No, this is still your same friendly neighborhood editor — I haven’t been hacked, and this isn’t a guest blogger. (Though I might have guest bloggers in the future.) No, the point I want to make today is that I don’t call myself “the Novel Ninja.” I am, at most, a novel ninja.

When I first started editing, I found a funny little image that I’ve often used as a profile picture on social networking sites. I’ve never liked the phrase “grammar Nazi” for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that the title “Nazi” has been diluted and yet is still an extreme pejorative. Calling myself a “grammar ninja” seemed a good and humorous compromise. It particularly fit my concept of what an editor is supposed to be: which is, as far as an individual book is concerned, invisible.

When I edit something, I don’t try to place my mark on it. My job is to make you, the author, shine. I make your dream as wonderful as I can make it, and then I disappear — in a puff of smoke, if necessary, but hopefully without any flash. This philosophy has been a large part of why I took so long to set up a blog on the subject of writing, despite many requests from multiple quarters. In fact, the thing that made me finally do it was the realization that I was repeating myself in emails so much that I had a constant sense of deja vu.

So when it came to start my blog, I took the term I’d already been using as a joke, “novel ninja,” and decided to make it into a bit of a brand. It is not, however, a brand for me alone. It’s on my business cards, but I’m not the only novel ninja out there, no matter what they might call themselves — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.