I've signed up for this account at the behest of ShotgunNeko, who tells me that he has in times past been frustrated by his inability to respond to my signed-anonymous reviews. If you've come here looking for a sample of my writing, bear in mind that it's his fault you've been disappointed.

I feel odd maintaining an account here without posting any stories, but perhaps a few writers here will appreciate having a blue name to click on beside my reviews of their work. (Actually, I can anticipate this backfiring. As a signed-anonymous, I could be confident that I wouldn't be taken seriously and thus review with impunity; now that my name appears in shiny blue link form, I may review less often, made shy by the fear of not living up to my own underlined, clickable glory.)

I am a native speaker of English. As such, I am confident in my grasp of spelling, phrasing, grammar, punctuation, and usage, and will often review just to correct these if the error is particularly glaring. I understand that many of us writing in English do not speak the language natively; that's alright. I'm only here to help. (And to read your stories, parasitically feeding off of your work while providing no fiction of my own. Think of my corrections as my efforts to make myself into a symbiont.)

Speaking of which, here's an error I'm encountering so often that the explanation belongs in my profile:

Losing patience with loose usage

'To lose' is to suffer a loss. You can lose your car keys, lose a game of chess, or lose your mother to cancer. 'To loose' is to set free or to let go. The first has only one 'o', the second two. This remains the case even when we append '-ing', as the following example demonstrates -

"Losing patience with the trespasser, I opened the kennel gate and loosed the hounds. Loosing a cry of terror, she began to flee, racing my dogs for her life. She was losing."

It's a bit awkward to stay in that tense for as long as I did, but at least I didn't mix up 'lose' and 'loose'. (By the way, for those of you familiar with the IPA, 'lose' is pronounced /luz/, whereas 'loose' is /lus/. And coincidentally, if you know Spanish, those two are pronounced how they're spelled between the slashes.)