has the largest vocabulary of any language on the planet. Some English words are homophones, words that are pronounced alike but spelled differently. (The most famous example of homophones is “to,” “two,” and “too.”) If English were my second language, I might have used a homophone—“rite”—in my title. Lemme think about that…. “Rite words” might be words used in a ritual. But that’s not what I’m riting—ahem, writing—about. And I do not write in “texting,” where the point seems to be to shorten and misspell wherever possible. U no wht I mean abt rite wrds? (Did I do that right?)

My editing skills have helped some very intelligent people just coming to the English language. An Israeli author, for example, wrote “infect.” The first time I saw this, it didn’t make sense. The context has nothing to do with infection. I just sat here and shook my head until I finally figured it out. She meant “in fact.” A Brazilian author referred to the goddess Nikki. After reading a couple more paragraphs, I understood that she meant Nike. A very wise Mexican author wrote, “That indelible moment reinforced my belief in the effectiveness and plausibility of enjoying a dichotomy transcendence of completely diverse fundamental human attitudes.” That was a sentence I had to completely rewrite. He and I worked together to make his biography of Benito Juarez readable (and I learned a lot about the history of Mexico). It was even more fun when I was doing technical editing for a scientist born in Azerbaijan who wrote in Russian and used computer software to translate his articles on topics in physics. The scientist and I became friends while we were working together, and he patiently answered my every request for clarification.

But even if we were born in the U.S.A. and English is our first language, we sometimes miss the right words. Here are a few examples from books I’ve actually edited. “Kevin walks in Grandma’s direction. She stands in the umbra shaking nervously.” “I felt like I had been found guilty of a crime punishable by no cure. So just like the penile system, I locked myself away from society.” “Being disabled in a fast paced society seemed like trying to rock climb in the dessert.” “Then came a fast and bestial curve.” “The sound of the lock turning made a squeaky high-pitched noise, almost like a scream. The lock sang out once more and finally clicked. The hinges crooned a hideous caterwaul until the door slowly opened.” Sometimes an editor needs to have a functioning imagination.

Want more?!  Barbara has some great suggestions and a helpful link for would-be writers in part 2 of Writing the Right Words.  For the rest of this very interesting article, please stop by tomorrow! 

Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. (http://www.barbaraardinger.com/), is a published author and freelance editor. To date, she has edited more than 200 books, most of them for authors going to small, vanity, or on-demand presses. The 200 projects are both fiction and nonfiction and also include screenplays, children's books, academic discourse (textbooks and doctoral and master's theses), web site text, and some poetry. Fiction edited includes romance, action-adventure, science fiction, western, mystery, historical, speculative, and horror novels. Nonfiction edited includes philosophy (mostly mainstream metaphysics and New Age), Calvinist theology, holistic health, science and technology, political tracts, business topics, history, and memoirs and biography. The authors live around the U.S. and around the world, and for many of them, English is their second language. Barbara has also taught university classes in writing and public speaking and has worked as a technical editor (four different industries).

Finding a Good Editor

By: Barbara Ardinger  (please see Barbara's bio at end of article)


A friend and I were talking about books a few days ago. With me, that’s not unusual: I’m always surrounded by books. When I’m not editing potential books, I’m reading novels. My friend and I write book reviews for both print and electronic media, and what came up in our recent conversation was the fact that we’re seeing more and more books published by print-on-demand and vanity presses. What we’re seeing in these books are lousy production values. I told her I had recently declined reviewing a book that the author had obviously just pulled out of her printer and taken (I guess) to Kinko’s. It was double-spaced and lacked even a single page number. And it was filled with typos and usage errors. “I’m seeing a lot of books I think are really unfinished,” I said. “Authors who use ‘it’s’ for the possessive. Whose subjects and verbs don’t agree. Who can’t punctuate dialogue correctly.” “For sure,” said my friend. “And semicolons where there should be commas. Unintentional sentence fragments. Colons in the middle of a sentence.” We both chuckled. “Why don’t more authors read The Elements of Style?” I asked. Her reply: “People who can type seem to think that’s all it takes to write a book. Sometimes they don’t even know they need help.”

