I won an Award!

Like Second Skin, my science-fiction semi-dystopic military novel, won two third-place awards from The BookFest Fall 2025; Fiction Romance – Science Fiction and Fiction Sci-Fi – Military.

This was the first manuscript I ever completed to “the end”. And it sat around for over two decades waiting for me to finish editing and rewriting parts of it. My kid read it in their late teens and liked it. I knew I should publish it, but over that two-decade it sat stagnant, I figured it had “aged” and would need some updates.

A year ago, I read it from end to end, and I found that I thought the story held and really just needed some minor updating.

So I completed those edits and updates and published it through DreamPunk Press early this year.

And submitted it for The BookFest awards early this fall.

I really hadn’t expected much; I consider it part of my early writing, when I was still learning and weak in my storytelling. Maybe that was just my imposter syndrome making itself known, and now I think I should read more of my early unpublished writing (much of it is short stories, like “Guilty Conscience”, that I also revisited and was accepted by Tundra Swan Press for its anthology, The Haunted Zone.)

Time to go and revisit those writing archives.

3 Technical Writing Resources from my Personal Shelf

As a technical editor for 25 years, I’ve accumulated a lot of book resources. Here are 3 that I think would be great to have on your shelf (if you can find them).

1. Technical Editing : The Practical Guide for Editors and Writers by Judith A Tarutz

This book provides information on how to edit technical materials. It is a wonderful resource to have on your shelf, although all I can find are used editions for sale now. If you cannot find this, a resource specific to technical editing is always a good choice. Editing and writing (as I have iterated many times) are not exactly the same thing; a book that provides good direction on EDITING is golden.

THIS is the book that taught me how to edit (my English classes taught me to write and rewrite, but as I cannot seem to say enough, that is NOT editing.)

My copy has sticky tabs and sticky notes on so many pages, it’s almost at the point that they are useless. I have opened it so many times the spine is barely holding it together and I bought another (used) copy.

2. Science and Technical Writing: A Manual of Style (I have the 2nd Edition) by Philip Rubens

This is a style manual for what science and technical writing should look like; general guidance on how and what to cite, how technical and scientific terms should be handled. This guide, as the title implies, is also for WRITERS, and as such, is a good resource for an editor to understand what has molded and guided the writing.

It addresses topics such as analyzing the audience (very important for a technical or scientific topic), planning the documents itself, using global English, handling technology terms, etc.

This too has sticky tabs and sticky notes on a lot of the pages.

3. The Elements of Technical Writing by Gary Blake and Robert W. Bly

This resource is a wonderfully short book to have on your desk as a quick reference. This is my go-to for when I am actively editing a technical piece and I have a quick question I need answered. It may be hard to find a copy of this book, though, since it has a copyright date of 1993, and about 5 years ago I asked the organization I worked at to buy up all the copies it could so we had copies to go around to all the technical writers.

This book doesn’t have a lot of sticky tabs (really, it would be hard to add sticky notes, it’s only 156 pages without the appendix and index). That single appendix is titled Writing in the Systems Environment (3 pages) that addresses editing using computers, and while today that is the standard way we work, those Items to think about are still relevant.

What are your go-to resources for editing? Do you have a more up-to-date technical editing guide or resource? Please share, as writing this post has shown me just how dated mine are. 🙂

7 [personal] Rants about Editing

[I’ve been doing this for 25 years; I need to blow off a little steam!]

1. Editing is not proofreading (and vice versa).

Editing and proofreading are two different, but related tasks, and have overlapping, but not identical, skill sets. Proofreading is the last task that should be completed before a piece of writing is typeset (or formatted), and its main focus is to catch typos and grammatical errors. A proofreader should not be checking to make sure that your character arc or plot make sense. That is within the realm of the developmental edit (which is different from a copy edit or line edit). While an editor will likely catch many typos and grammatical errors, there is so much more to what they do. In addition, when the writer makes changes because of edits, there is a possibility for typos and grammatical errors to be reintroduced.

2. Editing is not formatting (and vice versa).

Formatting is the task of setting margins, font, font size, chapter headings, table of contents, page size, etc. And while many editors like to work on a piece that has some sort of formatting, it is not the editor’s responsibility to format your work. In the publishing industry, there are standards for how a manuscript needs to be formatted, first for submission to an agent or editor (Shunn’s format is standard), then again for when it is being printed as a book. In high-end formats, borders and drawings and special fonts can be used to make it unique.

