Dear Exalted Editors, I recently went to a science fiction literary convention, and I had the chance to mingle with established authors and emerging authors from all walks of life. It really drove home the fact that not all emerging authors are like me. Specifically, it made me think about the different experiences some of these writers were bringing to their writing careers. The author/editor combination is one that I'm seeing more and more frequently. In this case, either a published author decides to become an editor, or an editor decides to give publication a shot. I can see the benefits to both of these transformations. Authors who have worked for years on perfecting their own writing should have a fairly good eye for making corrections in other people's work. Editors who have slaved over manuscripts in various stages of polish should be ahead of the game when it comes to polishing their own. Have the author/editors here found this to be so? What other benefits are t...

Language is not static. Language evolves over time. Words come en vogue (or are invented) and some words become passé or even archaic. As language changes, so do the “rules” of its use. For example: someone says to you that “every sentence ends with a period and that rule will never change.” Oh, really? That’s news to me! Here are examples where a period does not end a sentence: It ends with a question mark It ends with an exclamation point It ends with a colon “Never start a sentence with a conjunction.” But why not? This can be a personal preference or a “house rule” for a publisher or publication, but it is not a law and if you break it you go to jail. My husband, who also edits, follows this “rule” but I don’t. We still manage to have a happy, loving marriage despite this difference in our editing preference. “Sentence fragments are wrong.” Baloney. What kind of writing are you doing? I would say this is true for academic and professional writing, but in fiction writing, ...