And, here is a link to When It’s Time to Say Good-bye, my short essay that was just published on The Memoirist. I’m so happy to share a glimpse of the classy and classic Alice Redmond (shown with her beloved Mustang) with the world, and I recommend subscribing to ’s Substack, which is chock-full of top-notch short memoir.

Now, on to the subject at hand:

I have never understood why people feel so strongly about semicolons and em dashes. Writers seem to either hate them or love them. There is no reason to get so emotional about these punctuation marks; they are simply tools to have handy, and the choice of whether to use them or not—and where to do so—is all yours.

Personally, I love to use semicolons, parentheses, and especially em dashes—maybe because they feel so dramatic! Where a pair of parentheses can sometimes make a long piece of description feel overly formal, a properly placed dash—perhaps used to set off a side-thought, like this one—instantly brings your writing down to earth and makes it accessible.

A semicolon puts a period and a comma together, creating a mark that unites, rather than separates; it is less than a “full stop,” but more than a simple pause.

A fine example of the proper use of semicolons is found in the opening sentence/paragraph of Persuasion by Jane Austen. Austen is one of my favorite authors, and not only because of her command of punctuation:

“Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.”

Periods wouldn’t work here and dashes wouldn’t either. One could put everything after the “Baronetage” within parentheses, since the description could all be considered rather “parenthetical” (I always picture a character out of a staged melodrama who speaks in asides, hand shielding their mouth) but this glorious bit of description is an example of what I term “character-revealing expository,” and, as such, it exposes a great deal about this pompous, self-involved man.

In short, I am with Adam O’Fallon Price, who, at the end of a lovely essay entitled “On Semicolons and the Rules of Writing,” wrote this summation: “I have an affection for the semi, in all its slightly outmoded glory. The orthographical literalism of having a period on top of a comma is, in itself, charming. It is the penny-farthing of punctuation—a goofy antique that still works, still conveys.” It certainly does.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

One rule I do stick to is not using semicolons (or parentheses) in dialogue, and advising my authors to eschew them there as well. Seeing a semicolon within quotes looks odd to me and instantly makes the dialogue feel formal and unbelievable. Dashes, on the other hands, are perfectly suited to dialogue, as we speak in fits and starts, a style which lends itself to that “dashing” mark.

I am speaking of course, of em dashes. En dashes are not the same thing at all, and neither are hyphens, though they both have their uses; visit thepunctuationguide to learn the difference between the two marks.

Some editing clients have resisted my liberal use of dashes, preferring to use commas or to simply shorten their sentences, but I find the dash to be inordinately useful. “The Punctuation Guide” calls the em dash “perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark,” as it can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons, “in each case to slightly different effect.” So true.

I even like the way dashes are used (rather pointedly, and decoratively) by poets, such as the great Emily Dickinson who wrote this:

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality.

The em dash can also, as the Punctuation Guide states: “be used in place of a colon when you want to emphasize the conclusion of your sentence.” One of their examples: “After months of deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous verdict—guilty.” The Guide goes on to say “The dash is less formal than the colon.” I agree. And who among us wants our writing to be labeled “formal”?

As far as how to make the dashes, most writing software—such as MSWord, and Mac Pages, which I use—have two ways to insert an em dash. You can locate the em dash on your page of symbols and copy and paste it, but it’s simpler to use two hyphens (the only way to create an em dash if you still use a typewriter, or screenwriting software). In Word or Pages, when you type two hyphens together the software creates an em dash instantly—voila! Adding yet another pair of hyphens joined to the following word sets off the preceding word or phrase within dashes—like this—and on you go.

As for parentheses, no one uses them much anymore, but they are still very helpful in when used in just the right place; I used parentheses in the previous paragraph, for example. And one might want to set off an acronym which will be repeated, like this: “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) was called in, and soon the crime scene swarmed with ATF agents.” Wasn’t that a fine sentence? I’m quite the writer, even off the cuff like that.

This line marks the point where I must begin to bring this post to a full stop (get it?). I hope you’ve enjoyed this little excursion into the world of punctuation. If you have a question about any of the above descriptions or examples, ask away! Feel free to email me directly here (just hit reply and your email will be private), or comment below if it is a general question (click the heart to go to the comments section). I read them all.

If you think this post would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below); or you can re-stack it—that really helps new readers to find us here.

If you like my posts about rewriting and editing, you may look up at the tab above that reads “An Editors Tips For Writers,” and click on the tab to see them all.

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

Back next week with more book reviews.

hasta pronto!

The authors of the three books I am reviewing today—Jim Ruland, Holly Kammier, and Richard Carrico—are all San Diegans, at least Jim was living in San Diego when I met him long ago…Funny enough, though, none of the three books they are bringing out this month are set in America’s Finest City. One is set in an Arizona college town, and the two others are mostly set in Los Angeles, though one of them has some grisly crime scenes set in the vast arid stretches of east San Diego county.

Jim Ruland’s new novel Mightier than the Sword comes out this coming Tuesday, October 27. I got an ARC from the publisher (Rare Bird) this summer and I absolutely loved it. Not just because the cast of characters are all adjunct English professors, but because the characters felt like people I know. Of course, I do know quite a few adjunct professors, including my own Professor Russel Redmond, of San Diego City College fame, so I am a fairly good judge of what feels real in that department (or in any old English Department!). And I loved the variety of the characters—not just the racially diversity, but young, old, gay, straight, law-abiding and not so much.

Cole, one of the four English professors is a failed writer. (I say failed because, at 25, Cole feels like a failure, having submitted dozens of cowboy stories and had none accepted for publication. Ah, youth.) Cole’s father was a semi-famous writer, which both helps and hurts Cole’s ambitions. The other three adjunct professors are a sad divorced dad, a down-on-her luck lesbian tattoo artist, and a guy who dabbles in dealing drugs and gambling, and is suddenly, dangerously, messing around with the absolute wrong guys. My favorite character isn’t any of these leads, but an older woman who arrives midway through, as much of a catalyst as she is mysterious.

The heist itself—did I mention that the plot involves a heist?—is pretty clever, and the banter between the characters is priceless. Think Quentin Tarantino, if he ever wrote about college English teachers. The setting in northwest Arizona is spot on, and the author’s descriptions of the area’s bars, restaurants, and tattoo parlors—as well as their denizens—made it all come to life on the page. Even the movies they talk about felt real. And speaking of movies, Jim Ruland has a book about Repo Man, “the movie, the soundtrack, the Gen X of it all” as he puts it, that will be published in June of 2027.

Holly Kammier’s new novel Oracle is a bit of a departure for her. Her previous novels have told a variety of tales, but they have all been grounded in ordinary life, even when they involved crime or domestic strife. Oracle is the story of a woman who lives a life that is as far from most of our ordinary lives as I can imagine. The book’s protagonist, Alex Campbell, is not just a psychic, she’s a famous, beautiful psychic.

Cities like Los Angeles, where Alex lives and works, are being attacked and threatened by a terrorist cell that claims to be saving the world by bringing attention to the fate of the planet; they demand massive changes or they will cause more deaths.

Unbeknownst to anyone else, Alex is in the thick of it—her visions are slowly revealing exactly who is behind these attacks, and where the next target is. With time ticking away, she needs serious help to find them. But the two men (yes, they are very handsome men, this is Hollywood, after all) she turns to, are not just suspicious of her and her motivations, but of each other. Alex also has a super fun and glamorous alter-ego who wreaks havoc on hearths and hearts. This book, which provides plenty of action and more questions than answers, will keep you up turning pages.

Last but not least, is a true story by Richard Carrico, another chronicler of San Diego history. Carrico is perhaps best known for Strangers in a Stolen Land: Indians of San Diego County from Prehistory to the New Deal, an extremely readable and important regional work. In fact, this book is just one of the titles that we at Regional Ink (if you missed hearing about the new literary non-profit I’m part of, click here) hope to raise funds to reprint and distribute, in partnership with Sunbelt Publications.

Carrico turned to true crime with Monsters On the Loose, a true story of three unsolved crimes committed in Prohibition Era San Diego. His latest, Bound To Die: The Young Victims of A Serial Killer and Rapist tells the story of a Los Angeles-based crime spree in the 1950s that was brought to a halt by the gutsy response of the girl who was supposed to be his next victim. It is a chilling story, and of course, in spite of the many decades that have gone by, the exploitation and murder of women is still all too timely.

If you have any questions about Regional Ink, or the projects we are funding, or how your company or group can get involved, or if you want to cover Regional Ink or our event in the media, please feel free to email me here (just hit reply and your email will be private), or comment below if it is a general question (click the heart to go to the comments section, or email us at info (at) regionalink (dot) org.

Right now I am traveling up in the PNW, and I’m coming to Seattle early next week!

My Seattle Book Event: Karson Brown in discussion with me at the University District Barnes & Noble on October 26th at 5pm. It’s free but you can reserve a spot here.

If you think this post would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below). Or restack it!

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

I’ll be back next week with some marketing/editing/writing tips.

Hasta pronto!

In 2000, I was hired by Sunbelt Publications to market their books and acquire new projects (eventually I was promoted to Editor-in-Chief, to do those same things and much more!). In 2005, I started teaching classes on how to get published. In 2011, I became a freelance editor and publishing consultant, while still working with Sunbelt to find potential projects. Recently, I was part of a small group that helped spread the word about Sunbelt’s struggle to raise funds to reprint their classic books.

The effort to raise money was only successful enough to reprint one book, and help with expenses with another pending reprint. People kept telling us we needed to have non-profit status, but that is nearly impossible for a for-profit business to do, after the fact. But businesses said they couldn’t donate to printing books without that NFP tax designation.

Well, one thing led to another, and that small group of San Diego friends, including Neva Sullaway, author of Baja to Bering and San Diego Seafood, Then and Now, among other titles, started talking about how to enable companies and individuals to more easily and readily donate toward printing and publishing both classic and new books.

In other words, we decided to form a non profit! It took some time, but thanks to Neva and the other Friends of Sunbelt, that all took place, and somehow I was made President of the non-profit’s board and Neva is the Secretary (we are both doing this as a labor of love, not for any salary). You can reach either of us at info (at) regionalink (dot) org.

Our first order of business will be to solicit funding from individuals, companies, and foundations, and to establish partnerships with local and regional businesses, in order to fund the reprinting of children’s books that entertain and educate young readers about the natural history and cultural heritage of the U.S. Southwest, including Southern California, of course.

So, without further ado, I introduce you to Regional Ink, a registered 501(c)(3) public charity based in La Jolla, California. On the website you can learn more about the educational titles we are currently raising funds for, including a couple of desert-themed coloring books and Life in the Slow Lane: A Desert Tortoise Tale.

In my dreams, I can see Regional Ink being and important regional resource, enabling local authors and publishers to raise funds to produce, package, and print important literary and educational works. Every big success has to start somewhere, we are starting right here and now. I hope you’ll join us. And you can start by attending the first event we have planned, held at Sunbelt’s Chula Vista book warehouse and offices on November 21st from 4-7pm. You may have planned on visiting Sunbelt’s new(ish) location for the past couple of years, and wanted to see the book warehouse, so here’s your invite. And yes, it may be chilly out so there’s homemade chili!