3. Spellcheck does not edit; neither does grammar check.

While these two tools can help you proofread, there is even more to proofreading than that. How may times have you used grammar check and then, after publishing, you read your words to find that you used “form” instead of “from”? That is the type of word usage a proofreader will catch, since the proofreader is reading the whole sentence for correctness, not just each word.

And, in my humble opinion, spellcheck needs a better dictionary (although it’s been getting better over the years). Far too often spellcheck will want to use a hyphen to create a compound word when it should be a single word. I can remember a decade ago, as a technical writer, having a red squiggle under “antivirus” because Microsoft Word thought it needed a hyphen. This is one reason having a good grammar and punctuation guide is necessary.

4. Writers who do not understand what editing is (and don’t attempt to learn).

There are different levels and types of edits, and there are specific times in the writing of a piece where they are appropriate. A developmental edit is not the same as a copy edit, and a copy edit and line edit are are different, too. (Hint: a copy edit is appropriate for very clean copy, while a line edit is required for rough copy, as it needs much more attention to detail. However, a line edit is NOT a rewrite. The Jane Friedman Agency has a great article detailing the differences.) If a writer wants to make their writing their livelihood, they should learn about the entire process–and that includes the bits of the process that aren’t writing.

5. AI [artificial intelligence] wants my job (well, no it doesn’t, but its creators seem to).

It seems AI wants everyone’s jobs. It wants to write for you, it wants to draw for you, it wants to do your research. I don’t think AI will ever be able to do any of these tasks as well as humans (as a whole) can; but on an individual level, let’s face it, not everyone can write or edit or draw. And we shouldn’t have to.

Self-publishing has created a culture where the writer is expected to do pretty much everything, most likely because they can’t afford to pay for an artist and an editor and a proofreader and a formatter and a….you see where this is going. But AI is not the answer to this; it just shifts the money from individuals to a corporation that doesn’t value what humans create.

6. “You can’t edit your own work.”

Um…I don’t believe this.

If you know how to edit, you can edit pretty much anything (although, perhaps not to the same degrees of quality; there are differences you need to understand in the writing of different pieces, and by this I mean fiction vice nonfiction, and technical vice academic writing). Can most writers edit what they write? Maybe not. But that is because they are not editors, they are writers. Just as some writers inherently write cleaner copy than others, some writers can edit better than others. In the same vein, some editors are good writers and WANT to write (I think I am one of those), but others just don’t. Again, while the skill sets overlap, they are not identical.

7. There are too many style guides.

There are many, many style guides: Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), Associated Press (AP), American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA; which is also my favorite, probably since I used it the most in getting my English degree), Turabian (which is supposed to be an easier version of CMOS for students), Government Printing Office (GPO), and then different takes on these used by different organizations (called in-house style guides) that are usually supplements to one of the main guides. Most of their differences are in how citations are formatted, and then how certain terms might be capitalized or general dates (think 1970s vice 1970’s).

Each main style guide is used by a particular industry, which is why a technical manual may cite an article differently than a technical journal. If you’ve never noticed, that’s okay. As an editor trained to notice this stuff, it can drive me bonkers when I switch from editing one type of writing piece than another.

There are also a slew of books about writing style, from Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” that should be on everyone’s desk, to “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” by Lynn Truss. These are general guides for punctuation and grammar, and should be used in conjunction with a style guide.

Did I miss a rant that you have about editing? Please share. I will commiserate with you (and add it to my list of stuff to vent about.)

3 Quick Grammar Tips

English grammar can be tricky. Here are three little tips to help make your writing clearer.

1. The possessive “s.”

The possessive “s” is pretty straightforward, you add an ‘s to the end of a word signifying ownership (you can do this for words ending in “s” now, too).

Unless that word is a pronoun. If you are saying that an item or quality belongs to “it” you uses “its,” because “it’s” is the contraction of “it is”. I think this is what makes the possessive so confusing for folks. But, if you recognize that “it” is a pronoun, then it makes sense. This is true for other pronouns, as well: me/my, us/our, he/his, she/her, and they/their. (And be careful, because in some instances you can write “he is” as “he’s”.

2. Compound adjectives (also called a unit modifier, I guess?).

This is where several adjectives are used to describe a single object. The red ball; the little red ball; the little red-striped ball.

Why is “red-striped” hyphenated? In this case, the adjective red is actually describing the stripes that are on the ball, and not the ball directly.

Here is another example: I like black-and-white sweaters, vice I like black and white sweaters.

In the first example, black and white describe a single sweater. I.e., the person likes sweaters that are black and white. To indicate this, we hyphenate to create a single adjective. In the second part of the example, the person likes black sweaters and white sweaters; these are different sweaters.

