Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

This year at YeahWrite our free workshop focuses on everything BUT the writing, with an editorial series that’ll take the words right out of your mouth and put them on the page. Of course, we’re also including some tips on writing so that the eventual edits to your story won’t be the heartbreaking kind where you have to remove an entire character or plot arc and re-evaluate every interaction in your 300,000 word novel.

Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And speaking of navigation, don’t worry: our Navigating Prompts workshop from last year hasn’t gone anywhere. You still have a handy tool to refer to when you’re stumped by a prompt or need help on how to approach it or what judges might be thinking as they read your story.

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month (usually on the Second Sunday) we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

It’s a twofer!

Last month may have had 22/02/2022 in it, but this is the month you’re getting your twofer. In March we’re going to talk about things you should be noticing and looking for as you write. But those are also the things you’ll be looking for as a developmental editor if someone else hands you a manuscript, so start building that dev edit checklist now!

March is all about not losing sight of the forest for the trees. That is, not getting so excited about your sentences, fight scenes, cool historical details, or characters that you forget to write about, you know, the story. This applies equally to fiction and nonfiction, especially creative nonfiction, so keep both of those hats on as you read. When you add in your writing hat and your editing hat, you’re in a lot of hats this month. Sorry. At least it’s still cold outside?

Deforestation

Look, let’s save some time by developing a language to talk about what we need to say this month, ok? The easiest way to do that is going to be using our existing metaphor of forests and trees. We’ll refer to big issues as forests, and the minutiae of writing as trees. For those of you who benefit from examples (and checklists), here’s what we mean. Yes, you can copy/paste this list of forests for your own use. Yes, if you suggest that other people use the list we’d love credit. Ready?

Trees

spelling

dangling participles

whether a character is described consistently

sentence structure

that one perfect adjective (even if it’s “liminal”)

the exact words one character says to another

whether the blocking in the fight scene is realistic

exact dates

less than/fewer than

one or two spaces after a period

serial commas

“filler” words

bold and italics

internal cross-references (“see footnote 15” or “see page 5”)

chapter titles

formatting

We’re really committing to this metaphor now

Whether you’re dev editing or keeping an eye on your own work as you go, it’s important to take a second and figure out what kind of a forest you’re in, and what kind you WANT to be in. Are you working with a few trees on a stony crag, a minimalist story with very little plot, focused on the inner landscape of a single character, or are you in a dense jungle of overlapping motivations, leaping seamlessly between points of view as each character’s desires drive them toward the inevitable plot climax (with or without dragons)? Or are you somewhere in the middle, perhaps in a sort of mysterious forest with winding paths, few of which are visible at any time but all of which are necessary to get you where you’re going? And are you sure your destination is in this forest?

Once you’ve identified what should be in the big picture, it’s easier to spot it if it’s missing. If you’re the writer, it’s your job to include it as soon as you know it’s not there. Trust us, it’ll be easier to do it ASAP than later. If you’re the editor, you should probably point out the gap in the landscape, and  suggestions for how to fill it in. Let’s walk through the forests we just identified, and make sure you’re familiar with them. We’ll also talk about a few paths you can take.

Does anything happen?

No, seriously. As you read, keep asking yourself if something is HAPPENING. Are characters actually moving around? Are they doing things? Or do they sometimes enter or leave rooms but mostly spend time thinking about things and having feelings about that? Note: if the author actually intends this, lean into it. But often the author thinks they’re writing an entirely different sort of story.

Trees to prune: how much time do characters spend sitting down, standing up, physically expressing emotion, or going to sleep and waking up? How often is the body doing one thing but the mind is somewhere else entirely? Cut these spots back to make room for the character to act in the present, instead of just thinking about actions that aren’t happening. Tell or show an emotion once instead of three times (“I wasn’t sure how to wrap words around the shape of my grief.” instead of “I was sad. I couldn’t breathe. A single tear rolled down my face. I wanted to speak, but everything I said hurt.”)