There, you can meet Neva Sullaway of Regional Ink, Jeniffer Thompson of the warm and welcoming group Publishers & Writers of San Diego, and of course, meet the Sunbelt crew—Lisa, Nichole and Maria. (I won’t be there as I was already booked to do in-person book and writing events in the Puget Sound region—if you’re in the Seattle area, find out about the University District B&N event on Oct 26th here—so I won’t be able to be there. Typical over-booked president behavior, right?)

If you have any questions about Regional Ink, or the projects we are funding, or how your company or group can get involved, or if you want to cover Regional Ink or our event in the media, please feel free to email me here (just hit reply and your email will be private), or comment below if it is a general question (click the heart to go to the comments section, or email us at info (at) regionalink (dot) org.

If you think this post would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below). Or restack it!

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

I have more book reviews coming up in October; it truly is an amazing season for independent publishers.

Hasta pronto!

I met on social media, and then subscribed to her here, where she writes Floating in Memory. An artist and writer and sailor who hails from the PNW, Karson’s debut book, 48 days to Barbados, is about a too-long sailing voyage across the Atlantic back in 1999 when she was 28 (the same age I was when I set off on my very first sailing voyage). It was a tough, grueling trip, and the experience helped make her who she is today. 48 days to Barbados comes out Oct 20, and you can preorder it here.

One of the things I kept thinking about while I was reading this book, is what would have happened if my very first trip had been the sort of nightmare trip that Karson and her friend experienced on that seven-week voyage to Barbados. Would I have kept sailing? Would I have even stayed married?

Over the years, I’ve heard so many stories about couples who sail down Baja, and they get to Cabo San Lucas, and then one of them flies home for good. That’s the end of the dream of cruising together. And sometimes it is even the end of the relationship.

I was so lucky. Russel was a good teacher and smart enough to plan a lot of stops in the first week—every night we would stop and anchor in a calm cove. Also I knew a little bit about food and was open to learning how to provision, so we had plenty of food (though a lot of it was rice, beans, and pasta). And I’m extremely lucky that Russel was smart enough to make sure that we had plenty of water, because water and food are 2 things that are in short supply in 48 days to Barbados.

Karson was not a newbie to sailing like me. She’d been raised on boats and was very comfortable sailing. She grew up with a single mom who raised her on a series of small boats. So she’s very comfortable and she also knows enough to be a little suspicious about the condition of the vessel, and a little bit wary of everything that’s going on preparatory to them leaving Portugal for Florida (their original destination). She many times expressed her doubts to the woman who had “hired” her (no pay just expenses) and her friend to do this yacht delivery with her.

Unfortunately, the woman does not listen and so they end up short of food and very short of water. Because the water in the tanks goes bad. And if you’ve ever smelled water, when it is a little bit off, you’ll know what I’m talking about—that horrible rotten egg smell.

If you are thinking that this book is all about the worst parts of sailing, it is—but it also includes some of the greatest parts of sailing. It’s got the incredible moments of joy, peace, and bliss, and also that nadir that can come from being so cut off and so isolated. And in young Karson’s case, to not being listened to when you are right, and she’s kicking herself some of the time for not being forceful enough. That leads her to an epiphany about not using her voice, not owning the full responsibility for herself.

To open this book is to be immersed, to get the opportunity to join this young woman crossing the Atlantic with her good friend and this other woman on this vessel that is seaworthy, but just barely….where everything seems to conspire against them, including Mother Nature. Oh, yes, there’s a hurricane, on top of everything else a hurricane is bearing down on them. So yes, 48 days to Barbados has everything you want in a sailing yarn, and a lot more.

I personally love an adventure travel memoir that has a vivid and fascinating outer journey and a compelling and relatable inner journey; a story about facing a time in one’s life where a journey or a situation becomes a crucible—a place or time that is so different, so difficult, and/or so life-altering, that it forges the person we end up becoming. Think of Cheryle Strayed’s Wild, or Kirsten Neuschafer’s All Good, K, or even my own Honeymoon at Sea. This is that kind of a journey.

48 days to Barbados shows what sailing can be like—the amazing and the awful—but it is not just a book for those who sail or who hope to one day sail, but for anyone who feels that, or wonders if, they are at a turning point in their own life. Armchair travelers who dream of changing their life—with or without a crucible journey; those people who are asking themselves “What do I really want out of life and how do I make that happen?”

Free Book Event Notice: Meet Karson and me at the University District Barnes & Noble on October 26th at 5pm. It is free to attend but you can reserve your spot right here.

If you want to hear more about the book and the voyage, and get a chance to meet the author and me, I will be talking to Karson at the University District Barnes & Noble on October 26th at 5pm. The event is free! Come and listen to the discussion, maybe ask a question or two, and get a signed copy of the book. Or catch her second event on the 29th at Eagle Harbor Book Company, on Bainbridge Island. More info below.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment on Substack), or, if you prefer to keep your message private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your reply. If you think any of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

I have more book reviews coming up in October; it truly is an amazing season for independent publishers.

Hasta pronto!

The publication was a labor of love, meaning we lost money on it. In 1999, with the next collection slated to come out in 2000, it soon became clear that, whatever was going to support us—publishing or painting—it wasn’t going to happen in Baja. So we drove Mr Bus (our 1970 VW van) up to San Diego to try and get a distributor, in order to get into real book stores. We also planned to find a gallery for Russel’s paintings. Pushing forty, I didn’t want to go back to bartending or waiting tables.

I’d met author Judy Goldstein Botello in the shadow of the Loreto cathedral one afternoon as she held forth in English and Spanish about her new book, a novel based on her life called The Other Side: Journeys in Baja California. Judy sent me to her own publisher, Sunbelt Publications, a small press and distributor in San Diego. Owners Diana and Lowell Lindsay saw the win-win that the Sea of Cortez Review could be, and we became partners. Sunbelt would distribute the two previous issues and publish the final collection in 2000. Russel did some illustrations to promote Sunbelt’s Baja books, and I brainstormed ideas with their VP Kathy Gouin. When their sole marketing person left, Diana suggested I apply for the job. I wrote up a resume that focused on marketing I’d done for small theaters and cafes and soon I had a job in publishing.

After almost three years of struggling to put out a superior product and market and promote it on our own, suddenly copies of the Sea of Cortez Review were in local bookstores like Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Waldenbooks. It was easy to sell the collection along with Sunbelt’s Baja list—they distributed thousands of books on many dozens of subjects—everyone wanted their guidebooks and memoirs.

I found ways to promote long-time Sunbelt authors like my friend Judy Botello, and was thrilled to meet Harry Crosby of The Cave Paintings of Baja California and Antigua California fame. He was generous with praise for our publications, though he made Russel and I laugh by referring to it as a “Quixotic venture.” I asked him dozens of questions and my interview with him ran in the 2000/2001 edition beside a wonderful sketch Russel did that perfectly captured Harry.

That final edition of the Sea of Cortez Review was everything we’d dreamed of—Laurel Miller’s gorgeous cover and interior design featured Russel’s line drawings and all of his Baja paintings on an inside cover. It truly was a win-win.

Soon I was working as Sunbelt’s acquisition editor, not just finding the gems in the slush pile of submissions but also trying to find opportunities to work with authors we wanted for projects we envisioned. I did both jobs for a while, but eventually we hired a marketing person and I was promoted to editor-in-chief.

What does an editor-in-chief do? Well, if they work at a small press like I did, most anything might fall into the category of my job on any given day. I created budgets, wrote profit & loss sheets, worked on grant proposals, dealt with “high maintenance authors,” and occasionally pitch-hit for a missing author, including doing an impromptu slideshow for a Baja photography book. I even edited some days.

In addition to working with the Baja aficionados—Harry W. Crosby, Judy Goldstein Botello, Graham Mackintosh, and Greg Niemann—I got to work on books about local and regional subjects. I did a Palm Springs gardening book with dry-land plant guru Maureen Gilmer, a biking book with Jerry Schad and Nelson Copp, and a dog-hikes book with Donna Lawrence and the frisky Bailey.

Then one day we got a proposal from Iris Engstrand. Iris was someone I’d heard of by then, a renowned historian who taught at USD, she was active in all sorts of groups related to local and regional history. She’d written about the Enlightenment in Spain and about science in the New World. And she had the idea to get all of her different lectures and articles together into a one-volume history of San Diego.

We of course, said yes! And I had the joy of working with her on that book and on other projects as the years went by. She introduced me to her husband, children—including my friend Kristin Moran, also a local college professor—and grandchildren.

The book, San Diego: California’s Cornerstone, came out to acclaim and continues to delight historians and laypeople alike. We called it “a sweeping history of the region from the time of its indigenous people to the 21st century” and State Librarian Kevin Starr said: “Spanning the eras of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, the history of San Diego…is intricate and colorful. No one knows its complexity and drama better than University of San Diego historian Iris Engstrand; and no one has written a better one-volume history of this important American city.” That is all still true.

Iris Engstrand passed away in September, but her books continue to sell. A new edition of California’s Cornerstone came out in 2016—yes, you can find it at Sunbelt, and yes, most of the book covers the history of the region before the 21st century.

Shop the Sunbelt warehouse (online or in person) for this and other San Diego and SoCal books, along with the Baja books I am always raving about, like The Cave Paintings of Baja California by Harry Crosby, an adventure tale that looks like a coffee-table book; and the newest Baja marine adventure, the gorgeous and informative Baja to Bering. Plus oodles of colorful children’s books. (They even carry Honeymoon at Sea!) You know, is it not too early to start thinking of buying friends and family beautiful books for holiday gift-giving. After all, it is already October.

If you missed seeing my super short essay in Narratively, they published my flash essay about my first “too good to be true” job, in 1980s NYC a couple of weeks ago.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment on Substack), or, if you prefer to keep your message private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your reply. If you think any of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

I have more book reviews coming up in October; it truly is an amazing season for independent publishers.

Hasta pronto!

Funny enough, I finally got a copy of the issue of Latitude 38 with the article I wrote about that first voyage we took to Baja’s Sea of Cortez, also called “Honeymoon at Sea,” and the magazine has been lying about in the boat since I brought it home. It took me 3 years to get an article about the journey published in any of the sailing magazines and I’m damn proud that my determination to do it finally paid off (not in terms of money, as they don’t actually pay freelance writers). I’ll drop a photo of it here, so you can see the blast from the past we’ve been enjoying viewing.

It is fascinating to contemplate the life of a book. The idea is born in someone’s head—in this case mine. It can be inspired by people saying “You really should write a book about that,” but none of that counts until one puts pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and it doesn’t really begin to warrant belief in its fate until you’ve got one or two stories or chapters that work. Other sources of nourishment to the embryonic book are friends and family who read snippets and chapters, and of course editors who publish excerpts.

At a certain point, the collection of pieces you’ve written begin to resemble a manuscript, though the book’s overall shape may still keep shifting. Soon enough, you begin to wonder what an agent or editor might think of it. You send it out. And, if you’re lucky, as I was, an actual publisher (Rebecca Eckler) falls in love with it.

In early 2023, not long after I’d signed the contract with Re:Books to publish HatS, my friend Helen Landalf warned me that the year ahead would be the hardest of my life—maybe the best, but also the most difficult. She’d published two books by then, but I sort of laughed off her advice, which of course turned out to be spot on. Not only was it hellish getting the final edits done on such a tight schedule (thank goodness I had a thorough and efficient content editor, Deanna McFadden), but it was even tighter getting the copyediting done, and then done again by my personal proofreading army.