This compound adjective can be called a unit modifier (I guess) when it is a unit of measure.

For example: The three-inch stick. The five-mile stretch of road. The four-year-old toddler vice the toddler is four years old. Again, this is because the number is describing the unit (how many) vice describing the object directly.

3. Using semicolons in lists.

[ Note: Please don’t omit the Oxford comma (especially if your excuse is that the reader will understand the context.) Clear writing means you write without expecting your reader to inherently understand the context.]

So, the semicolon can be used as a “supercomma” in complex lists.

Lets look at this sentence that lists places a person has visited.

On my road trip, I visited the Alamo in Texas, the beaches in Miami, Florida, and the Marine Corps Museum and the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

Vice:

On my road trip, I visited the Alamo in Texas; the beaches in Miami, Florida; and the Marine Corps Museum and the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

This second example uses semicolons to divide the list by states, and is a little easier to read. And if you think I omitted the Oxford comma, I did not. The Marine Corps Museum and the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia are a single element in the list.

Let’s look at another example of using semicolons in a complex list in a paragraph.

Margaret needs to buy turkey, cheese, and milk at the grocery store, pick up a prescription and a birthday card at the pharmacy, drop her clothes off for dry cleaning and pressing, pick up Shirley, Helen, and Rhonda at the mall and take them to pick up their car at the garage, then go back home to start dinner, the laundry, and make the beds.

This could be made into bullet points like this:

Margaret needs to:

• buy turkey, cheese, and milk at the grocery store,

• pick up a prescription and a birthday card at the pharmacy,

• drop her clothes off for dry cleaning and pressing,

• pick up Shirley, Helen, and Rhonda at the mall and take them to pick up their car at the garage,

• then go back home to start dinner, the laundry, and make the beds.

This takes up a lot more space on the page, and if you don’t have that room – or you are including this type of list in an essay where you are not supposed to use bullets – you can make it easier to differentiate the items using a semicolon.

I.e., Margaret needs to buy turkey, cheese, and milk at the grocery store; pick up a prescription and a birthday card at the pharmacy; drop her clothes off for dry cleaning and pressing; pick up Shirley, Helen, and Rhonda at the mall and take them to pick up their car at the garage; then go back home to start dinner, the laundry, and make the beds.

Anyway, I hope these little tips help you in some way. Is there a grammar trick or tip that you like to use?

3 Important Questions for your Beta Reader

Beta readers represent your target audience. They should be regular readers of the genre you are writing. They shouldn’t be reading first drafts; they should be reading something that you have worked on and think is final, though before you get an editor. Your beta reader is helping you get that manuscript ready for edits.

But, what do you do with a beta reader besides ask what they thought? An “I liked it” or an “I didn’t like it” don’t really help you hone your story. (Been there, gotten those answers; they are frustrating to receive.)

Here are 3 questions to give your beta readers BEFORE they start reading to help make the exercise productive. Giving them before they start reading helps them pay attention to the story so they can give you an answer that is going to help you.

1. When did you decide you liked the main character?

Not just did you like them, but specifically when. They should like the character within the first few pages, ideally on page one. If they like the character, then they will care about the character, and that is what makes someone keep reading. Alternately, and especially, if the character displays a big flaw in those first pages, ask when did you connect with the character? A connection can also lead to caring.

If the answer is in the middle of the story, you need to ask why your beta reader liked them at that point, and why they didn’t like them before. These answers can help you craft an amazing main character that will make your audience want to know what happens to them next.

2. Was there a time you didn’t want to keep reading?

This can indicate a couple of things:

• the story got boring

• the story got too intense

Again, you need to follow up with why–because these are opposing issues and are fixed in very different (if not opposite) ways. A story needs ups and downs in the plot, small conflicts need to be resolved but the bigger conflict needs to intensify; a reader might need a break from the action (as might your character), or they may need something to happen to push them to keep going.

This feedback can help with pacing and making sure that there is enough plot to make the story a worthwhile read.

3. Did anything not make sense or was not explained by the end of the story?

In a standalone story, this is super important. The main plot needs to wrap up, and any loose ends should be minimal (although a secondary plot left unfinished is always a good way to bring your characters back for another round.) However, the reader needs to feel like the story they just read is complete. For example, in a romance, the couple should be together in the end, or in a mystery, the mystery needs to be solved.

Now, in a series, you need something left open. Maybe the minor or side plots wrap up, but the main plot remains unfinished (this can be seen in a lot of fantasy or science fiction series). Conversely, the main plot can wrap up, but a secondary plot gets bigger, or hints that there is more to that main plot than the characters thought. Something that I’ve seen work well in cozy mysteries is the mystery is solved, but a secondary romance plot remains unfinished. In fantasy, a small quest is completed that fills in the first stage of the larger quest.