We were not, alas, just complaining to be complaining. We’re both seeing diminished editing. So let me state what I know to be true. Inexperienced authors seem not to know what good editing is. But it’s not always their fault. Some traditional publishers, who are interested only in making money, have zero interest in good writing. And I’d swear they’re hiring sophomores as editors. When they make changes that introduce errors into a book—this has happened to me and many of my friends—such editors are not helping the author Some of the on-demand presses and very small presses do offer editing services, but they’re almost always both expensive and insufficient. I’ve done editing for print-on-demand presses, so I know they often hire people they call “evaluators” (who have responded to those “earn big money at home” Internet ads) to edit manuscripts. The publisher gives the evaluator a handy checklist and instructions to “follow the rules.” That’s what they call editing.

So what’s an inexperienced author to do? Here are a few things you need to know about finding a good editor:

1. Don’t ask your husband or your best friend to edit your book. They love you. They’ve probably been supporting you in the hard work of writing a book. They don’t want to break your heart by changing or criticizing your work. What you need is fresh eyes. You need an editor who will spot errors you don’t even see anymore, either because it’s a fine point of grammar or usage you don’t know about or you’ve seen it so often you don’t even see it as an error.

2. Don’t try to save money by hiring the cheapest editor. When you pay cheap, that’s what you get. If you’re going for cheap, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get an expert. A college drop-out or an English major who took a lot of literature classes but avoided all the advanced grammar classes won’t be able to help you very much. Someone who studied grammar but knows nothing about anything else, like history or psychology, may not be very helpful, either.

3. Find a good editor before you go to a literary agent or publisher. A good editor who will help you not only with your manuscript but also with the emails you send to literary agents or publishers can be worth her weight in gold. Everything you write needs to be clear. Without typos. Without common usage errors. You’re judged by your emails before the agent or publisher even looks at your book. The money you pay your editor is an investment in yourself.

4. Keep in mind that your reader doesn’t live in your head with you. You need an editor who can help you “translate” your rough draft into something both full-bodied and readable. The rough draft is a mind-dump: you just get everything on paper (or on the screen), but then it requires good editing so other people can understand what you intended to say. When I’m editing, I’m forever writing notes to my authors. “As written, this says so-and-so. Is that what you really mean? Can you please clarify?”

My friend and I firmly believe that anyone has the right to write a book. I once edited a book written by a young man who was in jail for robbing banks to support his drug habit. I’ve edited books for people whose opinions I don’t even begin to share. But they have the right to write. And it’s my job to help them write better. My published authors consistently tell me that they’re glad they didn’t go with cheap or inexperienced editors. And that’s what warms the cockles of an editor’s heart.


Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. (http://www.barbaraardinger.com/), is a published author and freelance editor. To date, she has edited more than 200 books, most of them for authors going to small, vanity, or on-demand presses. The 200 projects are both fiction and nonfiction and also include screenplays, children's books, academic discourse (textbooks and doctoral and master's theses), web site text, and some poetry. Fiction edited includes romance, action-adventure, science fiction, western, mystery, historical, speculative, and horror novels. Nonfiction edited includes philosophy (mostly mainstream metaphysics and New Age), Calvinist theology, holistic health, science and technology, political tracts, business topics, history, and memoirs and biography. The authors live around the U.S. and around the world, and for many of them, English is their second language. Barbara has also taught university classes in writing and public speaking and has worked as a technical editor (four different industries).


Barbara lives in Southern California with her two rescued Maine coon cats, Heisenberg and Schroedinger. When she can get away from the computer, she goes to the theater as often as possible—she loves musical theater and movies in which people sing and dance. She is also an active CERT (Community Emergency Rescue Team) volunteer and a member (and occasional secretary pro-tem) of a neighborhood organization that focuses on code enforcement and safety for citizens. She has been an AIDS emotional support volunteer and a literacy volunteer. She is an active member of the neopagan community and is well known for the rituals she creates and leads.

Editor's Tip - And Now for Something Completely Different

Here's another great article by Barbara Ardinger, freelance editor. Barbara is an experienced editor who has worked with many authors. If you have questions about your book and/or need an editor, contact Barbara at bawriting@earthlink.net. You can also visit her website at BarbaraArdinger.com





… and a dead parrot to the first reader who identifies this phrase. Of course! It’s from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was absurdist television at its best. I liked Monty Python a lot, and when I saw Spamalot last year, I’m pretty sure I got most of the jokes. I also believe that John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman are geniuses, not only for their Python work but for their later work, too. Chapman, alas, is dead; not much later work. But Idle played Koko in my favorite version of The Mikado.


