by Jamie Chavez | May 2, 2013 | Words & Language
If you’ve been coming ’round here for awhile, you know I have a thing for the dictionary. There’s, like, so much information in such a small space! It’s so efficient! And it contains all the building blocks for my work in one place! Aaaah. But the dictionary’s a...
by Jamie Chavez | Mar 14, 2013 | Words & Language
For the uninitiated, that word’s pronounced “crack.” In fact, that word is crack. Meaning it’s an English word (crack) borrowed into Irish (Gaelic) as craic; then that Irish spelling was reborrowed into English (starting with Hiberno-English, which is, simply, the...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 28, 2013 | The Writing Craft, Your Editor Says …
I have spent a good bit of my life trying to learn how to write well. Writing well, I think, is one part practice (those 10,000 hours), one part reading other writers (good ones), and one part the study of fundamentals (grammar and craft). There may be other...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 7, 2013 | Your Editor Says …
In the art world they say a work is open for interpretation by each person who views it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. And so it is in the editorial world. If you give a manuscript to five different editors, you’ll get five different sets of...
by Jamie Chavez | Jan 17, 2013 | Miscellany, The Arts & Media
As I was writing my recent post on the words and phrases and concepts William Shakespeare contributed to Western culture, I started considering how interesting life is when one knows such things. I mean, do you smile when I write “I’d rather be right than be...
