My life has been taken over. It no longer belongs to me. I tell you this because I’ve been neglecting this blog. That does not, of course, mean I haven’t been writing. The truth is, I’ve been doing more writing than ever before.

Thanks to the economy I have been

• Writing more for the various magazines I work on in order to save money on freelancers
• Doing more freelancing, which never turns out to be easy but instead involves me dragging interviews out of people kicking and screaming

Thanks to Authonomy.com I have spent just about every spare minute I have revising and adding chapters to Fiona vs. The Foot Tickler or hanging out on the sites forums. I also have another, far snarkier/newsier blog that I operate. Mind you, I also go to the gym, take a “Street Survival” class at a local dojo, and volunteer at an animal shelter twice a week. I almost never go straight home after work, and if I do, I leave again a few hours later. (My cats are not happy about this.)

Forgive me, if I’ve neglected this blog. Today, however, I stumbled across a post on an Authonomy forum that I just had to share. These days, all roads lead to Twitter, and this post is no exception. I think I’m finally starting to understand that site. The forum post referred to an interview with a Ballantine editor. For a writer there is nothing more interesting than the inside of an editor’s brain. Technically, I’m an editor. That’s my job title, and several times a month, I do actually edit other writers’ submissions, and frankly, I think I’m pretty good at it. Editing an article is a far cry from editing a book, though. And editing an article you assigned is way different than accepting and editing a manuscript someone thought-up and wrote themselves before they even knew who you were.

As a writer, you can easily detach yourself from the article about a new website someone else assigned you. It’s different when it’s the book you’ve been slaving over in secret for years. Chances are if you’re writing articles about websites you’re doing it to pay for the apartment and computer you need to write your novel, so I suspect that forum post and glimpse into an editor’s brain will be useful for you!