Dr. Linda Seger, author and script consultant

Facilitator  in Cascade, Colorado

"Making a Good Script Great"

Denise DiPietro, copy editor 

         Denise DiPietro believes that when a good writer teams with a good editor—one who questions, researches, suggests, refines, and tweaks—good things happen.
         Denise compares editing to a Fabergé egg—one that has been sitting around in a basement for a long time, just as many a good manuscript by uncertain writers lies in a drawer for a long while. She takes the egg and carefully cleans the goo that has detracted from its beauty, tightens up some ornamentation, and reshapes a little piece that has broken. What she does not do is add anything new, change the color, or pound it into another shape.
         An avid reader, she collects words, lots of them. Big words, little words, obscure words, it does not matter. She absorbs them and tucks them away in a corner of her brain for later retrieval. Not only does she collect words, she collects pens and pencils—everything from fine-point roller balls to expensive fountain pens—in all colors.
         Denise welcomes writers to her compulsive world of professional copyediting. A bit obsessive about commas, misspellings, and dangling participles, she encourages writers to communicate what is burning inside them, and she edits to allow the fire to show through the smoke. An avid reader too, an exasperating moment for her is finding a big, fat typo halfway through an already published novel.
         A professional copyeditor for more than fifteen years, Denise's editing repertoire includes more than fifty-two novels, twenty-three nonfiction works, and uncountable magazine and newspaper articles, corporate newsletters, and Web sites.
         She has co-authored a cookbook, Cooking Smart Using Ingredients on Hand and a Southwest gardening book, Son of the Soil.
Denise is a 1977 University of Washington graduate with a bachelor's degree in Journalism/Communications. She is the former editor of Alaskafest, the in-flight magazine for Alaska Airlines and was Literary Editor for The Prescott Times. She has contributed feature articles to the Daily Courier and the Chino Valley Review, and has worked in television production in Seattle, Washington.  
         Denise and her husband, Douglas, a writer and manuscript evaluator, live much of the year in a bright fuchsia 1940s boutique hotel, now a residence, overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Summers often find them at their cabin in the high desert not far from Seligman, Arizona.
         If you have a project and are uncertain whether you need an editor, send a few sample pages to Denise. She will be happy to perform a sample edit on your work and make recommendations. She likes to keep things simple. All of her editing projects are accomplished by Internet transfers. She can be reached at icopyeditu@yahoo.com.