Tuesday, June 24th: GUEST SPEAKER, ANN BEARDSLEY

At the last meeting, we enjoyed a terrific presentation from guest speaker (and SWG Member) Jim Waller, on his latest book Tybee Sunrise and on the genre of Southern Fiction.

June is fast approaching. We will meet on Tuesday, June 10th, and then again on Tuesday, June 24th, when we will welcome guest speaker Ann Beardsley.

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Editing your own work is like trying to pick out the darker grains of sand from all the others on the beach. First, you have to see the different grains--and that takes a magnifying glass. Then you've got to decide what to keep--this one's dark; no wait, this one's darker. Or is it? What about this one? Editing works much the same way--one change can cascade into a whole mess of complicated chain reactions, all of which you might then have to undo. But as writers, we don't want to do that. We just want to make our writing better, tighter, clearer (although in some cases, we might want our characters to speak less better, less tight, less clear). What to do? Editing your own work is more difficult than editing someone else's because sometimes you look right over the issue. It's so clear in your head, you don't notice the fog surrounding your reader.

Ann Beardsley has been a professional freelance copyeditor for 15 years, specializing in nonfiction but with occasional forays into fiction. She's also the author of Tilted Windmills, a historical mystery (which she would edit again, if she had time). She is currently writing the Historical Dictionary of NASA and the Space Program with several of her Mars One cohorts and self-editing her own Backyard Weather Forecasting: How to Be Your Own Weather Forecaster.