About

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

I work as an editor. I Love to edit almost as much as I love to discover something lovely and forgotten, to taste something sublime and unforgettable. This desire to tweak and improve, suggest and listen, polish until it shines is more than about words and ideas for me. At home or on the road, I look for that extra-special foodie something. I will travel far for a taste, and I will spend weeks trying and erring my way through from-scratch home-made baked bread.

Online and in print, I’m best known for a past career writing in arts and music criticism and collaborating 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. Offline, clients hire me for my research and discourse analysis expertise and my accomplished mix of writing and editorial skills.

This blog, however, is a place to let my Oxford commas down, and, so, I reserve the right to make tired mistakes and typos while writing about anything that catches my fancy. You might find a bit of photography, food musings, thinking-out-loud essays, and grammar talk. Oh, and art. And poetry. And, and.

One of my no-longer-secret dreams 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. The last few years were soul-shaking, game-changers. I can see how defining moments are defining, but they can’t be allowed to define/limit a person’s life: I am not the situation, circumstances, or events in my life. A liberating hard-won lesson.

There are so many things I wish I’d known about the world and people and growing up when I was a teenager and university student, and I am looking for a way to share what I’ve learned.

This site uses WordPress and a free 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 use this contact form. 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.