I have some exciting new projects involving books! Won’t spill all the beans until things are completed, but here’s a sneak peek at the latest package to arrive at my house to help me in my work. Essentially, I’ll be penning some back matter and writing catalogs for a children’s book publisher.

In other news, I just proofread the Mud Cakes cover for Bona Fide Books, and its release is forthcoming. Jason Schossler‘s book tour starts early October, so check his site for details.

Heading to San Francisco this weekend and will be on the hunt for my face on a bus… I hear I’ve been riding around the city (around Market Street) but have yet to see it in person. I realize this is the smallest photo known to man, but a friend took it from his phone and it’s the only one I have. Let me know if you see me!

In the past few weeks for Smith + Jones I’ve proofread a conference planner for the North Lake Tahoe Visitors & Convention Bureau and written a Zephyr Cove Restaurant ad, for which my research included strolling around the resort, watching the MS Dixie II set sail (pictured above), and eating a nice dinner on the restaurant’s deck. It’s a tough life, people.

I just finished proofreading the English-translated memoir of former Basque Country lehendakari (president) Juan Jose Ibarretxe for UNR’s Center for Basque Studies. I’m not a fan of politics in general, but I’ve got to say I really enjoyed Ibarretxe’s style and candor in this book. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts.

In regards to the Basque Country/Spain relationship:

Two sentences sum it up. One was uttered by Rodríguez Zapatero, who said, “If we live together, we have to decide together,” a statement that reminds me of deeply misogynistic ideas, like “I killed her because she was mine.” The other was my reply: “We have to be able to decide to live together.” In all spheres, personal and political, in any relationship, it is the ability to make decisions that makes a relationship strong; true strength lies in freedom, in being able to decide.

In regards to the importance of culture, and learning from others:

Adopting the idea of Gandhi: “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”

In regards to human rights, happiness, and standards of living:

Support for others is an extremely complicated concept; we can see the difficulties Barack Obama has had in making changes to the US healthcare system. But can we call a country in which fifty million people have no healthcare coverage developed, even if it is the world’s largest economy and even if it does have one of the highest standards of living in the world? I don’t think we can. It is better for a country to progress more gradually than to leave people lying by the wayside.

I urge you to look up more on Ibarretxe (some funny images on Google… some sites compare his looks to Spock), and to read his memoir when it’s released later this year. Will let you know when!

Some people in our lives are many things. To me, Laura Read has been an inspiration, a mentor, a friend, a fellow writer, and now a client. She’s enlisted me to be her first reader, on everything from magazine articles to drafts of her book, Persistent Fruit. Check out her story on Ireland’s Burren, which I copyediting before she pitched it, recently published by SIERRA magazine. It’s exciting to see anything you’ve worked on come to life on a page, and copyediting gives me that joy without all the hard work of actually getting it there. ha! Go Laura!