Then there was the cover angst, which finally got resolved just in time to have the books printed. Then there were the many mostly-fruitless attempts to get any pre-publication reviews in industry publications, and our efforts to line up book events for fall, without knowing exactly when the books would be available. And the wonderful, demanding, exhausting 3-day campaign that was reading the audiobook of HatS in a Seattle sound studio (Mirror Sound, where my friend just recorded the audiobook of 48 Days to Barbados).

I was wiped out by the end of August…And that was before the book marketing events really began. My publicist set up plenty of podcasts, and some magazine and radio interviews, and I found the perfect venues for my two book launches—a talk and slideshow held at the Carnegie Library in Port Townsend, Washington, and one three months later at La Playa Books in San Diego, where my brother and many of my friends showed up to celebrate my accomplishment. Not long after I did another book signing at Small World Books in Venice, California, where other dear friends came to support me in my original hometown. I alternated between laughter and tears for both of those joyous California events.

The point I’m trying to make here is that Helen was right—it was the best of times and the worst of times. Luckily HatS was received well, won a few minor awards, and has been very favorably reviewed. That has not translated into meaningful sales of the paperback, but the ebook continues to sell—due, no doubt, to the aforementioned relentless (endless?) book marketing I have done and continue to do. Luckily, I enjoy it, especially the ever-widening circles of friends and followers I’d found here on Substack.

I have done well over 150 book/writing events since starting my ‘stack, including many online appearances and talks. Yes, I kept track of every event for more than three years from before I started this whole marketing dog-and-pony show, which you can read about here; I stopped listing and documenting them more than a year ago, at 150, but of course I haven’t stopped marketing my book, just stopped counting events. (And the book keeps on selling—the ebook is in the top 500 in three categories today and the paperback is back to being available and is in the top 900 in three categories.)

Early this month I marked another anniversary. September 9th was the day my mom, Diane Shea, died in 2019. She wasn’t just a wonderful mother to me, but a true writing friend—a huge supporter of my creative work and of writing in general. (On the subject of books, it does still irk me a little that she didn’t live to see my memoir published, but she did read everything I ever wrote, including many pieces that ended up in HatS.) In the end, she and our family were actually blessed—she didn’t have to endure Covid in enforced seclusion in the memory care facility she lived in. “Everything’s a trade off,” as my husband Russel would say.

September 11th was the fifth anniversary of Diane’s memorial—yes it took two years to set it up because of Covid. We were worried, at first, that people would think it was odd to have her memorial on 9-11, but we decided to reclaim the date with laughter and songs. The long-postponed memorial turned out to be a sunny, song-filled, heartfelt, joyful (and tearful) gathering of friends and family in San Diego’s Balboa Park that was among the best days of my life. That is my Sept 11th memorial now: remembering one good life of loving and being loved, gone but always celebrated.

Speaking of celebrating lives of those who have now gone on, I have to mention the loss of Annie Dillard. I have many favorite writers and favorite books, but Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek showed me that a writer could share their own point of view about true, everyday things, and with some effort, make them important, even somehow sacred.

I’ve always been fascinated by nature—by the ducks and dogs that wandered the Venice Canals, the horses I rode and watched others ride at San Diego country stables, by the pigeons, squirrels, and rented horses of Central Park, by the plethora of marine and desert fauna in Baja, and by the dogs (and one cat) I adopted and loved. Annie Dillard gave me the confidence to devote whole chapters of my memoir to stars, fish, shells, and even ants. I will always be grateful.

If you missed seeing my super short essay in Narratively, they published my flash essay about my first “too good to be true” job, in 1980s NYC a couple of weeks ago.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment on Substack), or, if you prefer to keep your message private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your reply. If you think any of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

I have a couple more book reviews coming up next week; it truly is an amazing season for independent publishers.

Hasta pronto!

I loved Cheek’s first memoir, which was called Sit, Cinderella, Sit, and which I reviewed here. In fact, I love , who also has a cool Substack. She is funny, honest, and so warm and open that reading her books feels like you are just sitting talking to a really witty friend over tea—or champagne, in this case!

If Sit, Cinderella, Sit was the vehicle for her to talk about life, making art, and being a middle-aged woman in a male-oriented business and a youth-obsessed culture, then The Big Day: Saying “I Do” Only to Discover I Didn’t – Another Mostly True Memoir is her vehicle to cover the BIG subjects of love, romance, and commitment.

Though I was only 28 when I got married, I’d been falling in love with boys since I was 5, had boyfriends of some sort since I was 11, and dated older men since I was 16, so I’d had a lot of romantic relationships by 28. The point is, I totally get the thing of feeling like the fireworks would always fade and that the urge to commit to one person for a lifetime was simply not for me. Then I saw Russel Redmond again, and pow—there it was.

So this story of love at almost-50 to a bigger-than-life man (seriously, he is called Big Johnson!) really resonated with me, as did her hesitance, fears, confusion, and downright terror of making this oh-so-final step. All this comes wrapped in Cheek’s trademark humor, doused with cultural references that made me nod and smile, and with the insights and wisdom of a life lived with self-awareness and zero pretensions. The book comes out Tuesday, but you can pre-order it here today.

Another ARC I read this summer was Crypto Island: A Memoir of Midlife Relocation to Puerto Rico, by (author of another Substack I recommend) about how her marriage turned life upside down, in so many ways. After years of comfortable married life in California, Hodgkinson’s attorney husband wanted to move to Puerto Rico. The tax reasons that inspired the idea made sense for him, but not for her. And how could she move away from her college teaching job? Then came the pandemic, and her biggest reason not to accompany him there went away.

Then, living on an actual island that was cut off from her family and friends and let’s say her persona, Hodgkinson is exposed to the new culture of crypto currency, which sort of excites her and also scares her. She proceeds to look outward—to research and invest a bit in crypto—but more interestingly, to look inward, finding that her whole outlook about money and security had deep roots in her childhood poverty.

Boy, could I relate to this story! First off, loving someone who takes you off on an adventure that upends your present and your planned future (luckily for me, that adventure turned out to inspire our sailing lifestyle which I still love). And secondly, the whole subject of becoming “successful” or at least solvent, after a lifetime of living hand to mouth. It is weird to be a poor kid and then a poor young adult, and to end up as someone who can actually buy groceries without having to add the total up first to see if I can afford everything in my cart.

You might want to read Hodgkinson’s memoir to find out about midlife reinvention, and for some information about how investing in crypto currency can help or hurt your portfolio. For any or all of the reasons above, you can preorder the book here; it comes out on Tuesday as well.

Both of these books are published by She Writes Press, which just goes on to prove what a great season this has been for indie books to be released…I know I keep saying that, but it really is quite something!

And speaking of excellent indie books coming out Tuesday, I have one more:

Most of us grew up either reading “The Wizard of Oz” books or seeing the movie on television. I have done both, as well as falling in love with “Wicked,” both on stage and on film. All of these stories began in the brain of Frank Baum, who stayed at, and perhaps wrote one or more books at, San Diego’s Hotel Coronado. Yes, I know a bit about the wizard behind “The Wizard of Oz” but it turns out there’s a whole chapter of his life that I knew nothing about.

Enter The Lark, a work of intensely researched historical fiction by Laura C Rader, author of Hatfield 1677. The Lark is about Paul Tietjens, the genius who was the musical partner of Frank Baum, leading up to the first production of what would one day become a very different “Wizard of Oz” being brought to the stage.

Inspired by the 1901 diary that Tietjens kept, Rader tells the story of his journey from a suddenly-impoverished family farmhouse to the booming city of Chicago at the turn of the century, and from gifted young pianist to world-renowned composer. And it tells the story of two marriages, one between Frank Baum and his wife Maud, who apparently had a fine relationship; unfortunately, the other marriage is not Tietjens’ but that of the already-married woman who was his great, necessarily secret, love.

If you like “The Wizard of Oz” and historical fiction you are going to love finding yourself immersed in a world you probably knew nothing about—I certainly didn’t. Not only the story of two geniuses who become friends and write an iconic stage musical, but the story of theater itself in 1900s Chicago. This theater kid found them all to be fascinating subjects. The book is out next week in Kindle format, you can pre-order it for just $4.99 here.

I have a couple more book reviews coming next week; it truly is an amazing season for independent publishers.

If you missed seeing my super short essay in Narratively, they published my flash essay about my first “too good to be true” job, in 1980s NYC a couple of weeks ago.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment on Substack), or, if you prefer to keep your message private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your reply. If you think any of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

Hasta pronto!

Like me, she was always interested in books and writing, but hadn’t taken the time to pursue it with single-minded passion until that point. Unlike me, she has now written more than a dozen books, under more than one pen name, and some of her books have had big fans—apparently Dolly Parton kept a copy of her novel, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow (written under the pen name Olivia Hawker), on a special shelf that was reserved for her most favorite books.

also has a Substack, which I thoroughly enjoy, and, like me, she has only 650 or so subscribers. Of course, her Substack is newer than mine, so she has plenty of time to surpass me, and I predict that when this new book of hers gets out there on Tuesday and people start reading it, her subscriber list is going to grow pretty fast.

But the key link between Libbie Grant’s new book, The Ended World and my life is much more than a superficial similarity in our interests. And, oddly enough, it may just pertain to your own life, and the life of everyone else you know.

In case you didn’t hear, two different workers in the AI industry have recently predicted a very good chance that AI could destroy all human life in the next decade. Yep, we’ve created something that people on the inside of that technology business predict could quite probably eradicate human life as we know it.

What does this have to do with The Ended World? Well, this fascinating novel, which intrigued me from page one and never ceased to delight me, involves—among other things—a young man who studies modern technology and grows up to invent an AI tool that becomes a sentient being. And that artificial consciousness, and its aims, really worry the young man.

Cue the Twilight Zone theme song.

Now, all that is cool, but plenty of books have had plots that are “ripped from the headlines,” though they were written years earlier. That is not why I’m reviewing The Ended World. What most contemporary novels don’t do—really almost never do—is to surprise me. The Ended World surprised me again and again. The author never takes the easy route, she never “phones it in” as actors say about mediocre acting. She always chooses to go deeper into these characters and to expose the specific and personal ways we humans both long for and fear change.

Grant also takes on faith, both the everyday faith that keeps us going in life, and the religious faith that propels church-going people, and perhaps inspires saints like St Clare of Assisi. Did I mention there is a medieval saint in The Ended World?

I just took a walk to clear my head and a good friend who is a fine writer called. I shared with her how hard this review was to write. Most reviews of good books are not that hard to write. I explain that it is a memoir about this or that subject, or that it is a genre book, or a work of literary fiction in a certain style. But reading experiences that make you rethink your opinions and perhaps your philosophy of life, those are the hard ones to sum up. Obviously, The Ended World was such a book for me.

Having said all that, I don’t want you to think the novel is too serious, though it deals with such weighty themes. It is sometimes profound, but quite beautifully written; it is wry and and insightful, but also quite witty. I have not read any of Libbie Grant’s other works, so I can’t compare it to her previous output, but The Ended World reminded me of Ursula LeGuin and Emily St John Mandel, with a touch of Tom Robbins and Salman Rushdie, blended with Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Cinematic, in the best way, meaning it does not try to be anything but what it is—gorgeous prose about this specific moment in time.