But why, you ask, “something complete different”? Here’s why. This month I’ve been editing two enormously abstruse works written by women neither of whose first language is English. I needed a break. One project is a Ph.D. thesis written by a Greek woman living in the north of England, the other, a New Age book by a woman who lived for awhile in Los Angeles but is currently back home in Austria. With both of these projects, I’ll be reading along and all of a sudden I come to a sentence that is composed of English words all in a row, but it’s just not English. Whoa—read it again. And again. Take it a phrase or a word at a time. Find the subject and the verb and see if they agree. See if the modifiers modify the words they’re supposed to modify. Decode the “technical” nomenclature. Figure out what’s going on in the sentence. Make a stab at rewriting it. Write a note to the author explaining what the sentence means as written. Is that what she intended? Ask for clarification. Take another best guess at meaning. Read it again to see if it makes sense yet. I’m not complaining. I love my work, but, yeah, I needed a break.


So—and now I’m getting to the point—I wrote a play. It’s only sixteen pages long and it’s so full of nonsense one might think I got bitten (swallowed?) by a Python. It’s an anodyne to my highly serious work. I wrote the play for a group with whom I’ve been celebrating the solstices, equinoxes, and other festivals of the wheel of the year for a decade. They asked me to design the spring equinox ritual. So I did: it’s a ritual inside a play. I’ve written this kind of play before, most recently for the fiftieth birthday of a good friend. I fill these silly little plays with private jokes and puns and (because I was an English major and love musical theater, too) copious allusions to literature and musicals. Then I print up enough copies for everyone and ask for volunteers for the speaking (or singing) parts, and we all read it together. Totally unrehearsed. It becomes awfully Pythonesque, doncha know.


My play about the spring equinox features retired Latin gods, including Saturn (king of the golden age), Mars (originally an agricultural god), and Ceres (the grain goddess). (The word “Latin” comes from the area in Italy once called Latium.) The spring equinox is partly about the return of plant life as mythologized by the return of Ceres (aka Demeter) and her daughter Proserpina (aka Persephone) to our world, so when Ceres and Prossie come on stage, Ceres is carrying boxes of breakfast cereals (Cheerios and Froot Loops). We also know that a major mythological figure associated with the spring equinox and its signal holiday, Easter, is the Easter Bunny. In my play, that’s Harvey, the six foot-seven inch pooka from the famous 1951 movie written by Mary Chase and starring James Stewart and Josephine Hull. Well, actually, there’s a small forest god named Cocky who is transmogrified into Harvey. As Harvey, he recites a couple of Shakespearean verses about springtime and the sun.


Also in the play are Dorothy (yes, that one) and Elphaba, the green girl from Wicked. Get it? Green? Vegetation? Somehow Dorothy and Elphaba have become friends. Dorothy is trying to buy a replacement balloon:


“Hey!” she calls out, “can I please have another balloon? You know, like, a bigger one? The first one, like, got away, and … and it, like, it took that dumb old man with it, too. I don’t know where he went. Some other geographical location, I guess. And, like, these shoes are too damn tight, and they’re really, you know, like majorly ugly. I hate sparkles. They reflect your underpants and, like, boys can see…. And I, like, really do not, like, want to totally walk everywhere I’m going. I keep tripping over those damn yellow bricks. You know?”


To which Cocky exclaims, “Dudette! You’re not in Kansas anymore!” and the Disneyesque chorus of exceedingly cute forest animals sings, “Somewhe-e-e-e-e-r-r-r-re over the rainbow, good girls fly….”


"And, you know, all those nice friendly flying monkeys?” Dorothy goes on. “They, like, talk so much, Elphie and I, we like totally can’t get a word in edgewise. And those three guys I was traveling with? They’ve, like, turned into, you know, politicians and they’re, like, totally giving speeches and making gestures all the time.” A minute later, she tells Elphaba that if they can get the broom started, “We’ll, like, find a nice castle to live in and we’ll totally live happily ever after. After all, There’s No Place Like, you know, like, totally Like Home!”


Yes, it’s total nonsense. But, hey, I live near L.A. I’ve heard Valley Girls talk. And, like I said, I’ve been working too hard and I needed a break. And I haven’t even mentioned Jane Austen, who is also in the play because Masterpiece Theatre was broadcasting a dramatization of one of her novels the night I thought this nonsense up. My Jane is a little confused, though:


“Oh! My stars and garters! I need to finish this novel! Goddess knows when I’ll find time to write another! I’ve got to figure out how to get Mr. Darcy to propose to Emma. Get those foolish Bennett sisters away from Northanger Abbey before Varney the Vampire—or is it Wallace the Wererabbit?—well, whoever—before someone scares them to death. Get Captain Wentworth to rescue Jane Eyre from the Phantom of Mansfield Park—or do I mean that crazy man who lives under the Paris Opera—”


So … what is the take-away message of this blog? If you’re working too hard, take a break. Don’t be afraid to let your mind wander. Get bitten by Pythons and write some nonsense. You’ll come back to your real (presumably serious) writing refreshed. Have fun! Totally!

