I’m guest blogging on the Bettyverse today, Mes Amis! Come visit–the Bettyverse is always a pleasure! www.bettyverse.com

I am writer. My friend, Lani Diane Rich says I should say “I am a great writer!” So I will say it, “I am a great writer!” I’m anxiously waiting for my agent to call me and tell me that an editor agrees with us. That kind of validation would be truly wondrous. But being a writer makes me hyper-aware of everything I write, from blog posts to queries for my authors as I edit,  from chats with my kids to comments on  Facebook, from emails to a damn grocery list. Seriously! I’ve been known to toss a grocery list that felt disorganized or untidy and begin again. Am I…

…we do it all the time here. Husband, Son, DIL, and I constantly quote favorite lines from movies to one another. We’ve been known to have entire conversations using someone else’s words. And it doesn’t matter if the lines come from different movies—we can make it happen and the results are always pretty damn funny. So imagine my delight when I checked out author Jenny Cruisie’s website today www.arghink.com and found that her June 19 post was about “Useful Quotes.” The comments have been pouring in with tons of great quotes, including lots and lots of movie lines. It got me thinking about how much movies and TV affect my…

I’ve been writing this week and that’s a very good thing. This is only big news because I haven’t been writing for a while. I’d allowed the editing gigs and the rest of my life to take over. But for the last week, I’ve been writing and editing and rewriting and editing again…  And then it’s time to turn the finished chapters over to my critique partner. One of the most difficult things for me to do is release my work to my critique partner, Sandy www.sandy-james.com.  Not because she’s unkind. She’s terrific and always gracious even when she has to shred my work. She’s amazing—a prolific writer, who’s had…

…seriously. I’ve always taken pride in the fact that I have a good vocabulary. My mom insisted that we have extensive vocabularies and use them appropriately. I’m a whiz at spelling and usually if someone asks me what a word means, I can come up with the correct definition without running to a dictionary. I’m a bodacious Scrabble and Boggle player. My grasp of language and it’s appropriate use is  part of why I’m a terrific copyeditor (I have clients who’ll testify, honest!). So it surprises me to find that I’m using expletives more frequently as I get older. And I’m not talking about the occasional “crap” or “damn.” I’m…

I don’t know how many people remember Joe Brooks, but he died this past weekend. He was a jingle writer and the composer who wrote “You Light Up My Life,” the song that made Debby Boone famous. That was good song, but it got overplayed and overused and became almost banal before we got bored and moved on. But I remember Joe Brooks for an obscure, sappy movie he made and starred in called If Ever I See You Again. The acting was…not good, the premise rather silly and sophomoric, but in 1978, I went to see that movie six times in the few weeks it played in my town.…