Since starting Thayer Literary Services, a book editing business, in 1997 and after reading what seems like a gazillion first novels, I have seen the same mistakes over and over again. After a while I started calling them “the usual suspects.” I have considered collecting them into a book, but I thought that seeing so many of them all in one place would drive me to drink.

So I decided to create this blog as a way to discuss grammar and punctuation problems one at a time, along with many other writing issues, all of which I think will be helpful to budding writers. Follow this blog, and I’m sure you will find some information that will help you become a better writer.

Welcome aboard!

Paul Thayer
Thayer Literary Services
paulthayerbookeditor.com

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Paul Thayer is a full-time professional book editor with more than 35 years of experience. During that time he worked in the trenches of the real world of writers, editors, and publishers. He uses his extensive knowledge to help writers who still have a lot to learn, offering them critiques and line editing of their work.

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The title says it all in this collection by Paul A. Toth. New York Times journalist and A Southern Yankee blogger Dan Newland has this to say in his pre-publication review: "These stories are a veritable showcase for the concise and subtle craft of a sort of 'watchwork' writer whose faux aloofness belies a raging zest for life and minutely detailed attention to the people and places around him, which borders on the obsessive, while investing profound empathy in every line he writes."

And this from friend, Nashville genius writer, and editor of The 2nd Hand, home to many of my stories: "The veracity of the facts of this recollection are lost to time, but it's no matter, the book he's asked me to introduce here is one of those story collections that, if history is kind, I'd wager will resonate years, decades, centuries hence itself, well beyond whatever fall is in store for each and every one of us near- and/or long-term to turn us all into refugees in our own right."

So with far more humility than that paragraph invites, I say to editors, "This is a collection as relevant as its title. Here it is, relevance, and that's what I've always meant to offer. Something that adheres to these times and not the mediocre nostalgia that steams from the MFA factory chimneys."