Editor's Tip - Try to Remember - Part 2

Here's part 2 of Barbara Ardinger's "Try to Remember" post.  (Part 1 was posted on 2/11/10)




What if it’s the middle of the night and you don’t want to sit up, turn on the light, find your glasses, find the pencil, and start writing? What if you’re going 75 mph on the freeway and really should not take your hands off the steering wheel? What if you’re typing along at 60 wpm and what’s flowing across your screen is brilliant—and suddenly someone knocks on your door? Or the phone rings and it’s someone selling carpet cleaning or asking for a donation to some political cause? If you’re focused on traffic or an important task, you can’t start writing in your notebook or typing on your electronic thingie. And it’s tacky not to answer the door or the phone.



Here’s the solution. Try to remember. More than that, learn to remember. Train your memory. Develop or practice some kind of mnemonic system that helps you remember what that 3 a.m. idea was or where the sentence ends that was interrupted when you had to get up to answer the door. This very thing just happened to me. I was a couple of paragraphs back, and a neighbor came to ask about cat food for the feral cats we feed in the parking lot. She also needed a bandage for her finger. Then we had to gossip about one of our other neighbors. Five, ten minutes later, I finally sat back down at my computer. Now, I asked myself, where was I? What on earth was I writing about? I could have just lost it and never finished this blog.


Editors learn to remember. We get lots of practice. We remember details our authors forgot. We remember the names of characters whose names change from chapter to chapter. We remember what the author said on a previous page that he has suddenly contradicted on this page. We remember useful and germane books on the topic at hand and recommend them to our author for additional research. We remember historical facts that the author has gotten wrong. Whether you’re a writer or an editor, remembering is a useful skill.


Try to remember. Learn to remember. Learn to use a system of cues and associations, learn mnemonic aids like the one medical students learn the bones of the human body, count on your fingers and assign a phrase or key word to each finger. Over the years I have developed my own system. I’ll share it with you. When you’re in that hypnagogic state before you fall asleep, tell yourself that you will remember good ideas. Say it out loud. Further, I also tell myself that if I seem to have forgotten, the idea will come back. This is a common principle in guided meditation, where you recall what the Goddess or the wizard taught you in your meditation. Still further, I tell myself that if I don’t remember, then the idea wasn’t worth remembering anyway, and I just let it go and go on to the next one that sleets into my head. When you begin your next project, remember what you’re doing and where you’re going, and you’ll be more productive.

Editor's Tip - Try to Remember

Here's another great article by Barbara Ardinger, freelance editor.  Barbara is an experienced editor who has worked with many authors. If you have questions about your book and/or need an editor, contact Barbara at bawriting@earthlink.net. You can also visit her website at BarbaraArdinger.com





Yes, this is the title of one of the songs from The Fantasticks, which ran off-Broadway for something like forty-two years. It’s a simple, lovely show. I could also, of course, refer to the beautiful song, “Memory,” from Cats for this column about remembering ideas. (If you’ve been to my web site, you know I’m gaga over musical theater.)

But using a Fantasticks song title as my title here is not meretricious decoration. It’s not just a fancy allusion. A writer needs to have or develop a good memory.


Ideas for books, articles, blogs, dissertations, school essays, and collateral literature can come from anywhere and at any time. A bit of a song lyric we hear on the radio when we’re not really paying attention but that somehow sticks in our head. A phrase we see on Facebook or in a spam we open by mistake. Disconnected words that fly by when we’re engaged in a conversation with friends (or in line with strangers) and somehow make a connection with something else in our head. An idea that slaps us upside the head when we’re standing, all soaped up, in the shower. Something brilliant that comes when we’re sound asleep and hear a voice speaking the beginning of a narrative or the best dialogue in the world. Something that blows in the car window when we’re stuck in traffic and zoned out.


Back in the late ’80s, I had a friend who worked in PR and carried a tiny cassette player everywhere she went. When one of these ideas arrived, she spoke it into her cassette player. Today you can just type stuff into your BlackBerry or whatever other electronic gizmo you carry around. I’ve also known people who are so nerdy (moi?) that they carry little notebooks and pencils everywhere they go. They even have little notebooks and pencils on the bedside table and the coffee table.


