The Final Touch

Like me, my sis­ter, Shan­non Hyland-Tassava, is a writer. Actu­ally, she does more orig­i­nal writ­ing at the present, while I am pas­sion­ate about help­ing oth­ers’ writ­ing shine. I’ve writ­ten a few pieces here and there — the Fore­word in a forth­com­ing book, a few arti­cles for the web-zine 10,000 Cou­ples, and some of the monthly con­tent of a sub­scrip­tion pub­li­ca­tion for church newslet­ter cre­ators — but Shan­non now has two essays pub­lished in antholo­gies related to wom­an­hood and moth­er­hood. I invite you to check them out!

The first essay, “The Mommy Wars Killed Our Friend­ship…,” Read the rest of this entry »

I really have no idea why my side­bar to the right is over­lap­ping the right mar­gin of my blog posts. This should NOT be!! I’ll have to see what I can find out about it soon. So sorry, all. Hope you can see the posts well enough to not be dis­cour­aged from read­ing them. ~Heidi

I am so delighted to share with you the promo video for a soon-to-be-released book I’ve had the honor of edit­ing. Author Bathsheba Smithen is only in her mid-20s, but she has wis­dom beyond her years. Watch the video (Bathsheba is the first indi­vid­ual in it)… and then read the book’s Fore­word, below, which she also gave me the priv­i­lege of writing:

Editor’s Fore­word

“All is van­ity and a chas­ing after wind. … So I turned to con­sider wis­dom and mad­ness and folly…” (Eccle­si­astes 1:14 and oth­ers; 2:12, NRSV)

When Bathsheba Smithen first invited me to write this Fore­word, I replied with a laugh, “You want a pasty white girl from small-town Min­nesota to intro­duce a book by an African Amer­i­can from Wash­ing­ton, D.C.?!” Read the rest of this entry »

On April 3, I attended the Home Con­cert (con­cert given imme­di­ately upon return from tour) of the Oak Grove Lutheran High School Con­cert Choir. One of the most mov­ing pieces they did was called “Requiem,” by a young Amer­i­can song­writer named Eliza Gilkyson. The arrange­ment was by Craig Hella John­son. It was writ­ten in response to the South­east Asia tsunami of 2004, was per­formed also in response to Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina in 2005, and in the con­cert I attended was per­formed as a trib­ute to all affected by and lost in the earth­quake and tsunami in Japan this past March.

The video here is not the choir I heard; this is the National Lutheran Choir. But the song is gor­geous no mat­ter who sings it — believe me, I’ve lis­tened to it at least four times in a row by dif­fer­ent per­form­ers this evening! Take a lis­ten:

photo © 2008 Codice Inter­net | more info (via: Wylio)

A few days ago, I was try­ing to do some­thing with an Excel spread­sheet. Now, mind you, I know only the most basic basics about Microsoft Excel, but I do keep my Con­tacts List fairly well orga­nized in that pro­gram. Well, in the process, I “hid” a cou­ple of columns (inten­tion­ally), but then I could not for the life of me “unhide” them! I clicked on “Hide/Unhide” and on “Columns” and… in the words of one of the ani­mated char­ac­ters from Veg­gi­eTales videos, “noth­ing, zilch, nada!”

I wasted prob­a­bly a good half hour and tons of energy on it before it dawned on me that I could Read the rest of this entry »

I have been so blessed in my work as a free­lance copy edi­tor to meet some truly inspir­ing peo­ple I would never have met oth­er­wise! I’d like to intro­duce you to one of the busiest of them, I’m quite cer­tain: David E. Wat­ters.

Some­times my copy edit­ing crosses over into the oppor­tu­nity to do some orig­i­nal writ­ing, as it did when an arti­cle was urgently needed for the April “10,000 Cou­ples” web-magazine for which I serve as copy edi­tor. I hope you’ll take time to read the entire arti­cle here, to see pho­tos and a rel­e­vant side­bar, and per­haps even to sub­scribe to “10,000 Cou­ples” if you wish (it’s entirely free, and though you can read the whole e-mag with­out sub­scrib­ing, doing so has its perks — like allow­ing you to post com­ments). But to give you a teaser, here’s a bit from my arti­cle, and a video mes­sage from David him­self:
Read the rest of this entry »