First post

I have recently signed on with Zharmae Publishing Press, and am an editor on two imprints, Tales of the Heinous (horror) and Porfirio Press (mystery). My goal here is simple:  preserve for posterity the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the fun and the woe, all of my journey through the world of editing.

First, how about a little background?

I was born in Spokane, WA. When I was about 14, my family moved to Kent, a small city about halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. From there, we went to Federal Way, a city that borders Kent just to the south. I graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1995, and about a year later, I moved to Los Angeles.

In LA, I did quite a few things: I worked for a dance studio, I worked for a fashion designer, I worked on building/upgrading and repairing computers. About 3 years later, I moved back to Federal Way, for about a year, then went back to California.

This time, I lived in the San Francisco Bay area - first, in Redwood City, about halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, later in San Mateo, maybe 5 miles to the north, then later in San Francisco itself. I worked for a bank in Santa Clara, bordering San Jose to the north, and worked in technical support. There were lots of ups and downs during that time, since the whole dotcom industry had collapsed. Millionaires were suddenly poor, and there was no work available anywhere.

I decided that I had to get out of this industry, it was too unstable. I decided to look for a cheaper place to live, since it was impossible (or very difficult) to work a full-time job in CA and go to school. Where did I go? New Orleans. I knew some people who lived down there, and had visited a few times. While there, I worked as a contractor for a number of places in construction, still in technical support, but that never worked out as every time that a hurricane came through, work stopped and I was left broke.

I then went to Lafayette, LA, which is even cheaper than New Orleans and started at the University of Louisiana, where I met lots of great people and had a good time. My (now) ex graduated before I did, and we decided to go back to San Francisco, and start a new life there.

Things in San Francisco didn't work out, and our relationship didn't survive. I went back to Federal Way, and then started at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where I finally moved. At the UW, I discovered that I love language, and finished two degrees: General Lingusitics with a minor in Philosophy, and another in Romance Lingusitics, with a minor in Spanish. After taking about 5 years of Spanish, I knew that I needed to go some place Spanish-speaking in order to not lose my language skills. Then it hit me: I am going to do a masters somewhere, why not do it in a Spanish-speaking country? And thus, the next leg of my journey began.

About 3 months after graduating from the University of Washington, I started a masters at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. There, I studied Discourse Analysis, which can be thought of as German- or French- style linguistics, also textual linguistics. There was a great deal of philosophy, literary theory, lingusitics models, etc. Believe it or not, I became bored with the slow pace of the program (which is 3 years long, minimum) and took on another masters, this time in Classics. In this program, I specialize in the cultural and literary aspects of life in Ancient Greece and Rome.

About 4.5 years after first arriving in Argentina, I finished all of the coursework for both masters, and returned to the US to work on my theses, and begin to re-establish my life. I am in Spokane, WA again, my home town, as my family eventually moved back to this side of the state.

Now I am working with Zharmae, and have my first two books signed, which puts me in the position of just starting up! This seems like a good opportunity to begin a blog, and I think that it will be quite fun to keep my progress updated.

I will probably come up with pseudonyms for both the authors and their books, for privacy purposes, to be revealed only after books are announced.

In the meantime, I hope that I garner some amount attention, and perhaps can make people laugh a little bit as I learn my new role! With all positive hope for the future,

Ashlar Trystan