Whatever that idea is, and however it comes, you need to capture it and write it down, either in the little notebook or on your handy electronic thingie. Capture it before it flies away and lands in someone else’s head. You don’t want to be reading a book or an article or a blog and say, “Hey! I thought of that first!” But you didn’t remember it until you read it above someone else’s bionote.

STAY TUNED - PART 2 OF BARBARA'S ARTICLE WILL BE POSTED TOMORROW

Editor's Tips - Helping Inexperienced Authors

We're excited to welcome back Barbara Ardinger, freelance editor, to the Feathered Quill blog family. Barbara is an experienced editor who has worked with many authors. If you have questions about your book and/or need an editor, contact Barbara at bawriting@earthlink.net.  You can also visit her website at BarbaraArdinger.com

 
Helping Inexperienced Authors
Now that I’m out from under web site construction and social media (I feel like I’ve been building a new Great Pyramid), I can get back to talking about things I love best in the world. One of these is helping inexperienced authors create the best books they can write.

I’ve just begun working with a woman who’s writing on New Thought topics, including bringing our lives into proper balance. It’s going to be an interesting, philosophical book, but we’re just getting started. Most of the time, this author lives in Los Angeles (less than an hour north of where I live), but right now she’s at home in Austria. Thank Goddess for cell phones. We’ve had two long conversations, voice to voice instead of mere e-mail, in one week. She’s having trouble getting started.

“Don’t let that worry you,” I told her. “You’re doing exactly the right thing.” What has she done? A mind dump. She just poured all her thoughts into her computer. I have two chapters right now, though I’ve only opened the first one. It’s 48 pages long. Her writing is so philosophical and dense that I’ve divided it into four parts for ease of editing. That’s not a problem? you ask. No, I repeat. She’s doing the right thing. She wrote a terrific rough draft, even though her English is not always idiomatic American English (easy to fix), her paragraphs are sometimes nearly a whole page long (less easy to fix, but fixable), and sometimes she uses New Age jargon when she could be writing in a fresher style.

She’s doing exactly the right thing. She thought about what she wanted to write. She organized her thoughts into chapters. She mostly organized the chapters by topic. Then she started writing. She wrote a lot.  

“That,” I told her (several times), “is precisely how you write a book.” The steps in writing a book look simple: (1) Prewriting. This is the planning stage, where you organize your thoughts, gather your resources, find books or web sites you want to cite, and figure out how your word processing program works. (2) Writing. This is putting everything “on paper,” well, actually into your computer. Be sure to save often! (3) And rewriting. Over and over and over. Moving ideas, reorganizing paragraphs, deleting, moving sentences, doing more research, and writing some more, deleting some more. Finding an editor like me to help do all this work.

This is what surprises most new authors. Just because you’ve written your first draft, you have not written a book. You’ve started a book. The only famous author that I know of who said he wrote only one draft and I believe him is Isaac Asimov. Everyone else writes multiple drafts.

That’s what I told my new author. She’s written a terrific rough draft. Now we will be working together to turn that terrific rough draft in to a book that people will read and enjoy. It’s a lot of work, but the end is worth the journey.

Where on Earth

… have you been?” one of my friends asked me last week. “I haven’t seen you since before Halloween. What on earth have you been doing?”

            “I’ve been right here,” I told her. “I may have been a technological nincompoop until now, but that’s changing. I’ve been learning to do new things on my computer. I’m toddling into the 21^st century.”

            Yes, I’ve been sitting right here. Learning, as John Dewey said, by doing. In September, I decided it was time to update my web site, which was originally created a dozen years ago to publicize my books. Every time I had a new book published, either my friend Alexis Masters (www.designbyalexis.com) or my daughter-in-law would update it for me. I didn’t have a clue about how that was done. But when Alexis and I spoke on the phone early in October, she said, “You’re going to learn to work with the content management system yourself now. It’s time for you to stop being so helpless.”