Paths to take: consider starting the story in a different place or time. If the entire story is a flashback, ask if it really needs any of the present day framing, or if it can just be told as a story. It’s also possible to tell a story about the past without paragraphs and paragraphs at the beginning and end explaining what the character looks like now and has been doing since then. A little “I know now that he was getting a drink when he went to the basement, but at the time it seemed to me…” goes a long way.

Do events take place in a reasonable amount of time?

Estimating how long something will take is a thing you do every time you have to be somewhere “on time.” You know how long the commute takes, you know what errands you need to run on the way (and how long they take), you know how long it should take to get ready to go, and you know what time you need to be there. Don’t just ignore that skill when you sit down to write! If your story is supposed to take place over the course of a day (or week) there’s only so much your character can do in that time. Remember to leave time for sleep. And if your story takes place in a real-world setting you have some easy online tools that will tell you how long it takes to get from one place to another! (Looking at you, Stephenie Meyers AND EL James. There’s a known distance between Portland, Seattle, and Forks. It’s FAR.)

Conversely, are you allotting too much time to an event? Sometimes a lot of important thinking or exposition happens during a relatively compact event like sitting in the pick-up line for school, or eating a snack. The fact that you’ve got a lot of writing about the event doesn’t mean that the event itself takes more than ten or fifteen minuets, so don’t forget to figure out what your character is doing for the rest of the afternoon or evening.

Trees to prune: You don’t have to include every single thing that your characters do in the story, but if big chunks of time pass you should probably mention what they’re up to. Consider sitting down with a timeline or spreadsheet and looking for where events cluster up to see if you’ve ensured they all can fit in a day (or hour).

Paths to take: You don’t have to (and in fact, please don’t) allot writing space to events based only on how much time the event takes. (Nonfiction writers, this one’s for you.) It’s ok to spend more space on important events and less on “I went to school for a week and nothing much happened.” But know if you’re putting too much in a day.

Pacing generally

Didn’t we just talk about this? No, not really. We talked about what could fit in an hour, day, or week of “book time.” Now we’re talking about whether all your events should happen in that span of time. Every now and then, step back and take a look at your story. Do the equivalent of that Google satellite view for your forest. Are the trees spread out more or less evenly or are there distinct clumps with nothing in between? While you don’t want to make everything happen at a uniform pace (which can make even horror stories dry and boring) neither do you want to crowd all your plot points into one or two clumps with very little happening in between.

Trees to prune: Do you see long stretches of time where the story is mostly just describing where characters are going and what they’re doing, but it’s not moving the plot (including any interpersonal issues they need to work out) forward? Consider summarizing those to make room to fully describe the important things. Look also for places where important actions, thoughts, or feelings are half-described or alluded to in ways that make the reader have to guess what’s happening as that point slides past. Slow those spots down and make sure there’s enough material for the reader to really understand what’s happening and why it’s important.

Paths to take: Don’t forget when you’re looking at pacing that there may be more than one kind of “tree.” You may have a mystery plot, a love interest, and a family reconciliation happening, and they should all get room to grow and bloom. It may help to think of Lord of the Rings – there’s a plot with a war and a plot with a couple hobbits trying to get to a volcano, and the book/movie moves back and forth between them so that you don’t have to spend a bunch of time watching hobbits walk, but you’re also not exhausted by endless battle descriptions. Adding an additional conflict to your story can, ironically, improve the pacing sometimes. If you’re dev editing and you see this happening, look for a subplot to encourage the author to bring forward.

Do all characters feel fully developed and have their own distinct motivations?

