"What is heartbreaking is that there is still beauty in the world"

Since super awesome Cheyanne pimped me out on her blog , I figured I should appear semi-educated at least once. Don't worry, it probably won't happen again.

If anyone is in need of any editing, critiquing, or just a fresh opinion on a WIP (novel, novella, play, poems, articles, dissertations, essays...anything really), I am available. I will probably start charging for my services (the legal kinds, haha) soon, but just to get my foot in the door and generate some word of mouth I'll take in some pro bono cases (because I am just that generous). As per my qualifications:

I graduated from the University of Miami, magna cum laude, with Departmental honors in English last year. I majored in English (d'uh) and wrote a senior honors thesis on Byron, Coleridge and German philosophy entitled "The Nihilism of Supernatural Idealism:
Coleridge, Byron and the Balance of Contradictions" (yeah, it was fun. All 35 pages and year-and-a-half of research/writing), which was a nominee for the ACC Meeting of the Minds Thesis Conference. I completed my first year of university at New York University (I even toured the New York Times office once!), and I worked as a copy editor for the school newspaper there during the fall semester. I then copy edited UMiami's newspaper, The Miami Hurricane, for nearly 3 years, as well as write for the school magazine, Distraction my senior year.

Next year, I will hopefully be working on a joint graduate degree- Master's in Social Work and MBA in Public Administration, with a specialty in Child Welfare. I write poetry and boring scholarly articles, and every once in awhile dabble in short stories and novellas. As for my novel editing prowess, I edited all of Cheyanne Young's debut novel, Motocross Me, last year, and am currently editing her current WIP, Deadbeat.

Also, I'm very cute and always ready with a giggle-worthy comment. Why that's relevant? My own thesis adviser once told me that criticism doesn't have to be harsh, that there is always a more helpful way to express your ideas than through a scathing remark. For that reason, I will never use red ink when editing (it's been proven to negatively impact a writer's confidence); sometimes we may have to start back at Step 1 to get a problem corrected, but that's no reason to be a bitch about it. I may be a bitch a majority of the time, but I know how important my writing is to me and can figure y'all feel the same about your own.

So, if anyone is interested (or I get some more followers, haha), feel free to leave me a comment with your name, email and a bit about your WIP or whatever you want looked at; if you have a query ready, that'd be great, too!




For what seems like the past 3 months but is most likely much shorter, I've been reading Debra Dean's The Madonnas of Leningrad. I bought the book almost as soon as it came out, since she was a visiting Creative Writing professor at UMiami when I was there and we got some insane deal on it. Only got around to picking it up recently (I tend to buy books even though my reading list stands at about 4 pages right now). But I FINALLY finished the book yesterday!

I will admit, the writing style kind of threw me off a bit. There are no chapter titles, and the book flashes back to 1940s Leningrad and then forward to what seems like it is the present, though you later find out that it's a few months removed as well. Also, some of the grammar and diction may appear a bit...simple, I believe is best to describe it.

However, about halfway through the book, during a scene that seems like it doesn't carry very much weight- when a young Marina is watching the older museum babushka Anya pray to an empty Raphael frame- it suddenly slams into you: all of the pieces fit. Of course it seems a bit presumptuous to believe the Dean managed to get an imprint of one of the largest publishers in the world to publish her novel, a novel which sat atop the New York Times bestseller list, on some sort of fluke, but for a long while, I didn't see anything so extraordinary about the novel. But suddenly everything became clearer. The short, one-page chapters that were likely a part of Marina's script when she served as a museum guide in the Hermitage Museum, her "memory house," served as the backbone of the novels haunting closing scene- Marina finding the beauty in the simplest of things after having wandered away from her family during her final days. The simplistic language? The language barriers that Marina faced when attempting to translate the beauty that she finally re-accepted into her life from her usual Russian to English. Those moments that felt hazy to the reader were equally as hazy to an older Marina, fighting with dementia and Alzheimers but struggling to remember the war days that she never spoke to her children about.

For me, there were many poignant phrases that helped me through a difficult time in my own life. When I felt so confused, so sad, so angry, it was hard for me to remember that there was still beauty and happiness in the world; in fact, sometimes I wondered why they should exist at all. Despite the emo-sounding quality of that statement, it is a normal sentiment in a depressed mind. I know I have a tendency to really see myself in books and go along for the ride, but sometimes, it's the only way we know how to deal, through the words of others, the words you weren't able to find before.


**Post title from Debra Dean's The Madonnas of Leningrad, pg. 161