The novel was published by Galiot Press, a new independent press that published one of the best books I read last year, Sex of the Midwest by . Robin just published a great interview with Libbie Grant, This is a story about AI you have not heard before. So worth the time, especially for writers with manuscripts they are working on right now. There are so many fascinating themes in The Ended World; I read the book about a month ago (I got an ARC in order to review it from NetGalley) and I am thinking about it still.

I sincerely hope this book finds the wide readership it deserves. It should provoke some excellent conversations about AI, faith, writing, and just, you know, LIFE.

If you missed last week’s links Narratively recently published my very short flash essay about my first “too good to be true” job, in 1980s NYC.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment on Substack), or, if you prefer to keep your message private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your reply. If you think any of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

More reviews of excellent brand-new books published by indie presses are on their way next week. This publishing season is turning out to be great, and I’m here for it.

Hasta pronto!

The memoir’s story was a common one in that ‘hood—young girl grows up in a broken family, gets pregnant as a teenager, and will pass that life along to her child. But this young girl did not follow the script—she kept the baby, but went on to college, excelled there, and became a successful corporate leader, coach, and speaker.

When I met the author, Pandora Villaseñor, I found her not only lovely but charming. We chatted about our old ESD neighborhoods, and about the careers we’d had since leaving them behind. I told her she simply had to get the book published, and that I was pretty sure she could do that. She left with my marked-up pages and a determined gleam in her eye.

Earlier this year, I found of All Gifts here on Substack. I offered to read her ARC for a blurb, and it was just as fabulous as I’d imagined it would be. ALL GIFTS: Finding Meaning in the Mess is a moving and timely memoir. I was fascinated by Pandora’s experience as a mixed-race child: being considered “too light” for some of her black family and friends, and too something for some of her white classmates.

It is fascinating and appalling how the system helped and hurt Pandora as she attempted to rewrite the script that predicted her surrender. She never stopped moving forward, finding strength in her faith (religious and otherwise). Readers may recognize parts of their own childhood, as I did, but either way, we cheer her young self on every step of the way. I’m still cheering her on: ALL GIFTS debuts Tuesday, pre-order it here.

The Brother Epistles: A Sister’s Memoir came out in June, but, as I did with Pandora, I discovered right here on her Substack. Her ‘stack, , is described as “health guidance for black women and a celebration of their stories.”

Young Shanda also grew up in a tough ‘hood, this one in Philadelphia, where drive-by shootings were not that uncommon. But when her beloved younger brother Monir was murdered on a Philadelphia street in 1992, the loss hits Shanda brutally hard. Unable to cope with grieving while trying to escape that same neighborhood, she shuts down her feelings and goes on with the daily battle of surviving med school.

Years later, already a successful medical doctor, she and her husband settle in a white suburb where she faces another kind of isolation which sparks a new kind of grief.

Having lost my dear friend Jim Hansen to AIDS back in 1993, I can relate to how grief goes on and on. I think of him, and mourn his loss so many times in a month. And I regret our government’s lack of relief in the early days of AIDS—due to wide-spread prejudice against gay men—and the lukewarm response for years after that. Adding frustration and anger to grief keeps it from being resolved, if grief for a loved one is.

In her remarkable memoir, McManus writes letters to her dead brother, as a way to figure out both their lives. How can she live authentically in such a different world from the one they grew up in? Why did he go from the military to dealing drugs? How can she inspire his fatherless young sons? Can she teach her own children about their uncle without them ever knowing him—and keep him alive for herself as well? The exchange is heart-breaking, funny, insightful, profound, and yes, ultimately uplifting.

Friends and Family by Natalie Baszile is not a memoir, but its insights into race in our modern world is as hard-hitting as any memoir I have read. Set in one of my favorite cities, San Francisco, Friends and Family is unlike any book I’ve read about “race relations,” because the entitled white people are pretty liberal, or they think they are.

The story is about Babs, a black women who is best friends with a white woman, Nora, who has an adopted black son. The two women have been close for years and their two teenage children—Nora’s son and Babs’ daughter are close friends, too.

Everything in their upscale enclave seems fine until the cops are called on Nora’s innocent but “suspicious looking” black son by a neighbor—unleashing a series of events that tears the neighborhood apart, right down the middle, including the two women friends. The damaging fallout goes farther than anyone could have imagined.

If this book doesn’t make you at least a little uncomfortable, you may not be being completely honest with yourself. I highly recommend it, but I don’t promise you’ll enjoy the read unless you’re not afraid to confront reality and you like great writing.

As a follow up to last week’s marketing post, I wanted to share that I’ve been sending short essays to various excellent Substacks, including and today they published my flash essay about my first “too good to be true” job, in 1980s NYC.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment on Substack), or, if you prefer to keep your message private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your reply. If you think any of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts on my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult). Click below to subscribe, or upgrade, if you’re already a subscriber.

Hasta pronto!

Think of the internet like a cocktail party, or a series of cocktail parties.

At the TikTok party, people video themselves talking to you—but never actually talk to you. You can do the same thing. And if you like talking about what you are reading, and making videos about that, then you have found your tribe. Search for Booktok and start following some of those peeps. Some of them are bound to start watching your videos and then following you.

On Threads, you’ll see a million short comments on a million subjects (like the Twitter of old). You can comment on others, or start your own. If you are good at short pithy comments, or short pithy replies, you’ll find yourself at ease in the Threads world. There are a ton of writer and agent/publishing threads going on Threads—follow them and see what happens.

At the Instagram party, people are all reviewing their photo galleries, or showing slideshows of images. If you like taking photographs, or seeing other people’s photos, you will blend right in. Try to find photos that link to a passion of yours—travel, gardening, dining out, fashion, cute dogs, you name it. Search for the hashtag #bookstagram. Then start posting your own pics with the hashtag bookstagram or bookstagrammer. You’ll soon begin to find followers.

Instagram and Facebook are both part of the big mega social media world of Meta, so if you post to Instagram, you can also link those posts to Threads and Facebook. Facebook itself tends to skew older and be more of a place to interact with people you actually know IRL (at least a little), or friends of friends. Or maybe that is just how it works for me. I like staying in touch with old friends, and probably would never have gone to IG if my three nieces were all on Facebook back then. So, your family and friends may lead you to one party or the other.

On LinkedIn, you can write up your resume, look for a real world job, interact with people you know, and meet people you might want to know/work with. You can write posts there, as well as reading about people’s various work and career-related milestones. If your work persona is a big part of how you see yourself in the world, then LinkedIn may be the right place for you.

Here on Substack, it is (mostly) all about words, primarily essays. Essays are basically arguments, opinions/positions/points of view about life, or any number of subjects. If you feel at ease writing 500 to 1000 words about what’s on your mind this week, you have found the right place. Search in Literature or Writing. Start following the writers that intrigue you. Subscribe to those you love. A bonus is that once you start following or subscribing to other writers, you’ll never find yourself without a great short read ever again. Read on, I have included a Substack video link at the end of this post.

Note that I have not brought up the word “sell” or “promote” or “market” or even “book” (except as part of a hashtag) one single time. The first step is to find your people—to find the party you want to attend. (Of course you can try to attend all the parties, but I find that most of us are most comfortable at one of the above parties. Of course, there’s Reddit and Pinterest, too, but I don’t know much about either of them.) Once you find the place you are comfortable, then you can start reaching out, following other people, and finding potential friends.

That is not the time to start spouting “Buy my book!” We are still making friends and building trust at this point. Just like in real life, we don’t start a first meeting by blabbing endlessly about ourselves. No one wants to be friends with a narcissist, so show that you’re interested in them and their pursuits (if you are).

Follow people who intrigue you, have a good eye for photos, or who write well, and show your support for them. Like, repost/restack, share, and comment. Talk about what you have in common—do not turn every post or reply into a way to talk to them about your book. You have to earn that trust first by being a good friend to them.

That doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything the people you follow are posting, of course. Everyone appreciates a spirited exchange of ideas and opinions, if it is civil and rational. Feel free to start a dialogue, but don’t waste your time and energy by starting a fight with someone who appears to be a numbskull.

Obviously, I’m not saying that you’re going to subsume your own opinions in order to get friends or followers; there are plenty of people out there on both sides of the political “aisle” for example, so you have a lot to choose from. I don’t like or believe Trump, but I won’t jump on a post that is a fully pro-Trump paean and start attacking him to his true believers because I don’t have the time to waste. Do so if you have the hours to spare, but you probably won’t make any headway and you’ll get a ton of abuse.

Naturally, if the subject is one you know well and understand, feel free to post or reply as your knowledgeable self, and if the person posting or commenting is open-minded you may in fact win a convert or two to your cause. And those people might choose to follow you. They will see that you have well thought out opinions, and have expertise in a number of areas, and they should begin to anticipate your replies and posts. They might share your posts/reels with others, who may also follow you.

Once you’ve accomplished all of this, you will have created/joined/inspired a circle of friends/followers/subscribers who will be more than excited to hear about your upcoming book, your cover reveal, your publishing news, your book events, and anything else that comes up in your journey. They might choose to share that information or news with their friends who are not in your circle (yet). And they may even decide to check out your book, or even buy a copy.

As you can see, this sort of marketing is organic in the extreme and therefore takes time—not years, but definitely months. So, if you are just beginning your writing journey, you have plenty of time to start small and watch your circle grow. By the time you have book news, you’ll have a circle to share it with. If you are already somewhere further along the publishing path, you need to get started soon. There’s no time like the present!

Before I wind it up today, I want to include this note that includes a link to me reading my short story from Wham! Bam! Thank you! Slam! (WBTYS) about voting with my mom over the years. This is the kind of thing that happens on Substack—you follow or subscribe to a Substack, then you get submit an essay, as I have done over the years to Substacks like @Memoir Land, In a Flash, and , or you get interviewed on by or you get invited by Nan Tepper to read a true story, as I did three times on WBTYS. I can’t see how to just link to just my story but this note includes a link to my short video.

The travel columns I wrote for Womancake Magazine for years are now being republished on a very cool and eclectic blog curated and mostly written by my friend, Thomas Shesss, called Pillar to Post. See, that is just one more way that the marketing ripples spread wider and wider; here’s the latest travel column of mine, about La Paz, BCS, that got published on Pillar to Post on Tuesday.

Thanks to all of the new subscribers who have joined Editor On Board—24 of you joined us in the last month! I hope you’ll join us with your feedback and questions in the comments section (click the heart or the talk bubble to go to Substack and comment or restack); if you have feedback or a question for me directly, feel free to simply reply here, and only I will see that comment. Please pass this post along to anyone you think might enjoy it. All that kind of interaction helps EoB to grow, and feels like sunshine after a rainy day to this writer/editor.

More book review of new books are coming next week. Back to boat work for now…

hasta pronto!

But before that, you may want to see/hear me—or one of the other nine women writers/performers—tell a story. Click here for the replay of last week’s “Sister Suffragette” storytelling gig on Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam!

Now to my encore post:

Though my life seems to begin and end with our boat and the boatyard right now, I am still always thinking about writing. I’ve read some very good stuff lately and a few book reviews will be forthcoming. I am currently re-reading “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr, because I am fascinated by the history of psychiatry and I like getting some of my doses of history in well-researched historical novels.

The book is excellent (the publisher was Random House). But, no matter how good the publisher/author/editor, I do run into errors. And, being that editing is my job, I can’t simply pass them by. So I mark them in the text and sometimes even make a snide comment. And no, I don’t proofread people’s emails or Substacks (unless they ask), I am talking about published books that are in print.