We’ve said it before and we’ll probably mention it again but one really easy way to make sure a story doesn’t depend on lazy writing and cliches (we’ll get to tropes in a minute) is by letting each character be a fully realized human (or alien, or animal) being. While it’s not important to know every detail of every character’s backstory, if they’re worth naming you should know a few things about them. What do they want out of life? What do they look like? What do they loathe? Look at your forest: is one tree tall and flourishing while the rest are, um, maybe bushes? It’s fine to have a central character, but not at the expense of every other character’s humanity. And when you fall back on shortcuts to describe characters instead of knowing things about them, you’re almost certainly going to start unconsciously replicating problematic media that you’ve been inundated with. [That’s a nice way for me to say “you’re about to write some racist stuff, don’t.” /rbg]

Trees to prune: Compare what the reader knows about the characters.  There may not be room in the story to give every character a full story arc with character development, but there’s room to at least imply that they have a rich inner life and some dreams and ideas of their own. Make sure the reader at least knows what characters look like. (Through no fault of yours, there’s a long and white supremacist tradition of a “default character” having a certain appearance and backstory in stories written in English. One of your jobs is to actively dismantle that tradition and let the populations of your stories be representative of the populations in the world it takes place in, whether that’s ours or another one.)

Paths to take: Write each character’s name down as you encounter them. Stop periodically and think about what you know about each character. Notice especially who gets a name and who doesn’t. There are so many examples of stories where the main (usually cis het white male) character has a name and is fully developed but supporting characters (often marginalized in some way whether as a matter of race or gender or some other factor) are unnamed or undeveloped – even if pleasing them or getting revenge for their death is supposed to be the main character’s entire motivation.

Are characters staying in character?

This is one that’s a lot easier if you know things about the characters, right? This particular forest is a complicated subject- what’s “in character” anyway? But generally, this means does each character act in ways that make sense for a person who knows what they know and wants what they want? And if they’re acting in ways that seem strange, is there an in-story reason for it? For example, generally if you pick up a Batman comic you’re not going to be reading a story about the main character robbing a bank. I mean, for one thing he’s a literal billionaire, why would he? For another, he’s a vigilante and is overall meant to be fairly anti-crime. So if you want to write a caper about robbing a bank, you’ll need to either have a different main character, someone who wants and needs something that robbing a bank will get them, or figure out what circumstances could make Bruce “I sleep on a pile of money in case my money gets lonely” Wayne need to rob a bank.

Trees to prune: Look for places where the plot and characters seem incompatible, or where character actions don’t make sense given what we know about the character. Would a timid child walk up to a stranger and start asking questions that lead to a big expository dialogue, or do you need to put that information in the story some other way?

Paths to take: When characters (yes even minor characters) make major decisions, there should be a reason. Keep an eye out for characters that are doing things that make no sense (like changing a job or changing schools or moving) and figure out what in the story’s world needs to be altered to make that decision make sense gfiven what you know about the character and their likes and dislikes.

Is there room for characters to make wrong decisions

Not going to lie, we considered just typing in a few author names and calling this section done. The point is, nobody likes to read about a character that’s right all the time. It’s boring. Leave some room for your characters to make wrong choices or wrong guesses based on what they know. Let them guess wrong about who the murderer is, and treat someone unfairly for several chapters. Let there be story and emotional consequences for that guess. This can keep the stakes high and readers anxious to see how it all comes out without resorting to the tired trope of characters who refuse to communicate with each other ever. You can generate a lot of story tension by making your characters fallible. Even in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes was wrong a nontrivial amount of the time. Sure, he solved almost every case, but it wasn’t a straight line from A to B, and the character you spent the most time with, Watson, wasn’t at all afraid to be wrong.

Trees to prune: The character who is always right. While they may have all the information they need to make a correct decision, ask yourself how likely it is that they’ll be able to spot and prioritize this information correctly the first time. Are there other, equally reasonable, suppositions? You don’t have to derail the whole plot in favor of the character being wrong, but let them screw up once in a while.

Paths to take: Make sure there are some low-stakes decisions as well as the central choices necessary to the plot. Even wrong choices like wearing shoes that work poorly with the weather or terrain can make a character more relatable. And sometimes a character can make a right decision for the wrong reasons, or use the wrong methods to get to a correct result, which is interesting to explore.