You have to provide satisfaction to your reader. You don’t want them so chuck it away and decide it’s not worth reading.

BONUS QUESTION (Maybe you need to ask or maybe you don’t.)

4. Did anything not sit right with you?

This question is especially important when you are writing about a sensitive subject, or your story includes an act of violence (on or off the page), or it includes another controversial element (think bad stuff happening to children.) The answer to this question could indicate that a content warning is warranted (put it at the back of the book with a note at the front that anyone needing a content warning should look there) or that you may also need a sensitivity read by an appropriate sensitivity reader.

The answer to this doesn’t automatically mean it needs to be removed, just that it needs to be reworked.

And if your intent in including this element is to make the point that it should not sit right with readers, then follow up with what does that “not right” feeling make you want to do now? This will tell you if your story is successful in that regard.

Happy writing! and Happy reading!

What are some questions you like to ask your beta reader, or if you are a beta reader, what feedback do you give that helps the author the most?

3 Reasons Word Sucks for Formatting (and how I’m dealing with it)

I have been formatting documents in Word for at least 30 years, and I made it easy for myself by modifying Word’s styles to format the way I need them to. I have different sets of styles in my own Word templates.

Recently, I’ve found it frustrating to use Word and the templates I’ve developed (and I’m blaming Word).

Here are the top three issues I’ve been having using Word to format a document right now. (I just installed the latest version and am trying to navigate the “upgrades”).

1. It tries to think for me. As I mentioned, I have been doing this for over 30 years now, and I know what I’m doing in Word. I really don’t appreciate when a tool that I am supposed to be in control of does its own thing instead of doing what I’ve directed it to do. This issue started about a decade ago, and this last iteration of Word seems the worst. I understand that some folks need help but I don’t want it. Please, let it be easy for me to turn off a function when I don’t want to use it (which for me would be never). When dealing with a specific style guide or formatting instruction, it is important that I am the one in control, not the tool.
2. Upgrades mess up what I’ve already made. Every time there is a Word upgrade, it seems to mess with my templates. Unfortunately, I never know what part is going to be changed, and so I have to go through each element and check. Sometimes, a feature is turned off for one upgrade of the application, only to be turned back on in the next (I’m looking at you insert alignment tab). And often, one client’s file will work fine in my template, while another will not. While this is probably due to their use of a different version of Word, it would be nice if Microsoft could provide a comprehensive list of what is compatible (and more important for me, incompatible) between versions, especially when it comes to its inherent functions (like autonumbering and those styles I keep mentioning).
3. Word Online. I mean, in my opinion, just don’t use it. I understand why it was developed (everyone is shifting to work in “the cloud” but it has a lot of limitations. Especially when it comes to Word’s styles (which I think is one of Word’s strengths when used properly). It doesn’t recognize customized styles, so I can’t even begin to format the way I like when using it. And if I have used one of my templates, and a client opens the file in Word Online (i.e., we’re using One Drive), it changes the format. Page numbers will be blue and shaded, so will other items in the header and footer, and it is a painful process to correct these back to how the client needs them to be. Indenting won’t display properly (inciting the client to try to fix it), which only makes it worse as it would have printed properly if left alone. It should come with a warning to only use it online and without ever opening your file in a desktop version. Microsoft put out a notice that they weren’t entirely compatible, but I think users need a little bit more information. It took a lot of time and effort for me to compile a list of formatting to ignore when viewing a document in the Online Word to help make it easier for my clients moving from desktop to online and back again.

My biggest peeve about all of this is that I used the functions available in Word (I didn’t code my own macros). I thought I was following the “rules” but apparently I’m not. Or I’m just not keeping up with them.

So, what am I doing about it? I deal with it, grumbling the whole time.

The first task I perform when there is an upgrade or update to Word is make a copy of my templates and play with them in the new version. I make note of what’s “broken” and what works differently. I check the Miscrosoft website forums to see if there is a notice about any of the functions I rely on, and add that to my personal notes.

And then, once I have a good understanding of what any issues are, I update my templates (again, by making a new copy so I can always go back to an unmodified template if a modification doesn’t work as I expect or breaks something else).

I also look for how to turn off any functions I don’t like or won’t use. Sometimes, this takes me a while to figure out, so, if anyone knows how to turn off the new AI ‘I’ll write for you” function, please tell me. I really need to save my sanity for my editing.