Not many people use the word editrix to refer to a woman who edits. I like it, because it makes me think of all the “tricks” I know about writing, rewriting, and editing—the edit tricks. I’m going to share a few tricks here, to soften the effect of my ranting. FYI, this is the sort of thing I am including in my current work-in-progress, about editing.

What is it about commas? Periods are seldom ignored, so why is such a useful punctuation tool as the comma the object of such disdain? Articles that debate the necessity of commas are written and re-written, especially the pros and cons of the "Oxford" (or serial) comma. Writers and editors argue about the worth of commas—sometimes writers even argue with their editors…Imagine that.

Most writing programs and conferences ignore punctuation altogether, which I suppose makes sense—the subject isn’t sexy, and, after all, you're supposed to have taken an English 101 course at some point before becoming an author, right?

An editor friend recently emailed me about a manuscript he's working on, writing that it was "well written, thank God, but like a lot of folks, the author doesn't really have a handle on commas. I am well aware of the 'open' style, which usually means 'no commas,' but sometimes they are necessary."

I agree wholeheartedly. The error I mark the most on manuscripts is either the elimination or addition of a comma. If I have to stop and re-read a sentence to figure out what you were trying to say, it usually needs a comma or two. You don't want your readers to be slowed down by having to decipher confusing sentences; the next thing you know, they’ll set your book down and be heading for a snack, or their phone.

I used to go on quite a bit about missing commas, especially the “serial” or Oxford” comma; it prevents any confusion and doesn’t cause any problems. But now I’m finding extra commas in every manuscript. Lots of extra commas. Especially when people are describing things with more than one adjective. Completely unnecessary commas like the ones in these fragments: “a long, thin cigar,” “dried, brown crust,” and “crumbly, old stone wall.” Apparently, people have heard about serial commas, which are used to separate all the items in a list, such as “apples, pears, and bananas,” and decided that any list of words has to be separated by commas. Well, it doesn’t.

I was reading an excellent novel today, published by an imprint of one of the Big Five Publishers, and found half a dozen places where the author had added a comma where it didn’t belong, and the copyeditor had apparently missed them all. I know a lot of people will say “who cares?” but I guarantee it won’t lessen anyone’s reading pleasure to have the extra commas deleted and it will make me crazy to keep seeing them proliferating where they don’t belong. 

There's an easy way to find the “missing" commas in your writing: read your manuscript aloud. Better yet, read it aloud into a recorder, then play the recording back and listen while looking at the manuscript (printed out or on your screen). If there's a very brief "stop" or teensy pause, or, sometimes, just a slight change in tone, look to see if it needs punctuation—those audible hints mean you might need a comma. 

Remember, a well-paced comma does not slow down readers, but a badly placed comma may, and it definitely will if the editor or agent is reading your manuscript, and considering it for publication, because they have no desire to take on sloppily punctuated work when there are so many good books that are perfectly polished.

Remember, if you can add an "and" between two adjectives, or reverse them, then you can use a comma instead of the "and" there. So you should not put a comma in “white, charming houses," because you would not say “white and charming” or use the phrase “charming and white" unless you were writing copy for a toothpaste ad (and see the note about word order below, because it should be charming white houses, too). There is no comma in “little old house” because you wouldn’t write “little and old” would you? Or “old little house?”

So when you are editing or rewriting and come across two or more adjectives with commas between them, try reading the two adjectives with an “and” added between them (or reverse them) to see if you can take out the comma you put between them.

By the way, there is a proper order to listing cumulative adjectives, whether or not they are properly punctuated. This is the commonest order I’ve found referenced: Number, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Purpose, then noun. (The acronym for the mnemonic is NOSASCOMP). If the words are listed in the proper order, there is no need for commas between them. So, the following sentence could be written: “I bought twelve delicate little old oval blue Mexican pottery soup bowls at a yard sale.” Yes, I just made that up. Not shopping for anything new this summer.

That’s it for this week. Book reviews and boat work updates are coming next week.

hasta pronto!

Comma Image by starline on Freepik

If you want to subscribe to Nan Tepper’s Substack, you can do that at the $10 a month level and that will get you in for free to each of the monthly readings, which is pretty amazing. If you are not a subscriber, you should get your $12 ticket ASAP because there’s a limit to how many people get to be in the virtual room. It is always a treat!

If you’re interested in the article I wrote for Latitude 38 and wrote about here back in March, you can read the entire article at this link. If you don’t already have a free Lat 38 account, you will have to set one up, which is basically just giving them your email. If you are in coastal California (or places in Oregon or Washington, you may pick up a free copy of the August issue in marinas and boat stores (like West Marine).

Now on to this month’s installment of my series: An Editor’s Tips for Writers, which is about using (not abusing) transitions in your writing.

Transitions don’t get enough love, either in life or in writing, and they don’t get much respect. In life we tend to gloss over transitions in other people’s lives with phrases like “It’s just a phase,” “This too shall pass,” “You’ll get over it,” and even “Get over it!”

In judging an author’s writing, editors and agents often say “the transitions were weak” but what exactly does that mean? In my experience, it means that either you took too long to get from plot point A to plot point B, thereby boring the reader, or that it happened too fast and left us wondering what just happened? Study your manuscript in order to make sure you know which problem your text suffered from.

When transitions surprise us unintentionally, it isn’t really the transition itself that is to blame, but all that came before it. A surprise can be a good thing in some genres—I still remember gasping out loud when I read the big twist in Gone Girl—but no reader wants a completely surprising surprise, if you know what I mean. We’ve all read the kind of surprise where we say, “WTF? That character would never have done that!”

In order to improve your transitions, you must first find them. You can spot them by highlighting what they are not. Transitions are not usually whole scenes—they are the connective tissue between scenes. Scenes are made up of action/active dialogue followed by reaction/active dialogue (”beats,” if you will) and then the scene ends and, at some point, another scene begins. The part that connects the two scenes is a transition.

Chapter breaks often work as transitions, but you can’t always start a new chapter just because you want an intermission in the action. There’s no hard and fast rule about this, but generally chapters should be approximately the same length in a book. Don’t make them too long, and definitely don’t make them so long that people start to wonder when the current chapter will ever end. And—unless all the chapters in the book are super short, which can definitely work—do not make them super short.

Of course, rules are meant to be broken, and sometimes a whole, very short chapter works as a transition in a book. A great example, in Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, is this one-sentence chapter: “Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that night.” Great transition, but it won’t work in too many books.

Sometimes a transition has to do some heavy lifting, like jumping through space and time, and, unless you’re Zane Grey, you don’t want to use the cliched “Meanwhile, back at the ranch...” So, how do you make those leaps, from breakfast chit-chat to permanent break-up, or from colonial Bangladesh to modern-day Bermuda?

The good news about transitions is that they free an author up to do all those things I am always harping on about you not over-doing. You get to give us some visual expository when you describe the new scene; there may be a new character to bring in, complete with their specific quirks and gestures and habits, and hopefully some character-revealing action and dialogue.

You might find the opportunity to bring in a little expository about your main character, too, which could be shown by their reaction to, or their actions in this new place. Or by how they react to or take an attitude toward the new character—and how they are treated by them.

When introducing a new setting or character, don’t leave out time, season, and regional weather; highlight specific sounds, textures, and other sensory input in your description. Sometimes less is not more.

Example: You can simply write: “Reverend Snead was waiting on the porch for Dot when she walked out the front door.”

Or you can write: “Reverend Snead, wearing his customary summer suit of wilted cream linen, lounged on the old porch glider fanning himself in the still evening air. He sat up, slid to the edge of the seat, and glared at Dot when she walked out the front door.”

A fun way to carry over a thought from one chapter to another is to use a visual motif, just like a filmmaker might do—remember the lit match that cut to a blazing desert sunrise in David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia”?

You might end a scene or chapter with a closing door and open the next section or chapter with an opening door, or window or gate. Or end with the fresh flowers on a table and then begin the next section with the protagonist dropping the dead flowers in the trash, showing a passage of time, and perhaps signaling a turn to endings, disease, death, or decrepitude.

If you are intrigued by and curious about transitions, you can do a little more research into them; I suggest reading the great writers of yesterday or today, and paying attention to how they do what they do—how they move characters through time and space, and how they jump from place to place. (I’m a poet!)

When you find a great transition, jot it down or highlight it (easy on a Kindle or most other e-reader apps). Go back and re-read them and see which one inspires or moves you. Keep a list of them for inspiration; next time you are stuck, refer to that list. You won’t use any of the transitions word for word, of course, but they can certainly act as a jumping off place.

Maybe you’ll come listen to our stories tomorrow at WBTYS ( 5 pm ET, 2 pm PT; buy tickets here) and hear a good transition line or two from one of the ten storytellers. They are very short stories (only 4 minutes long) so transitions are key!

An update: The crowdfunding campaign I’m helping with—raising money for Sunbelt to reprint a few important regional books and remain sustainable—is going well. They’ve already sent one children’s book of crucial regional history (“My Ancestors’ Village”) to the printer. Read more and donate here here; whether or not you donate, please pass on the info to your own mailing list or share on social media if you can.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment), or, if you prefer to keep your thoughts private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your message. If you think this information would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts off of my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult).

Hope to see you online tomorrow. More book reviews coming next week.

hasta pronto!

I’m a big fan of Jennifer Herrera. In addition to being an excellent writer, she is a respected and successful literary agent; for my readers who are authors, you should definitely follow Jennifer on Instagram because she not only tells it like it is without any meanness or snark (well, not very much), but she’s funny and adorable, and who doesn’t need more of that in this business?

If you’d like to read a review of her first book, The Hunter, a thriller that really is thrilling (and a little bit scary, to be honest), and a bit about how Jennifer and I met at my all-time favorite annual event, the Southern California Writers Conference, you may want to check out this post from back in 2023.

I got an ARC of Siren Says from NetGalley, and wasn’t sure what to expect from it—as I said The Hunter was a taut, gripping thriller, but the info made it clear that this new book was going to be something completely different. The jacket copy included phrases like “ancient plant magic,” “a painful curse,” and “Celtic spirits.” So naturally, I started reading it that very day.

There’s no question this is a witchy tale—if you like that kind of novel, you’ll love it—but if you prefer family stories about secrets and deceptions, with complicated relationships, you’ll like this book too. And the Celtic (Welsh, in this case) folklore and the (obviously deeply researched) plant knowledge is a whole other level of interest for readers to dig into. I could also go on about the poignant sibling relationship, the grief for a mother gone too soon, or the surprising love story.

Instead I’ll just say I loved this book. Jennifer’s writing got me from the first pages when she wrote that the sound of crows was a “harsh staccato like tiny dogs barking.” Yes, dozens of crows show up in New York City where this story begins for Raven Wynn. But it doesn’t end there—soon Raven is in a lush country setting with new allies and enemies, and the stakes are as high for her as they could possibly be. I predict you will be as spell-bound as I was by the trip the author takes us on.

Siren Says comes out in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook on the 18th; pre-order it here.

Another much lighter witchy book is the latest in the MidWitch series by DJ Bowman-Smith, who I met doing her podcast back in 2023. I enjoyed the first three books in her series, starting in 2023 (yes, we three authors all wrote a debut book in 2023, I just realized that) but MidWitch 4 may be my favorite yet. Perhaps because, even though she only became a witch in mid life, Lily is truly maturing in this book.

Lily is English, as is DJ, and, as in Siren Says, the sometimes charming and then dramatic settings deliver a great part of the enjoyment of the books, at least for me. The author has a whippet and Lily has a black greyhound as one of her many familiars. Lily bakes delectable treats and so does DJ. I imagine there are even more similarities between the two women, but as far as I know DJ is not capable of magic, unless you consider writing itself to be magical, as I do.

Another unusual new novel I was wowed by is Amazing, by Substack’s own . It fits in today’s post even though there’s no actual witchcraft in the book, because there are most assuredly unexplainable things afoot in Nina Thorne’s life. These events begin with an enigmatic email purportedly from from Nina’s dead mother, and include a couple of psychic readings by a road-side medium who predicts some of Nina’s future. Oh, and there’s her husband, who declares he’s leaving her to father a child, at the age of 72.

There were so many touchstones for me in this book: a lot of familiar and beloved sites on Nina’s road trip from San Jose to Santa Cruz, and up to Portland (to see her grown transgender child), and even a visit with her formerly troubled, off-beat sister in beautiful seaside Baja California. Add in a new man along the way, some cute rescue dogs, a new family connection, and it really is pretty amazing.

An update: The crowdfunding campaign I’m helping with—raising money for Sunbelt to reprint twenty important regional books and remain a sustainable business—is going well. They’ve already sent one children’s book of crucial regional history (“My Ancestors’ Village”) to the printer. Read more and donate here here; whether or not you donate, please pass on the info to your own mailing list or share on social media if you can; the time to help this struggling regional indie publisher is now!

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment), or, if you prefer to keep your thoughts private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your message. If you think either of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts off of my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult).

Hasta pronto!

The best of these characters—Scout Finch, Elinor Dashwood, Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, the guy in The Martian—are easy for us readers to relate to. They don’t overestimate their own worth or skills, but they never step back from a challenge. They are kind, honest, often humble, loyal to a fault, and will only lie in order to protect their own life, or that of their loved ones.

Because of these attributes—and so much more—protagonists like that quickly become like a friend to us. We cringe when they are heading into what we can see is going to be a bad situation; we cheer to ourselves when they score victories; we laugh when they are silly or self-deprecating; we may even cry when they lose a dear friend (human or animal) or suffer another painful loss.

Protagonists are our heroines and heroes, our literary idols, even our fictional role models. They can show us who, or how, we want to be in life.

Things get much more confusing when we start talking about literary antagonists.

No story, no matter how simple, can hold our attention for long without conflict. The antagonist is there to help provide that element, to provide an obstacle or throw up barriers of some sort in our protagonist’s path, whether they are looking out for our hero’s best interests, or not. They must do one thing very well, and that is to “illuminate” the protagonist’s character. They are able to do this in very different ways, from asking the right (or wrong) questions to actually pushing the protagonist to take decisive action, or simply by being that character’s opposite in every way.

When most people think of an antagonist, they think of the classic “big bad guy” antagonists. The Snidely Whiplash characters who are purely evil, selfish, greedy, and cruel; nearly every comic book villain falls into this category, as do President Snow, Voldemort, and Sauron. These characters have no redeeming qualities and need no redemption, as far as their character arc. In fact, one could argue that they aren’t antagonists at all, more like fixed obstacles. Either way, they are definitely not the only sort of antagonist.

The most interesting (and helpful to you, the writer) antagonist is a three-dimensional character who has wants and needs of their own, and who simply envisions something different for the protagonist than what that character is seeking, or wants them to go about their quest in a completely different way. These type of antagonists are often parents or siblings, as in the case of Atticus Finch and Marianne Dashwood, or friends like Sam Gamgee; they can also be teachers, therapists, doctors, and even wise and lovable wizards, like Albus Dumbledore and Gandalf.

A great example of an antagonist in a popular and beloved film is the character of Sean, the therapist played by Robin Williams, in “Good Will Hunting.” This brilliant, lighthearted shrink challenges Will at every step, calls him on his lies and all his other creative bullshit, and even pokes fun at him a bit. But in the end, it is clear that it has all been for Will’s benefit. The thing that makes this character so great is that Sean learns and grows, too—he is a different person at the end of the film than he was when he met Will.

That’s how you know that you’ve chosen the right antagonist for your book—they are not just believable and human, but they help you to make your protagonist more believable and human. Supporting characters can do this for your protagonist, too, but a great antagonist does it the most.

Speaking of supporting characters, remember that each character in your book needs a reason to exist. Often, because we are taught to “write what you know” we write novels that mirror our lives in many ways, especially when we write our first novel(s) and of course, our memoir(s). So if we have six great friends, our main character will have six great friends. And, if literature was like life, six great friends would be six times as good as one, but it isn’t that way at all. Six friends in a novel means six names and attributes to remember, plus trying to recall how they fit into our heroine’s life (and the plot), meaning that six friends are four or five friends too many.

So look at each of your characters with a jaundiced eye, and be ruthless. If a “good friend of the protagonist” character has no major reason to be there, delete them. Keep any cool things they say or quirks that are intriguing and give them to the best friend you chose to keep. One best friend is a joy, and can be an excellent foil for your main character.

When writing memoir, you don’t usually want to combine numerous people into one character, but you can simply leave your other friends out of the book—there’s no need to unfriend them, even on Facebook. In writing and editing memoir, we shape the structure of the book by what we leave out (that’s true in every book, but even more so in memoir, because we have so much life to choose from). So a friend whose presence in your life—good or bad—was not meaningful to you during the specific time that the memoir deals with is out.

Each character—antagonist, supporting character, foil or sidekick—needs to come complete with their own issues and backstories (whether you include that expository in the book or not); they should complete their own arc, too, meaning that they get to change somehow, as well, in addition to having a profound effect on the protagonist, or the plot. If you can do that, then we readers will find it quite easy to believe in all of your characters—whether we like them or not. And we won’t want to stop turning pages until we turn the very last one.

My own memoir’s audiobook is on sale now for $17. Not sure how long that will last!

An update: The crowdfunding campaign I’m helping with—raising money for Sunbelt to reprint twenty important regional books and remain a sustainable business—is going well. They’ve already sent one children’s book of crucial regional history (“My Ancestors’ Village”) to the printer. Read more and donate here here; whether or not you donate, please pass on the info to your own mailing list or share on social media if you can; the time to help this struggling regional indie publisher is now!

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment), or, if you prefer to keep your thoughts private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your message. If you think either of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts off of my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult).

Welcome to all the new readers—thanks for subscribing. More book reviews coming next week.

hasta pronto!

Shess worked at the San Francisco Examiner back in the day, before relocating to sunnier climes in San Diego. He lives in a coffee-table book worthy North Park Arts and Crafts bungalow with his lovely wife Phyllis, a retired judge. He founded the North Park News, before “retiring” to write novels and curate the daily blog, which covers the waterfront, from politics to coffee, and gets thousands of weekly views.

Tom’s latest book, Tough Love: Modern Noir Romances is both an homage to, and a fine example of, the noir genre. In Tough Love and his first book, Cantina Psalms, Tom personally introduces you to a host of one-of-a-kind characters drawn from reporting gigs at the daily Examiner and San Francisco Magazine.

You will meet cops, politicians, reporters, lawyers, criminals, rich men, richer women, bartenders, priests, and illicit lovers who have already made the mistake they are about to deny making. But Tough Love possesses something many noir imitators lack: affection for these human beings trapped inside the machinery of life. And the stories he writes are usually set in one of my two favorite places in the world: San Francisco and San Diego. If you like these cities and gritty stories, check out Tough Love!

Years ago Tom told me about a local author named Caitlin Rother, who is an old friend of his—San Diego is a big little town, especially in the small world of books. I have read more than a few of her true crime books, and reviewed them, too. The most recent of her books I reviewed is a novel from 2025, Hooked, Book 1 in her “Katrina and Goode” series. The second book Staged, which came out just last month, takes us even further into a world of dark deeds done in a lovely sun-drenched setting. You can start with book one, or start with Staged and go back to Hooked after you are…hooked.

And isn’t that an incredible book cover? I absolutely love it. And it isn’t just because I know that exact spot on that beach so well, or because the book would look fabulous on a shelf next to the blue and peach cover of Honeymoon at Sea, though both are true.

Staged begins where Hooked left off, and we plunge back into the action, when two persons of interest from a previous criminal case both turn up dead, in mysterious circumstances. And who are the titular “Katrina and Goode” of the series? Katrina Chopin is an investigative reporter based in La Jolla who is trying to solve the not-exactly-cold case of the murder of her parents, both judges as well as her brother’s suspicious “suicide.” Goode is a La Jolla police detective who surfs daily.

They are both driven, ambitious, smart, funny, and dedicated to their careers. They try to resist each other, and stick to doing those important jobs of theirs by the book, but whenever they get together, sparks fly. Luckily for Goode, Katrina is a natural investigator, and lucky for her, Goode can open some doors that she wants to look behind. Together, they make trouble for the bad guys, and sometimes for each other.

One of the things I often thought about when listening to the news in the last decade is why isn’t anyone writing about all the corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, not to mention the conflicts of interest in law enforcement and local politics? Well, rest assured, someone was writing about all of it, and that person is Caitlin Rother.

Rother is not just a good writer, she is an award-winning investigative reporter so she understands the world of journalism, plus knows the ins and outs of law enforcement and high-profile court cases, and now you can read the whole story. Well, not the whole story, but the first two installments of what will hopefully be a long-lived series.

Either of these books would make for a perfect poolside or beach read this summer, as there’s plenty of fabulous settings, a few ugly things done by beautiful people, and enough sizzle to enliven their sometimes complicated plots. Let me know if you like beach reads—if not, why not?—and what you have on your TBR list for this summer.

And speaking of Southern California, the crowdfunding campaign I’m helping with—raising money for Sunbelt Publications to reprint twenty important regional books and remain a sustainable business—is going well. They’ve already sent one children’s book of crucial local history (“My Ancestors’ Village”) to the printer. You may read more and donate here here; whether or not you donate, please pass on the info to your own mailing list if you can; the time to help this indie publisher is now!

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment), or, if you prefer to keep your thoughts private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your message. If you think either of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board—which turned three years old this month!—is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts off of my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult).

Welcome and thanks for subscribing. More editing tips for writers coming next week.

hasta pronto!

The year that SDWI moved to Liberty Station, I started teaching with them, which I love and still do, usually virtually but sometimes in person. But I really got to know Judy when we were both instructors at the Southern California Writers’ Conference (happening in San Diego on MLK, Jr. weekend, January 15-17, 2027. I had attended without Russel one year and Judy was also there on her own and we started talking one night after dinner and just clicked. We have been clicking ever since. I was lucky enough to edit her memoir, the joyful and bittersweet When Your Heart Says Go.

Judy teaches memoir writing, among other things, and she was leading a memoir class back in 2014 when she introduced me to Leslie Johansen Nack via email. Leslie and I chatted on the phone and found we had a great deal in common. Not just growing up as sun-kissed So Cal girls of the same generation, but having parents who raised us in unusual ways. For Leslie, first it was a far out off-grid sort of ranch, then her parents moved them moved to Oceanside, and soon onto a sailboat. I shared my family’s commune story with her and we marveled at the many connections we had, including difficult relationships with our fathers—and with our mothers, in very different ways. Anyway, Leslie was looking for an editor who would understand both the family dynamics and the sailing, and she found one in me.

When I did the initial content edit on the manuscript that became Fourteen: A Daughter’s Memoir of Adventure, Sailing, and Survival (She Writes Press, Oct 2015), Chapter One began with her family living on that rundown ranch she’d described for me, when Leslie was much younger than the title age. There was great stuff there—a lot of good description of the family and their property. We got to know her and her sisters a bit, and got glimpses of her parents’ flaws. The writing was excellent, but once I’d finished the MS, I saw that starting back that far threw off the book’s structure by focusing on Leslie’s early life, which is not what Fourteen is about.

I encouraged her to begin her story later—in 1973, when she was a preteen—by moving quickly to some of the early, troubled sailing scenes with her family on the boat they eventually sail to the South Seas. The opening pages would then show how her father bonded with her over sailing on day one (his unhealthy attention to his daughter, which eventually drove a wedge between him and her mother, is hinted at) and also let the reader know what sort of book it is (see subtitle). I assured her that she could show some of the early scenes in “flashbacks” later on.

In other words, Fourteen includes a dysfunctional, abusive family dynamic that was established early in her life, but the book needed to begin with a truer sense of what the majority of the story entailed: sailing and her strained relationship with her father. Showing the whole family interacting on the boat let the author describe them in visual, active ways that revealed their characters, not just their characteristics. For example, the first sailing scene shows the mom and sister getting seasick and Leslie feeling fine, which results in her father’s approval of her, specifically.

Leslie agreed with me and went to work on the opening chapters and some other trouble spots—for example, we decided that the book should end when the ocean voyage ended, because even though the manuscript kept going, that part of her story ended when the trip did. I hoped Leslie would write about the second half of her coming of age story in a future memoir and she hinted that she might (spoiler: she did).

The effort Leslie expended in cutting the early section and reworking the new opening chapters was worth it: Fourteen is the recipient of 5 independent book awards, and the book gets 4.19 stars based on over 1,050 reader ratings on Goodreads. And when Leslie’s second memoir Nineteen came out in 2025 to similar acclaim, those readers who claimed to have been disappointed when Fourteen didn’t continue after her long sailing journey were very happy. I reviewed Nineteen—read the review here.

So, once again, content and structure editing turns out to be well worth the time and money—because it works.

The best part of the story is that Leslie and I became friends, and we still see each other here and there in person, along with keeping up with each other virtually. She and her husband David are living up in the PNW nowadays, prompted by needing to take Leslie’s fair Scandinavian skin far from the SoCal sunshine, but we haven’t had a chance to get together since 2024 at the Oceanside Yacht Club for a book signing of Honeymoon at Sea (which Leslie set up). The traveling life is tough on socializing, especially when we are living on our boat without a car most of the year.

Next week I’ll be reviewing bestselling author Caitlin Rother’s latest, Staged, the sequel to Hooked (book 1 in her “Katrina & Goode” Series, which I reviewed here) as well as Tough Love: Modern Noir Romances, a new collection of noir tales from Thomas Shess, author of the acclaimed Cantina Psalms and intrepid blogger at Pillar to Post.

And for those who missed my direct email about the crowdfunding campaign I am helping with—raising money for Sunbelt Publications of San Diego to reprint twenty important regional books and remain a sustainable business—you may read more and donate here here; whether or not you donate, please pass on the info if you can!

hasta pronto!

First, I’ll explain what exactly the different types of editors do—and how to know when (or if) you need one. I’ll discuss what a developmental editor is, what a structure/content editor looks for, how a line editor approaches their job, and how that task differs from what copyeditors do. I’ll even talk about proofreading, though it is somewhat of a lost art, since we entered the era of digital publishing.

I’ll be concentrating on what you need to know about preparing your work to be edited. Why should you have to prepare your writing to be edited, you may ask? Because, when I get a manuscript that has been thoughtfully and carefully prepared, I (and any other editor) can do a much better job for you, especially in my first pass edit and evaluation, which I call a content and structure edit.

That initial pass is when I read your entire manuscript without knowing anything about it beyond the title (and maybe a query letter or some “back cover copy”). I am looking for any red flags—they depend a great deal on the book’s genre—and to be sure the book works just as it is, alert for elements that don’t work, like an expository-heavy opening, and for problems with the story arc, such as a boring “second act,” an inconclusive ending, or the protagonist’s journey having no emotional resolution.

Characters have their own arcs, and need a purpose for being, and sometimes I have to point out that a character doesn’t belong in the book, or that two characters could be merged into one. In memoir, you have to be careful with merging real people, but you can absolutely choose to leave out a character, in order for your story to flow better. The structure of a memoir is shaped by what you leave out, and a manuscript that includes everything you could cram into it will most likely need plenty of cutting.

The bottom line is, if I get a manuscript that has been re-read, rewritten, and self-edited by the author, plus Beta read (perhaps even workshopped or read to other writers) and reworked based on all that feedback, it is usually much tighter and cleaner; that means that I’m better able to spot the story’s structural flaws than if I’m reading a truly “rough” first draft where it is hard to even follow the story.

The needs of a writer who is planning to go the traditional path by querying agents are very different than the needs of someone who is planning to self publish or wants to approach one of the many fine hybrid publishers out there. No matter where you are in your publishing journey, if you haven’t yet worked with an editor—or you have worked with an editor but not too happily—you can learn a lot from this class.

If you are interested in registering for Understanding Editing (and Self-Editing), happening online this Sunday at noon on Zoom, go to this page on San Diego Writers, Ink site. The class is $36 for members and $42 for non-members.

The other class I’m teaching this Sunday (from 3-5pm) is Marketing and Promoting Your Work in Progress. All too often, aspiring authors spend months or years writing a manuscript, thinking that they will worry about marketing at some point “later on” when they are trying to sell their book to an agent or publisher, or even after their book comes out. So they keep their blinkers on and their head down and keep typing, giving no thought to creating a platform or any sort of a following.

Which reminds me of a PT Barnum quote: “Without promotion, something terrible happens…nothing.”

Agents and acquiring editors want good stories, but they want something more—definitely not nothing. No, you don’t need ten thousand followers on TikTok, but you should at least know what BookTok is, and where to find Bookstagram. And it isn’t just social media, since today’s authors need a newsletter, too—naturally, I prefer Substack to Mail Chimp and others, but everyone can choose their own platform.

There’s plenty you can do today to start marketing the book you are writing now, or that you already wrote but is not ready for the querying stage yet. If you have a book that already came out and sank without a ripple, you might want to learn a little more about book marketing, too. Marketing and promotion can be fun, and it definitely works—my “little book that could” is proof of that!

If you are interested in registering for Marketing and Promoting Your Work in Progress, this Sunday at 3pm on Zoom, go to this page on San Diego Writers, Ink site. The class is $36 for members and $42 for non-members. Considering that my private consultation fee for authors is $75 an hour, you’re bound to get your money’s worth in one or both of these two hour classes, and I’ll be taking questions at the end of each of the classes, when I can concentrate on your specific questions about your work.

Most of you know that I love Sunbelt Publications, where I was Editor-in-Chief and am currently Editor-at-Large; Sunbelt is a wonderful small press that focuses on the Southwest United States, chiefly Southern California, and especially San Diego County and and Baja California, Mexico. They publish and distribute so many great books and they are all on sale at their warehouse TODAY from 3pm until 7pm.

If you’re lucky enough to live in the San Diego area, and you’ve been meaning to visit Sunbelt’s Chula Vista warehouse, which is chock-full of books on the animals, birds, plants, history, culture, bike trails, architecture, and maps of southern California—and the region’s Indian tribes and bands (and their woven baskets)—then today is the day. This sale is like Christmas in July for book lovers! (If you can’t make it to Sunbelt today, stay tuned for another warehouse book sale later in the month.)

Meanwhile, the rest of us can go to their site: sunbeltbooks.com; there are plenty of book deals online, like bargain-priced (slightly shelf-worn) copies of some classic Sunbelt titles. They have dozens of fun children’s books too, like Lizards for Lunch and Bighorns Don’t Honk, plus coloring books, counting books, and even mission books.

And of course you can buy any of Sunbelt’s excellent new titles on their site, too, like Baja to Bering Vol. 1: La Paz to San Diego—a gorgeous hardcover coffee table book full of fascinating information about marine animals, especially whales—which I wrote about last month in my post, “Three Excellent New Books from Indie Publishers.”

They might even have a few copies of Honeymoon at Sea.

Hasta pronto!

Occasionally we all (separately and together) escaped to small towns in upstate or Connecticut to taste apples or wine and spend the weekend in a B&B. A girlfriend and I once flew to St Croix simply to sit on a sunny tropical beach for a long weekend in March, a month when the weather in NYC seems like it will never not be awful.

I loved visiting the charming and historic small towns of the Northeast—towns like Mystic, Connecticut, and Stowe, Vermont—and at some point in each weekend trip, I would always think, “I could live here.” But I also missed Manhattan when I left it, until the last time, when the timing was finally right and I left for good and didn’t look back—except in my writing, where NYC frequently appears in cameo roles, or stars in essays like this timely one from Memoir Land, set on the Fourth of July.

In The Emilys, by Heather Abel, a young wife and mother named Eve leaves Brooklyn with her two young children for a small town in Massachusetts; her musician husband visits them on weekends. Alone all day most days, Eve is lonely and unfulfilled but largely unmotivated. She reads, wanders the town’s streets, and dreams of change.

When Eve runs into an old friend she hasn’t seen since she was a young girl, it seems like fate; their fondly remembered girlhood friendship can be restored. Demeter, the friend, is a single mother, and her daughter suffers from an odd disorder—she cannot tolerate daylight (there are no vampires here, rest assured). The two women hang out with their children and Eve soon becomes somewhat obsessed with Demeter and her daughter’s illness. Then Eve hears of another person suffering from the same disorder, and another. And yes, the plot then thickens, but not in a way that feels artificial.

This gorgeously written novel is about—as you may have guessed—mothers and daughters and friends, and one dad. It is also about love and commitment, and illness and healing; about how healing is often not to be found in hospitals or clinics. Many people in this beautifully drawn fictional town want to find out what is afflicting The Emilys (the people affected with the same disorder as Demeter’s child, named for Emily Dickinson, a famous local recluse). The community comes together and some people come apart.

I read a wonderful, far-ranging interview by and , which I highly recommend, whether you listen to it before or after reading Abel’s novel. The title was “Can A Mother Have An Adventure?” and of course the answer is yes, but; and the but is going to be different for every person out there. In The Emilys, Eve needs an adventure, and an adventure finds Eve, which is a good and a bad thing.

My own mother was fond of adventures, and believed in bringing her three children along for the ride, from taking us to Europe backpacking for a summer, to taking us all over the West Coast in search of the perfect communal living situation. Looking back, all of this was formative and fabulous for me—I was not so much in favor of it, back when I was eight and nine. But I definitely learned as I grew up that taking risks and having adventures was a necessary and desireable part of life.

In Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum, Alan, a successful ad man, decides to have an adventure at home. What he opts out of is work and dressing up in a suit, and soon, even wearing shoes. Like a modern-day Bartleby, Alan prefers “not to”; not doing much of anything but beach-combing and pondering life, while hanging out in a shed on the grounds of his family’s big house in suburban Connecticut. With a live lobster for a roommate.