Are there stakes for failure?

How many times have you read a whole story where the central character is extremely worked up about taking or not taking an action, but their worst case scenario isn’t bad at all? While this is a totally useful way to show that your main character has panic attacks, it’s not usually enough to keep a reader engaged. Imagine you’re reading a story about a test. A test that the character is very stressed out about. The entire story is about their preparation for the test and the actual test day. And the test has five questions and be not even worth one percent of their grade. Now, the way we just told that story, the stakes are a humorous twist. But if you’d known all along that even if the narrator failed the test it would have no effect on their life or even their grade, would you have finished reading? Probably not. While not every story has to involve the possible end of the world (looking at you, MCU), the stakes need to be high enough for the character to bother doing anything about the problem, and for the reader to invest in the outcome.

Trees to prune: Examine decisions that characters have to make. In each case, there should be consequences for choosing wrong. Consequences that will matter to the character. If those consequences aren’t there, you’ll need to find a way to raise the stakes. In the case of the hypothetical student, maybe they have a parent who demands perfection, or a gift has been promised if they ace this specific test. Conversely, is every decision a world-ender? [I almost made it to the end of this section without mentioning coughJimcoughButcher but not quite. /rbg] And if so, are there any personal stakes for the character or are they likely to actually be fine afterward? [yeah, I was never gonna make it /rbg]

Paths to take: Any decision is interesting if the stakes are high enough. And no decision is very interesting if there are no stakes. Make sure there are a variety of priorities in characters’ lives, and for extra interest, make the stakes and outcomes different for different characters. That is, one character’s positive outcome may be another character’s negative one. Can you think of an example of that in a story you love? (For bonus points, make it more than just “the hero and villian want the opposite thing.)

Are outcomes realistic?

Without getting into the difference between character perception (oh no if I fail this test it will go on my Permanent Record) and reality (but it’s 2% of my grade in an elective class), its worthwhile to take another look at decision points and see if the character is choosing between things that could realistically happen. While it’s nice to write a story about foster children being adopted by their foster parents after the foster parents kidnap them and run across state lines, the realistic thing is that those people are definitely disqualified from fostering or adopting now. When you’re reading a story, read for two things: is the outcome emotionally satisfying, and could it happen within the rules laid out for the world in which the story takes place? (Yes, this includes this world, with all its laws and regulations.) While you’ll need to bend rules sometimes (your protagonist becomes President!) there’s a limit (but they can’t be 18! they have to be over 35!) to how far you can bend them before you lose credibility with your reader.

Trees to prune: Do the research, whether you’re the author or editor, to see how likely an outcome is. Or what the real stakes for a decision should be. If your superhero character makes a decision that results in a dislocated shoulder, there’s going to be a physical limit on how useful that arm is, no matter how strong their willpower. If you need to set Bruce Wayne up for that bank robbery, know that he’s probably not going to be actually able to gamble all his money away-but he could have it all frozen by the IRS.

Paths to take: If you’re not experienced enough to tell if an outcome is realistic – as author or editor – find someone who is and ask. The story is probably more important than your ego.

Is all the information that you need to understand the story contained on the page?

This is one of those moments where the outside editor has a strong advantage. You can tell really quickly if you understand what’s going on or if you’re just guessing. As an author, it’s harder, because you know so much that isn’t on the page yet. And nonfiction authors have it hardest of all, because they have to prune from a definite set of real but incredibly irrelevant facts until all that’s left is the story. Still, as you go, it’s a good idea to make sure you’ve put in enough roots to hold your trees up. One of our favorite examples is the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (yes, it took them that long to decide to make the first novel into a movie). In the book, master spy 007 is about to do something incredibly cool in a high-stakes card game. But Fleming understood that most of his readers wouldn’t know how to play baccarat, much less the chemin-de-fer version. So he spends a couple pages teaching the reader to play baccarat before moving on to Bond’s gamble. Without that background, one of 007’s major character development moments would have been wasted. While you don’t have to put in three pages of card tutorial, the same principle applies: the reader needs to understand what’s happening to appreciate it.

