hobbies do you have
um i i do i play tennis and softball and i do a little bit of woodworking around the house furniture stripping and stuff like that
ah
do you do antiques
uh well i have this uh huge kitchen cabinet that uh it was like an old cabinet my buildings from was built in nineteen oh four
oh
so i have this cabinet that had about eight layers of paint on it and i stripped it down and i'm still working on it for about it's been about a year that i've been working on it
oh my
it's beautiful moldings and a beautiful cabinet and as soon as i'm done with it it should be good
ah
we use like a heat gun to strip it and then uh chemicals to get the rest of the paint out of the crevices and stuff like that
do you do all this in your house
yeah yeah it's it's it's uh it's probably movable the cabinet but it would be tough to move i was able to take some of the pieces apart it's like a kitchen pantry basically
oh
uh-huh
oh
i was able to take some of the pieces apart like some of the shelves out to clean them out independently and stuff
boy that's an ambitious project
yeah a little too ambitious
had you ever done any refinishing before
no i'd done nothing like it before but a neighbor of ours had done this and it looked uh looked nice so we figured we'd try it ourselves
oh
so the neighbor was able to give you guidance
um a little bit she didn't tell us she did say it was gonna be hard work she was right she was right
yeah and she was right
yes
so uh what kind of work do you do you do any you do anything like that or what are your hobbies
well uh i do a lot of needlework
and i also do puzzles for magazines i get paid for this i've written two puzzle books
really
uh-huh and so in my free time even though it's not a hobby and that i do get paid for it i'm always developing new puzzles and activities and and word games mind benders that type of thing
crossword you do crossword puzzles mostly or or
no they're they're variety type puzzles
uh not crosswords just all different kinds find the hidden word and um you know anagram type puzzles acrostic cryptograms
right
uh mostly for children but some of them go up through grade twelve
so and i've developed a lot of my own type of puzzles like word snakes and grid graphs and things like that so that's what published so if i have free time i'm usually sitting down with uh graph paper doing some puzzles
is that what you do for a living or you do other things
i'm a writer for a living i writer other things i'm a freelance writer
huh grand
fantastic
and uh i was a teacher for fourteen years and i'm not teaching because we've had to move around so much that i
are you from Texas
no
oh
i i live in Texas now but i'm from Southern Ohio originally
oh okay
and uh we've lived in Michigan and it seems like wherever i go i need to take forty hours of college in order to update my teaching credentials
right
so i decided i didn't want that to be my hobby any more after paying thousands and then moving the next year so um now i'm i'm just writing at home
well you have yeah you have a good career for that crossword puzzles and writing you don't have to go out my wife's my wife's an editor and we just had our first child so she's
yes
oh and what does she edit
uh magazines she'd worked for a dance magazine and American oh you probably know the American Booksellers Association she
oh
yes ABA
she right she's worked for them for about the last year or so and they just had their convention in New York
oh
uh-huh that's right i knew some people going up there
and uh
she worked on the show daily doing the um you know the the daily uh magazine that they print out
oh well that
so that's good and they've now that she's possibly probably not going to go back to work at least for a few years um she's gotten freelance work from people
oh great
so she gets to uh do her hot stuff i don't know if they care what topics we talk about anyway right just
no i don't think so so does she take in manuscripts like fiction to edit
um yeah she would anything like that
because i'm in a a large writers group here in Dallas called Dallas Area Romance Authors do you live in the Dallas area
no uh we're from New York
oh you're from New York oh well there's a large group there too it's a national thing Romance Writers of America and they're always looking for freelance editors
yes
right
oh let me let me give you let me give you uh our address
okay i can send her some information about it because i know they mail manuscripts and
for a complete oh i think it's three chapters and a synopsis which would be around sixty pages the average price is around a hundred and fifty dollars for an editorial service
great sounds good
so okay i'll write this down and send it
she loves to read that's really the type of work that she would like to do even though she never did that professionally
oh good
yeah
uh yeah she's started in other fashions but not not not specifically reading novels and editing them and and proofreading them and stuff so i think she would like that
okay let me take down the information and i'll send her who to who to send her credentials to
right
great
her name's Mary C Murphy
okay
and her address is two twenty five
two twenty five
West End Avenue
