Who am I?  I’m Debra Doyle, the “Dr. Doyle” of “Dr. Doyle’s Editorial and Critique Services”, and this is my brand-new blog.

Why am I here? As I’ve explained elsewhere:

For business, I write. About the only thing I’ve ever done for money besides writing—if we don’t count a stint working in the dishroom of the cafeteria while I was in college, which, really, let’s not—has been teaching:  Freshman composition (under the various trendy names it’s gone by over the past two or three decades), which wasn’t really that much fun; and fiction (yearly at the Viable Paradise workshop since 1997), which was and is considerably more enjoyable.

What do I do? With my co-author James D. Macdonald, I write science fiction and fantasy. We’ve been in the business for over two decades now, and seen a lot of changes in the field, but we’re still here and still writing. On my own, I do the freelance editorial and critique work that will be the primary focus—but not the only subject; I know myself too well to promise that—of this blog.

What about the “Doctor” bit? That’s real. I did my graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, and received a doctorate in English, with my main area of concentration being Old English and my secondary area being Old Icelandic. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly—the sf/fantasy field is full of renegade medievalists), this turned out to be excellent preparation for writing science fiction and fantasy, and for doing critique work as well.