Trees to prune: Again, easier for editors, but as an author you can still look for moments when what you know in your head is critical to understanding what’s on the page, and add that in if it isn’t there yet.

Paths to take: As an editor, don’t assume that your confusion is because you missed something or aren’t smart enough to “get” what the author is doing. Ask for the information. Of course, go back and re-read to see if you missed something, but if you did, consider ways in which that information could be brought forward or rewritten to stick with the reader.

What tropes are being used and how?

Let’s get this out of the way early on: tropes aren’t bad. Not inherently, anyway. They’re like pieces of code that can be recycled into many programs, these themes in storytelling that we return to over and over. The important thing to do as a writer or editor is to be familiar with a lot (and I mean a lot) of them, and to understand which ones are likely to implicate racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc. so that you can nip those in the bud.

Trees to prune: Don’t let a trope reference substitute for the real work of character or plot building. If your hero is a Science Hero, they still need to have real motivations other than “is it shiny” and “can I lick it.” (Yes, all you real scientists out there, I see you, but isn’t Jurassic Park more compelling as a story about redeeming mistakes than “look what I can do”?)

Paths to take: Know if you’re looking at a trope. Then decide if it serves the story better to lean into or subvert the trope. Either way can work well, but this should be done deliberately, just like the decision to write “gotta” instead of “got to.”

What artifacts of other storytelling are present and do they implicate social harms?

Yes, this falls right onto the tail end of tropes. Yes, there’s a lot of overlap. Yes, it’s worth repeating. When a story borrows artifacts from other stories or mythologies, it runs the risk of repliocating harms in those mythologies. Let’s take a simple and probably common enough to be understood example: the goblins in Harry Potter. Do I have literally any idea if Jo Rowling herself thinks that Jews have big noses, hoard gold, or secretly run the world? Nope. But I know she replicated a mythical creature that has for a long time depended on antisemitic stereotyping for its root imagery. So if you end up with a big-nosed, gold-hoarding, miserly race of bankers who run a lot of the government through manipulation from behind the scenes… you’ve put antisemitism in your book. You didn’t just bring forward the idea of a creature, you brought forward the whole freight of its mythology and its origins. And this is true whether or not you made that creature up. So before you put pieces of other stories in your own work, examine where they came from and what’s clinging to their coattails. The same, obviously, goes for editors. When you see an external reference, make sure the thing referenced isn’t problematic, or isn’t referenced in a problematic way. Another great example is the Victorian fascination with China and Japan. Does it add some beautiful trappings to a steampunk story? Yes. Are you replicating Orientalist ideas and tropes in the way your characters interact with these trappings? Quite possibly. Look for those. Root them out if you can. Consider writing something else or changing some visuals if you can’t.

Trees to prune: Know the problematic references in mythologies you replicate. See if the mythology holds up without them, or if you should choose something else; a mythos or creature that can’t exist independent of the problematic underpinnings is just going to infect your work. Also note the problematic ways in which outsiders have interacted with in-group stories and mythologies (i.e. can and do you have a spirit animal? what is a “shaman” really? are you using that word right? do you know?) and do the work to see if you’re replicating those harms.

Paths to take: Flag anything that you didn’t personally make up and consider getting a sensitivity reader on that early or at least doing some google searching before you invest too deeply. As a dev editor, know what’s outside your competency and when to refer. Get your referral network together. Maybe make a spreadsheet of who’s good at what.

Is POV consistent?