            And so the “class” began. First I created a Word table, into the boxes of which I wrote my ideas for new pages. Because I earn my living as a book editor, I changed the focus of my web site from my books to my editing work. The headline under my name now says Let Me Be Your Editor. After Alexis walked me through picking a color scheme, we got to work on the content management system (CMS). This is my “admin page,” which she titled The BAWriting Room (Remember to Breathe). We deleted most of the pages on the old site and I wrote new everythings, including pagettes on Maine coon cats, Michael Ball (I’m a member of his fan club), musical theater and Shakespeare, my trip to England, and my son Charles, who is also a writer. There are pulldown menus along the top of my home page, and these pagettes fall under About Me. I also wrote about how I work (“My Wordy Life”), set forth some opinions concerning how publishers treat writers, and selected a dozen books I’ve edited over the years to serve as examples of my work. But I didn’t forget my own writing—we also set up pages for excerpts from my books, some of my shorter works (including a prize-winning magazine column I wrote when my gay brother reappeared in my life after 23 years of silence), some of my poems, and a links page.

            What did I learn to do? How to save all the new text I wrote as plain text files. How to copy and paste these files into the admin pages. How to save and refresh and edit the admin pages and save again. How to size and post photos to the pages. Alexis did the hard part, though; she made a nifty table for the thumbnails of the covers of the dozen sample books I’ve edited. How to add links, both internal and external. Let me brag a bit. Alexis said I learned better and faster than her other clients. Take a look at my new site: www.barbaraardinger.com. Tell me what you think.

            That was October and part of November. When I was very young, I used to listen to the Horace Heidt Orchestra on the radio in my grandparents’ living room. Last year, Horace Heidt Jr. decided to write a memoir about his father, and I had the pleasure of editing it. The memoir is about 400 pages long and filled with wonderful photos. Here’s the tricky part—I had to edit not a Word document but the typeset pdf files. But you can’t edit a pdf file. I got to learn how it’s really done. You download and save it, then you start reading. The writing, while interesting, wasn’t good, so every time I saw something that needed to be rewritten, I had to highlight the words or punctuation and add a yellow sticky note. Adobe gives you a nice yellow pointer, which you move to the beginning of the highlight, and a yellow brick road to the attached sticky note. You type the corrections on the sticky note. Some pages had so many sticky notes I had to nest them. The typesetter’s a friend of mine, so I also wrote notes to her about global changes and hyphenation. Heidt had a radio show in the 1930s called Pot o’ Gold. This is also the title of his 1941 movie. But what he’d written was “Pot O Gold.” We had to change it every single time, plus put all the song titles in quotation marks and all the titles of movies and TV shows in italics. Yeah. Lots and lots and lots of sticky notes. My friend the typesetter trudged through them like she was crossing a swamp. I’ll be eager to see the book when it’s published.

            In mid-December I was persuaded that social networking might help people find a good editor—me. So my son and a friend led me through the thickets of Facebook. I’m friending and being friended—and almost immediately I posted a note saying that “friend” is a noun and we should not verbize nouns. (Is the Facebook Team paying attention?) (No.) Now I’m looking at Plaxo and Twitter. I have not yet clucked or chirped or tweeted. I’m building up to it.

            Finally, earlier this week, my Internet service provider (I won’t name it, but you can get a clue from my email address) fu—failed to connect. Repeatedly. I get all my editing work via email. I had to be on line every morning and several times during the day. Here was Another Useful Learning Experience. A helpful neighbor walked me through a different way to connect and we put a new shortcut on my desktop. One of these days, though, I’ll have to get into a “live chat” with one of the multi-talented minions of my ISP and get it fixed.

            My plan is to go back to blogging for you about writing. We’ll begin with getting organized to write a book. Next time. Happy New Year.


Feathered Quill is excited to welcome Barbara back after a brief hiatus.  Stay tuned for lots of great info. to help you with your book.  We hope you enjoy her column.  Learn more about Barbara at: Barbara Ardinger.com.

Editor's Tip

In case you've been wondering what happened to our weekly Editor's Tip column, Barbara Ardinger had to take a brief "vacation" to concentrate on a book she's editing and also to re-build her website.  She'll be back soon.  Looking forward to reading more great tips, Barbara!

Tales from the Editor's Desk - Use the right words

Sometimes we forget we’re writing to read people who will be reading our books. We start writing writing. We dig into the thesaurus for synonyms. We stick in big words because they seem impressive.

Back when I was in high school—I used to tell my students that Shakespeare was still writing when I was in college (but some of them started believing me)—I belonged to the creative writing club. I was the only member who had a new story or essay for every single meeting. One of my sophomoric inspirations was to write a story about a woman living up in, say, Alaska who was all alone in her house. And there were prowlers outside. Trying to get in. They tell us to write what we know. I was a St. Louis girl; what did I know from women alone in houses in Alaska? Well, I had a good imagination, so I went for it. Most of the story was interior monologue, so I also went for the thesaurus. The woman narrating the story wasn’t speaking aloud; she was thinking, reflecting, cogitating, contemplating, pondering, puzzling over, musing, ruminating … well, you get it.