Vivian, his wife—who is sort of the main character of the book, as she does the most—is appalled; she is moving up in the world in her own way, and is near to being made a member of the most select women’s club in their very upscale neighborhood. Their two kids, who have their own issues, mostly like this new Dad better. The neighbors have very different reactions, which is part of the fun. Did I forget to say this is funny? Maum takes on everything from social status to climate change, all with a laugh.

Oddly, enough, though neither are what would be categorized as beach reads, these two novels are perfect for summer. Readable and loveable, in their own ways, both books tackle difficult subjects, like family expectations and the difficulty of making a marriage work while you raise children and try to also have a life for yourself.

I never had children (I have three nieces I adore), so my nuclear family experiences are chiefly in the rearview mirror, or were seen and felt at a distance. I’ve seen my brothers and cousins go through some spread-too-thin moments, especially when they were working while their children were little, and I’ve sympathized but probably couldn’t quite empathize, though I often “hurt for” them, as my Nena used to say.

What I have seen at first hand, in my own life and among my friends, is that it really is never too late to have a happy childhood, or a second one. Or to have yourself an adventure!

So, as a fan of adventuring, I just have to ask: What is it that you have been waiting to do? What are you waiting to attempt until you have more money, time, or attention? Or perhaps some external permission or validation?

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to comment), or, if you prefer to keep your thoughts private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your message. If you think either of these books would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below).

NOTE: Editor on Board—which turned three years old this week!—is always free, with no paywalls, but paid subscribers do get discounts off of my editing services (like 20 percent off a content edit, and a free pitch or query consult).

Welcome and thanks for subscribing. More editing tips for writers are coming in the next couple of weeks.

hasta pronto!

Readers seemed to be pretty interested in that post, so I thought I’d publish another in the series; the following was written by long-time client and friend, Eric Peterson, author of The Dining Car and Sunshine Chief (books 1 and 2 in the The Horace Button Series), two acclaimed novels that involve private train cars, mouth-watering cuisine, craft cocktails, and some very quirky characters.

Here’s Eric:

“Writing is a solitary vocation. You need more than a line editor who checks your manuscript for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors—you need a content editor, too, and here’s why:

Imagine that you’re an aspiring stand-up comedian. Dreaming of being a headliner, of touring the country’s hottest comedy clubs, you isolate yourself in a room for several months and write your new material.

Do you think for a minute you could step out of that room, catch the first flight to Las Vegas, and kill with that material—slay your audience!—at Vegas’s biggest nightclub? Of course not.

Jerry Seinfeld always works his new bits at a favorite local comedy club before taking his act on the road. Performing live before an audience in an intimate venue shows him where the laughs are and where the material needs more work. It gives him a chance to revise his bits and tags before hitting the road as a headliner.

Writers are well-advised to follow Jerry’s example. Think of a content editor as the first live audience for your new material.

For my last two novels, The Dining Car and Sunshine Chief, I’ve worked with Jennifer Silva Redmond, and it’s been a productive, successful partnership. Jennifer’s first pass on the manuscript is always in the capacity of content editor. I view her feedback report—what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be cut, what should be expanded upon—as an indispensable step in making the new manuscript publication-ready.

Working at the 30,000-foot level, Jennifer scrutinizes a manuscript for things like style, proportion, and consistency. Repetitions, tangents, too much backstory too soon, a major plot resolution in the wrong spot, one word that keeps turning up like a bad facial tic—these were all noted in Jennifer’s report on The Dining Car, and they all got addressed before the manuscript went for its line edit. In the end, we cut more than 10,000 words from the manuscript for The Dining Car. We cut the manuscript for Sunshine Chief by about 4,000 words.

As a fiction writer, I work under the self-imposed tyranny of a daily word-count goal, and I understand all too well the urge to see my newest book in the marketplace as soon as humanly possible—two compulsions that are antithetical to producing a quality product.

Today’s writers compete in a literary wild West. With the rise of self-publishing, there are few rules for what gets published, and even fewer filters. But readers haven’t changed. When they buy a book, they expect it to meet professional standards.

I’ve learned it pays to be patient and to invest heavily in editing your manuscript. A good content editor will tell you when your manuscript is ready for the world—ready to slay!—and, more important, when it is not.”

Thanks, Eric.

How did our partnership work out for Eric? Well, The Dining Car has won at least three top national literary awards, not to mention garnering a slew of five-star reader reviews on Amazon, where it continues to sell nicely. His sequel, Sunshine Chief, a modern mystery set in Tucson, is also winning readers’ hearts and critical acclaim.

I don’t think all those readers and critics would be quite so complimentary if Eric hadn’t been able to hear my criticism (and praise) clearly, and—even more important—been willing to work hard at cutting the manuscript, so that readers would be immediately hooked by his fascinating stories, as they have been.

So, working with a content/structural editor (some people use the term developmental editor) is definitely worth the time and money it takes. Because a good content editor can tell you what to keep and what to cut. So that you can focus on making your writing as good as it can be.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to go right to Substack to comment), or, if you prefer to keep your thoughts private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your message. Of course, if you think this post would be of interest to someone you know, you can share it in an email or message them the link (click share below). My Substack is always free, with no paywalls.

Editor on Board went over 600 subscribers this week, which is so exciting, and makes me feel like this Substack has really found its niche readership—after three years of weekly posts. In fact, I just saw on my dashboard that EoB added roughly 150 subscriptions in the last six months, going from 447 to 603 in just 180 days.

Welcome and thanks for subscribing. More book reviews and editing tips for writers are coming in the next couple of weeks.

hasta pronto!

Apprentice House is, as their site states, “the nation’s first entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book.”

I think that model is thrilling, because it’s focused on educating students about book publishing, and our industry desperately needs new blood; this sort of curriculum might engender more passion in the next generation of publishers and book-sellers than the time-worn process of hiring college grads as interns to read towering slush piles and answer phones for peanuts.

The latest title from Apprentice House is The Geography of Desire: A Memoir of West Africa (buy it at Bookshop.org) by Linda Gambill, which came out this week; I found it on NetGalley and read in an digital ARC. The book was transporting, and not just because the author travels, courtesy of the Peace Corps, to such an unusual setting—a devout Muslim village in The Gambia. I admired how Gambill (who went on to be an acclaimed photographer, a therapist, and an ESL teacher) managed to make the setting come to life on the page.

I felt the heat, saw the red dirt paths through the dense jungle, and tasted fresh mangoes, still warm from the sun. I experienced the hardship of gardening in the jungle, the thrill of riding a motorbike to the nearest ferry stop along the river, and the joy of falling in lust, as well as in love. The villagers I met were real people I laughed or argued with; the young women were open and friendly, the young men sometimes a bit too friendly. Endless insects and some religious intolerance were equally annoying.

Gambill, like most young Peace Corps volunteers, was searching for meaning and purpose; she left a complicated life behind her in the U.S., in the form of a toxic relationship. In The Gambia, she finds desire—see the title—but in the couple of years the memoir covers, she learns much more about herself (her own nature, as it were) than she does about the two young men she has relationships with.

If this fine book is a representative sample of the kind of titles that Apprentice House will be publishing, then I am bound to be bringing you more recommendations from their lists in the future.

Another independent publisher who turned a meaningful mission into a successful publishing house is Patagonia. If you’ve heard of Patagonia Books then you most likely know about Let My People Go Surfing, written by Yvon Chouinard, founder of the Patagonia clothing brand. The company’s books are nearly always centered on nature or outdoor sports (from rock climbing to surfing) or the “business” of saving what is left of the natural world. Their newest title covers all three subjects, with wit and style.

Water Lines: A Life on Marshes, Rivers, Seas and in the Rain by Riverhorse Nakadate, just came out this week. Nakadate is a man who seems to have done it all—his bio includes angler, musician, filmmaker, and conservationist—and he lives well, in the truest sense of the words. His essays focus on nature in a way that made me think of Edward Abbey, but the meandering pace of his travels, on foot and on wheels—from Texas to Minnesota and the Yucatan—put me in mind of William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways. One big difference between those two authors and Nakadate is fishing.

Nakadate loves fishing, wherever and whenever he can, but he lives to fly-fish. His essays about fishing follow the grand tradition of literary anglers—from Izaak Walton to Earnest Hemingway—but his love of nature comes through much more clearly and vividly. He’s also funny and irreverent—I was reminded of The River Why, a book I adored long ago, and now want to read again; perhaps that book’s humor is dated now, Water Lines is definitely not.

I have never tried fly-fishing, but caught many a fish with a fishing pole—or with a spear, when the water was warm enough to dive—when we were living in Baja. I’ve seldom thrown back a fish, unless they were way too small, something Nakadate does on a daily basis. In fact, he seldom eats the fish he catches, preferring to release them back into the stream or river or whatever body of water he’s currently fishing. If you have a fly fishing friend who is aware of how threatened most aquatic species are, this is the perfect book for them. Buy it directly from Patagonia Books.

But fisher folk aren’t the only ones who will treasure Nakadate’s book, because Water Lines is also a hardcover work of art, illuminated as it is in gorgeous full-color by watercolor illustrations from artist Sarah Lamar Stephens.

And speaking of gorgeous books, Sunbelt Publications has just released the first volume of Baja to Bering, by husband and wife team Doc and Ceci White, and Neva Sullaway. This first volume covers La Paz, Baja California, to San Diego, California.

Yes, the photos are amazing, but this is much more than a coffee-table book; it is a deep dive into the marine ecosystem of the West Coast of America, seen through the lens, and the pens, of Doc and Ceci White, long-time sea adventurers. Whales take center stage here, as the authors’ research vessel follows the gray whales’ titular migration path, but there’s a wealth of insights into other marine mammals, as well as sea birds and fish. The full-color hardcover is stunning and would make a perfect gift for the Baja buff, animal photographer, or nature lover in your circle.

Sunbelt has a wide variety of books and maps about Southern California and Mexico, especially Baja, as well as titles about the US Southwest—with books for for kids, too. Many titles are marked down right now as they attempt to clear out the warehouse to make room for the new fall titles that will arrive in late summer. You can shop the Chula Vista warehouse in person if you live in or near San Diego, or just click to shop the new and “shelf-worn” discount racks online; they ship anywhere in the US.

Sunbelt also carries Honeymoon at Sea, by Yours Truly, another memoir that puts nature front and center, so feel free to add a copy to your cart, or ask for it at your favorite bookstore. Ebooks and audiobooks are available at the usual online retailers.

Finally, Happy Juneteenth! I’m happy to be in green and sunny Port Townsend as it warms up to summer; not so happy to be back to living in the boatyard, but seemingly endless boat work is the price we sometimes pay to live the boating life.

Feel free to comment below (click the heart icon to go right to Substack in order to comment), or, if you prefer to keep your thoughts private, simply reply to this email which means that only I see your message. Of course, if you think this review or any of these books would be of interest to someone you know, share it with them in an email or message them the link (click share below).

Editor on Board is always free, with no paywalls, and should hit 600 subscribers this weekend (just in time for my three year Substack anniversary next week!). I am so grateful for all the likes and re-stacks, comments, and notes. Each of those responses is helpful, too, as a post’s engagement (likes, comments, shares, restacks) triggers Substack’s algorithm to help other readers find Editor on Board.

hasta pronto!