An easy one, at last! Kidding, this forest is deceptively hard to see. As you write, or as you read, really notice what the narrative voice of the story knows. Make sure that all the information given in the story is within the competency of that voice. If you need to break voice, figure out how to do that. Ngaio Marsh wrote mysteries mostly in third-person limited, where the narrative voice was closest to the investigator. But now and then the reader needs a piece of information that the investigator doesn’t have, to keep tension high, such as a planned next murder, or finding out the investigator is on the villain’s trail. So she’ll flip narrative voice for that chapter, opening with a phrase like “meanwhile” or “The murderer sat…” (So, for that matter, does Patricia Cornwell.) You know immediately that the POV has flipped, or that you’ve stepped outside the normal POV for the book, and that you’ll probably go back. So “is the POV consistent” doesn’t mean “do you have the same POV throughout,” what it means is “is the reader given information that matches the information that can be given in the narration with the POV as established, or do you need to switch POVs to give more information and if so how do you do that?” You can, of course, put everything in third person omniscient. Or you can switch POVs every chapter to keep the focus tight and on one character. Whatever you choose, though, make sure the reader isn’t getting extra information, and that the POV of the story can be used to give the reader enough information.

Trees to prune: Enormous expository paragraphs are rarely necessary. There are, of course, exceptions: brief scene-setting forewords to science fiction, the denouement in a detective story, and so forth. But it’s rare that you’ll have a narrative voice that’s conducive to those expository paragraphs, which is actually useful as both writer and editor- keeping the narrative voice consistent will keep you from infodumping and encourage a spread of information throughout the story (remember pacing? this is pacing.).

Paths to take: Figure out what the point of view you’re reading is best at. Then figure out what you need, and see if those match. If not, you may need to make some major revisions. As you do, don’t lose sight of what information you need to include!

Chekhov’s gun

If you’re unfamiliar with “Chekhov’s gun” it’s from a famous quote that basically says if you put something into a story, you need to use it. It’s Chekhov’s gun because the original quote says that if a gun is in act 1 of a play, it should be fired in act 2. But this doesn’t just apply to guns. If a car breaks early in your story, later on your characters should need and not have it. Or if a character buys something early on in the story, they should use or wear it later. Nonfiction writers and editors, this is a great rule you can use in reverse to tell if you’ve pruned out enough extraneous facts: get rid of the unfired guns, and you’ll have the core of your story. Or, if we’re sticking with our forests metaphor, every tree you plant should grow. Some can even be chopped down later for firewood.

Trees to prune: If you don’t need an object or fact later in the story, you know what you can cut out to make wordcount!

Paths to follow: Whether you “need” an object or fact, and how it’s used, are not hard and fast rules. Sometimes an action like a purchase tells you something about a character, and you need to know that thing about the character to understand a motivation later. That’s still “using” the action, even though the character doesn’t specifically take out and utilize the purchased thing. But ultimately, the reader’s knowledge of the characters and story should build, not stagnate, so make sure to keep using things that are put in the story instead of reducing the story to a bunch of one-off isolated incidents where no character learns or grows. If you’re an editor and you’re looking at a story like that, bring it to the author’s attention with suggestions for how later acts can be informed by earlier ones.

It’s not time for logging yet

There’s a time to look at the individual trees that make up your writing, the nitty gritty of sentences and structure and style guides, and we promise we’ll get there. But this month we’re focusing on forests. Whether you use these checklists as a writer to make sure you’re staying on target as you go, or as a developmental editor or beta reader who needs to check for plot holes rather than fiddly details, you’ll do fine if you look away from the trees and let yourself experience the forest.

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society on Sunday, March 13 at 2:00 pm US Eastern Time.

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place on the (usually; we’ll warn you!) second Sunday of every month at 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time. Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

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Rules of Order. Order of Rules. Something like that.

Wondering what the next meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society will be about? Here's our club agenda for the year.

September:

• Read: Editing nonfiction: how much is enough?
• Watch: September meeting

October:

• Read: Line- and copyediting: getting picky
• Watch: October meeting

November:

• Read: Finishing touches and final checklists: more than just spellcheck!
• Watch: November meeting

December:

• Read: DIWhy? what you can (and can't) do yourself
• Watch: December meeting

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me

About the author:

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me

About the author: