July 1 is the first anniversary of SRD Editing Services' membership in the Editorial Freelancers Association. In the past year, editor Cortni Merritt has taken some awesome editor training and webinar sessions provided by the EFA, and we wanted to tell you a bit more about what's going on behind-the-scenes and in-front-of-the-screens at SRD Editing [...]
Tag: advice
Tool for Children’s Book Writers (& Parents!): Accelerated Reader Bookfinder
For more than 20 years, the Accelerated Reader (AR) program has been helping kids read children's books they enjoy, at their own pace. Readers of all levels can choose an AR book, read their way through it, then take a computerized quiz to assess their understanding and sometimes earn class credit. Educators across the US [...]
Creative Writing Tips: How to Watch Movies to Improve Your Storytelling
Sometimes, you just want to watch a movie for the fun of it. Sometimes, you want to watch a movie and learn from it. Specifically, if you want to spend some time enhancing your own creative writing skills by watching movies, I think there are a few ways that can be done. Now of course, movies aren't [...]
From “Writer” to “Author of a Book”: 4 Tips for Imposter Syndrome
There's a mental shift for writers when they start calling themselves an author of a book. Many writers seem to find some magic in the term, some kind of promise in the word. If you are among the group of authors with only one published book, there's good news. That's all it takes to call [...]
Random Writer Tool: 200 Years of Illustrated Women’s Fashion (Historical Fiction)
Random Writer Tools: Fashion in Historical Fiction Writers of historical fiction: rejoice! As a writer, you never know what kind of random tools that you find online will come in handy, and this article from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art ("the Met") is one such example! A team of researchers painstakingly reviewed fashion [...]
Two Common (and Easy-to-Use) Semicolon Rules
Semicolons: Who Needs 'Em? Oh! Semicolons. I, like many other editors, love them. But if you're a writer who finds the semicolon *the worst, * you have options available to you. One of those options is that you don't have to use any semicolons at all if you don't want to. I won't pressure you. But if [...]
Self-Editing Tips: Chicago Style Overview of Number Rules
Everyone comes to writing with a different background. Different instructors. Different books we've read over the years that influence us. Different advice we've been given and rules we've been told. But when it comes to writing for yourself as a self-published author or prepping a manuscript for traditional publication, you may need to go against [...]
Improve Your Writing Process
The Outcome Can Terrorize You If there's a thousand ways to do something, there's a thousand ways to do it right. And a thousand ways to muck it up. And the truth is -- you'll never find the process that works for you, without stumbling through a few of those. In On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, [...]
Creative Thinking & Writer’s Block: Oblique Strategies App
There’s a bunch of apps out there to help you be a better writer. You may want to try a few to see what works for you. May I recommend Oblique Strategies? It’s available for both Android (here) and Apple (here) This sleek, straightforward app is designed to give you simple food for thought and […]
The importance of charity
It's a difficult thing, a solid thing, a hard thing: to let go. To release. But, decisions change the world.