And to this day, I can still hear the voice of one of my friends as I came to the end of the story. “OPINE??? What does opine mean?”

That was a lesson I’ve never forgotten. As far as I can tell—and what I tell the authors whose books I’m editing—only judges opine. We ordinary folks can have and give opinions, but we don’t opine. Stay away from big words, I tell my authors. They’ll tip whatever you’re writing right over into unintended humor.

This could have happened to one of my authors, a young woman I’m very fond of. She’s writing a series of novels that are partly set in an archaeological dig in Turkey. Early in her first novel, the characters come upon a house built of troglodyte.

I nearly fell off my chair. As I explained to my author, a troglodyte is a prehistoric cave dweller. The clichéd cave man. When I looked it up, I learned that the word comes from Trōglodutai, which is the name of an Ethiopian people once considered to be very primitive. My author obviously thought the word was the name of a kind of rock—maybe like dolomite or igneous or gneiss. We find words that sound good, but we somehow neglect to look them up. So we get a house built of troglodyte.

I fixed it for her, of course, by finding out what kind of rock was common in Turkey. (No, I don’t remember anymore.) Then I went on to edit the rest of her novel, which she has submitted to literary agents and publishers. I wish her luck.

And I’m glad that once upon a time I used “opine” in a story and learned that lesson for myself. It’s lessons like this I can pass along to the authors whose books I edit: If you’re new to writing, be careful with vocabulary. Don’t use big, unfamiliar words until after you’ve looked them up and know what they mean.

To learn more about the editing services Dr. Barbara Ardinger offers, please visit her web site at www.barbaraardinger.com.

Tales from the Editor's Desk - Use Words Correctly

This should be a no-brainer, but as I edit I find so many smart, well-educated people using words incorrectly, I begin to wonder what’s going on.

Then I turn on the TV. I listen to the Eyewitless News anchors who can’t pronounce the words they’re given to read (“tempachure,” says the weather guy, “sheriff’s depity,” says the anchor). I listen to the people being interviewed saying that an actor is “awesome.” I listen to the commercials. We’ve all seen this one: “I gave [the insurance company] a call,” the actor says, “and I literally fell out of my chair.” Literally? The quote was so low she fainted? It was so high she started laughing so hard she fell off her chair? Here’s another example, which I came to in a textbook I once edited. The author, a professor of psychology, wrote that in class one night he was “literally shooting questions at his students.” I couldn’t help but inquire if the classroom was filled with blood and body parts.

The word “literal” comes from Middle English literal, “of letters,” via Old French from the Latin, littera, “letter.” “Literally” (the adverb form) means verbatim, in a word-for-word manner, as when a scholar does a word-for-word translation of a passage from, say, Russian to English. It also means in a strict sense, concerned with facts, devoid of embellishment, exaggeration, or metaphor. A literal account of an event is unexaggerated, undecorated. When we say, “Don’t take what he says literally,” we mean don’t believe every word he utters, don’t take him seriously. “Literal” is of course related to “literature,” “literary,” and “literate.”

And literate is how we do not sound if we use “literally” metaphorically or for emphasis or as an intensive. One of my other favorite examples is “He was laughing so hard his sides literally burst.” Eeeuww! Did they rush him to the ER? Are you feeling tempted to use “literally”? Resist the temptation.

Perhaps I am, alas, fighting a losing battle. Yes, our language is changing. Yes, it’s useful to keep up with the times. But, yes, it’s also important to respect our language and use the words in it correctly and precisely. Especially when we want the words we write to be understood and taken seriously.

To learn more about the editing services Dr. Barbara Ardinger offers, please visit her web site at www.barbaraardinger.com.

Meet Editor Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger is writing a weekly column for the Feathered Quill Book Reviews blog. We thought you'd like to meet her... and be sure to check out her column here every Wednesday!

Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. (www.barbaraardinger.com), is a published author and freelance editor. To date, she has edited more than 200 books, most of them for authors going to small, vanity, or on-demand presses. The 200 projects are both fiction and nonfiction and also include screenplays, children's books, academic discourse (textbooks and doctoral and master's theses), web site text, and some poetry. Fiction edited includes romance, action-adventure, science fiction, western, mystery, historical, speculative, and horror novels. Nonfiction edited includes philosophy (mostly mainstream metaphysics and New Age), Calvinist theology, holistic health, science and technology, political tracts, business topics, history, and memoirs and biography. The authors live around the U.S. and around the world, and for many of them, English is their second language. Barbara has also taught university classes in writing and public speaking and has worked as a technical editor (four different industries).

Barbara lives in Southern California with her two rescued Maine coon cats, Heisenberg and Schroedinger. When she can get away from the computer, she goes to the theater as often as possible—she loves musical theater and movies in which people sing and dance. She is also an active CERT (Community Emergency Rescue Team) volunteer and a member (and occasional secretary pro-tem) of a neighborhood organization that focuses on code enforcement and safety for citizens. She has been an AIDS emotional support volunteer and a literacy volunteer. She is an active member of the neopagan community and is well known for the rituals she creates and leads.

Tales from the Editor's Desk - Query Letters, part 2

From the Desk of Barbara Ardinger

Let’s revisit that awful query again.

ive written three fiction novels. … i am looking for a literality agent, as i’m in this for the long hall.

Not only do we need to use the spell checker and not write in text-speak, but we also need to use the right words. Words are a writer’s most basic tools. To use a cliché, just as a cook starts with a good sharp knife, just as an artist starts with conte crayons, just as a mechanic starts with a wrench that’s the right size for the job, so do we start with words. We are required to use them correctly. We can spend our lives learning to do so.

As far as I know, all novels are fiction. Fiction is something that is invented, rather than something that actually occurred. The word “fiction” comes from the Latin fictiō, “a making or fashioning,” via Old French and the Middle English ficcioun, which means “invention.” When we write a novel, we’re making it up. Some novels are, of course, very close to nonfiction (Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood comes to mind, as do the novels of Dominick Dunne), but when this guy uses the words “fiction novel” in his email to a literary agent or acquisitions editor, it shows that he probably doesn’t know what he wrote. A query should not be a ficcioun.

Next, when this guy writes that he’s looking for a “literality” agent, he’s not just misspelling the word. My guess is that he has faulty hearing and maybe conflated “literary” and “literal.” Or maybe he’s a sloppy thinker, or he’s too lazy to look in the dictionary to double-check a word he thinks he knows. This reminds me of an ad I once saw in a college newspaper: “Looking for a doctrinal hood.” If we want to be taken seriously, we need to use the right words. I don’t know what a doctrinal hood looks like. I can’t help but wonder what reality a literality agent lives in. And if said agent could sell a book in the current publishing marketplace. And, finally, yes, there are long halls, often found in dormitories, hotels, and hospitals. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what the writer of this query intended to say.

“I’ve written three novels.” I am looking for a literary agent.” “I’m in this for the long haul.” If you want the agent or acquisitions editor to whom you want to sell your novel or nonfiction book to pay attention (and not just laugh at you), every word in your query must be used and spelled correctly. Creative people invent words, of course, and the meanings of words change, but in a query letter, it’s useful to be as correct as possible.

To learn more about the services Barbara Ardinger offers, please visit her website at: Barbara Ardinger.com

Tales from the Editor's Desk - Query Letters

You’re Your Own Book Cover - From the Desk of Barbara Ardinger

Welcome to my blog column. As a published author (seven books) and experienced freelance editor (more than two hundred books), I’ve worked with authors who haven’t had an English class since, say, sixth grade but have good ideas and feel driven to write a book. Sound familiar? As we go through the year together, I’ll be giving you tips that will help you write better.

Let’s assume for now that you’ve got what you think is a book and someone tells you to find a literary agent or a publisher. This is when you write a query letter. Nowadays, that’s usually an email. I also receive numerous queries from authors like you. What does your query tell a literary agent, an acquisitions editor, or a freelance editor about you? If your query looks like the one below (which my agent received), it means you can’t spell and probably can’t think clearly, either. This does not make a good first impression!

Here’s the query:

Hello ther,
My name is [redacted ] and i liv in [redacted]. Im 25, almost 26, and ive written three fiction novels. One sci-fi and the other, what ive been told is, “horror fantasy.” i am looking for a literality agent, as i’m in this for the long hall. i don’t want to write just one fiction novel, i want to write as many as i can in my life time. This is my passion, this is what i live for. this is what i am.

Tips: Always be sure to spell check everything you write. Don’t write in “text-speak.” If you need help to write a good query, get help.