About

Welcome friends, family, and fellow writers, readers, adventurers, and the curious at heart. This site is where I collect thoughts, things, and ideas that I like to share and hope others will appreciate. Often, even after posting, I’ll revise and edit because that is what I do.

This blog, however, is a place to let my Oxford commas down, and, so, I reserve the right to make tired mistakes and typos, and to write about anything that catches my fickle fancy.

In every job I have ever held, whatever the industry or field, I was the go-to girl for crafting persuasive, compelling, fun, or analytical communication material. I still do this, as a freelancer, and creative writer.

Online and in print, I’m best known for my past writing in arts and music criticism, and collaborations with graphic novelists/comics artists. I’ve been lucky to meet and work with wonderful people in Vancouver, Toronto, Detroit, and Montreal, my creative stomping grounds during the late 1990s and 2000s.

I love to edit. Tweak and improve, suggest and listen, to make the writing shine and the ideas sparkle sharp and clear. I love to do this for others. This business of rewriting and editing is intensive and focused work, and different from writing or proofreading. Trust me. My current novel is entering revision #2 and the process of editing I so easily do for others is, well, grumping me, but how I enjoyed writing the scenes!

My no-longer-secret dream this year is to finish my novel, publish it, see it adapted for film, and then put a big red bow on a Porsche and sit back for one afternoon while my sweetheart takes us for a spin. Yes, anyone living with a writer deserves a medal, or a Porsche.

I’m more the vintage Vespa or Karmann Ghia convertible girl, as long as they can be modified for electric. The state of our environment and our health, individually and socially, deeply concerns me. I look for ways to be part of the solution.

My other not-so-secret dream is to empower others to realize their deepest desires into tangible success. I’m not yet clear how I will do this, but I know I must. The last few years were soul-shaking game-changers for me: our only child died, relations with my mother deteriorated, and a car almost killed me while I was cycling. The shock continues to echo.

These days, a sense of grounded purpose is creeping over me. I see how these defining moments don’t define me, but they have power to trip me up. This is perhaps the most profound liberating lesson I have learned: I am not the situation, circumstances, or events in my life. The events did and still do provoke bare-knuckle questions about setbacks, trauma, struggle, courage, collapse, negotiation, compromise, and being true to my ever-changing self.

I am in the midst of making these dreams clear enough to come true, one word, one day at a time. There are so many things I wish I’d known about the world and people and growing up when I was a teenager and college student, and I am looking for a way to share that.

This site uses WordPress and a free PressWork Blaskan theme, and is happily hosted by Joyent.

On the subject of content and advertising, I do not accept money from anyone to blog about their product on this site. If I write about or endorse something, I believe it deserves recognition. I value and embrace the general spirit and ideas behind www.adfreeblog.org, but I am not for or against promotion, publicity, marketing, advertising, consumerism, or any fundamental modes of communication and exchange in society. I am for open discussion, education, and thinking about how we do it, when, where, and why, because asking these questions is another way of knowing where we stand in this big conversation about how best to live and relate. These are very important questions. I like that kind of stuff.

Welcome. And merry visits.

- ajd

P.S. If you’d like to contact me for editorial work or samples, please do so by info AT ajduric.com. I specialize in academic editing and have degrees in the arts and humanities, with emphasis in discourse analysis. I’m very interested in working with fiction and non-fiction book writers. I also welcome marketing communications projects. For more information, please see my Linked In profile.