I think I might have a word problem.
What do you mean, Patty? Do you mean you struggle to find the right words, or to communicate how you really feel?
Well, I’ll tell ya, bubbly blog buds. Really it’s quite the opposite. I can’t get enough of words. Reading, writing, reviewing books, even conversation. Talking on the air as a DJ, or on a college panel about social issues. Then there’s editing—my own work, paid editing work, or just mental editing of posts on the internet or signs on the highway. When I think of a life without words, my stomach clenches and my heart quails and the light of my soul dims just a little.
Wow, dramatic. Overwrought. Effusive. You might even say, a bit grandiloquent.
That’s OK! I own it.
I’ve been a bookworm since I started on chapter books around second grade, and when I started reading fantasy at age 11, my fate as a thrall to the written word was sealed. Worlds opened up to me, of little people with grand destinies, wizards sailing to tiny islands in cold grey seas, chasing their souls, and of punky teenage outcasts escaping banality in a town on the border of Faerie. I wanted to sail in Lookfar with Ged, run away to Bordertown, and rescue Frodo and Sam from the slopes of Mount Doom.
I serve words and words serve me… but now, I would like to start getting paid for it. I’m a freelance editor who has always had to make a living at a day job. It’s been my dream for decades to edit fiction for a living, and now, I hope to find enough authors to work with to make that dream come true. I have a beautiful vision of mutual dream-building: my authors are the architects of their stories, and I’m their construction foreman, making sure their word-materials are quality, delivered to the right spot, and assembled in order, on a solid foundation of clarity, proper grammar and punctuation, and a strong narrative structure.
Got a dream to build? Let’s start drawing up plans together. You’ve got this, and I’ve got your back.
