A Single Layer

Many of my college friends are in Chicago this week for a wedding, which makes me a little sad that I don't live there. I have been thinking about living in Chicago for the last few days, since I stumbled across the pictures for HGTV 's upcoming giveaway. I won't win this one either, but I am trying really hard to figure out if there's a way to affordably DIY the Frank Lloyd Wright Tree of Life lightboxes from the living area. Looking at the photos of the view out the apartment's window has brought a flood of memories (though some of the memories, I realize, are actually scenes from Divergent playing in my head, others are real). Some of my most vivid memories of Chicago: When we accidentally gave a drug dealer a ride home from the Jazz Festival. When I got suckered into giving a guy $20 to help me walk my luggage to Ogilvie (a cab ride would have cost less than half as much). When I changed for the opera in a McDonald's bathroom, leaving Jenny to ca...

I have been editing a lot lately. I have read and reread at least 23 manuscripts since the beginning of the year. Let me type that out for emphasis: twenty-three! And there are about four more left for the month of August, so I'm not slowing down any time soon (except to blog a bit, I guess). I am learning a few things about editing as I go, the most important being that it is never a waste of time to read something again. There's a reason publishers object to digital books being priced lower than print books. They both cost exactly the same amount to make in terms of time and expertise - and since digital books have to be formatted in a number of different ways for various platforms, they arguable cost even more. I am finding the ideal number of read-throughs for a manuscript, after all content is ironed out and sentences are looking more or less as they ought, is three. This is why there are copyeditors, line editors, and proofreaders, and why each of them have a slightl...