last updated: 2024/05/16

Behold! the list of Questions I have Answered! (Frequently?)

Is this FAQ accurate and up-to-date?
Where do you get your ideas?
What’s with all the typos, Anna? Don’t you have an editor?
Can you answer any of these questions succinctly?

Is this FAQ accurate and up-to-date?

No.  For two reasons:

1. The readership of this blog is…small, therefore I haven’t had any questions, let alone frequent ones (also this site doesn’t currently have a contact form) – ergo, all questions being ‘answered’ are fictitious.

2. FAQs are fundamentally out-of-date sorts of documents.  You write one, intending to make it all spiffy and thorough and informative, but you lose steam partway through.  In fact, you’ve got to be careful not to seed too many questions into the document up front, as you risk them doing little more than publicly lingering, unattractively, as failed reminder notes because you never got around to answering them.  Even the date-last-updated date is suspicious on an FAQ.  I probably forgot to update it the last time I added anything to the page.

Where do you get your ideas?

I don’t think I have ever been asked this.  However, I am given to understand that it is a question writers are commonly asked, and, even with little so far published (you all have the right edition of my high-school’s yearly literary magazine, yes?) I’m pretty sure I am a writer.

My ideas come from…my brain?

My ideas come from…all of the historical and science facts, literature, and raw sensory input that has been shoved into my brain over the full course of my life?!

Actually, there are two methods that I use when I really want to generate an idea (although the question there, of course, is why, considering that my ideas like to hang around and accumulate like rats breeding in the belly of a ship, and then they whisper at me that they’re not getting the attention they deserve – WHY would I want to purposely generate more?):

Method 1:  Pick something I don’t care much for, or that I think is fundamentally problematic, and find a way to make. it. great.  Annoyingly, I use this method a lot with beading and find I am more likely to use the center-components I think are ugly than the ones I think are pretty…why! to what end!  But my brain really likes a puzzle, especially if it’s got a really hard boundary or two to fight my way off of.  For stories, the resulting ideas are sometimes meh (I’m really just not interested in writing something post-apocalyptic), but other times feel like some of my most compelling – IF ONLY I COULD WRITE THEM ALL FASTER!

Method 2:  Take two or more things that have little to do with each other but that I think are awesome! and smash them together (incidentally, this is also usually how method 1 ends up actually getting accomplished).  Example: Marigolds + Snakes = Yes!  Other example: Alpine-groundcovers + People-who-stand-around-covered-in-bees = …Actually I still haven’t figured how to make that one work, it clearly needs a third thing…

What’s with all the typos, Anna?  Don’t you have an editor?

Oh.  So many ways to answer this question.  So here are all the different ways:

1) I am sorry.  Some of you see all the typos when you read a thing.  But I do not see them, therefore I do not fix them, therefore they linger in my writing to torment you.  Especial apologies to my mother, who will see them all.  But if I’ve posted a thing with typos, it is because I do not see them.  (Also, some of the extra commas are actually intentional, even if you don’t think they should be there…)

2) No, I do not hire an editor to edit my blog-posts, because that would be weird (and would also require me to interact with another human).  Be happy I do at least re-read my writing before I hit ‘Post’.

3) Yes, I have published stories to this website’s blog, but before I answer the question, consider that the editor you are asking about is maybe not the editor you are looking for.  When I conjure in my mind a movie version of an Editor, I conjure a magical person who argues with the author into making their story the absolute best story it could be, and who also returns to the author a densely marked-up manuscript pointing out everything that should be fixed and how.  In reality (as I understand it) such a magical person is actually as many as three different people doing three completely different levels of editing from a) pointing out scenes that should be tossed or re-written, to b) pointing out characters that had blue eyes at the beginning of the story, but brown eyes at the end, to c) correcting all the typos.  If we were talking about scientific publication, these three people would be a) an anonymous peer-reviewer (who you argue with, snarkily, in bullet-points passed back and forth like classroom notes via the teacher assigned magazine editor); b) an anonymous peer-reviewer (to whom you are eternally grateful they actually went to the trouble to check the units on all of your equations – can you believe such angels walk this Earth?!); and c) a copy-editor for the magazine (who mostly hounds you mercilessly about getting your manuscript to match the formatting conventions of the magazine).  I.e., if you are troubled by typos (or formatting inconsistencies), it is the humble copy-editor you are most desperately missing.  When their work is done well, it is invisible.

4) But no, I do not hire even a copy editor for anything I have published (posted up to this website) so far.  See above about how that would require interacting with another human.  And, it would have to be a human I don’t even know, since, even though my mother will see all the typos, we all know it’s generally a bad idea to hire family members for stuff one is liable to get angsty about.  (Trying to help my kids with homework is hard enough, and that’s supposedly for free.)

5) I don’t have any sort of formal editor, but for at least some stories I have a husband and a couple friends who occasionally provide me story feedback AND I AM VERY GRATEFUL WHENEVER THEY ARE WILLING TO! (especially since my stuff tends to be not short).  Thank you, husband and friends!  (Do not blame them for anything; they absolutely are not copy-editors.)

Can you answer any of these questions succinctly?

Ummm…