A-1 Editing Service, LLC

Carol Thoma

A former college English teacher, Carol Thoma has a Ph.D. in English literature, specializing in the English Romantics. After eighteen years of waging war against abstract diction, the passive voice, and the five-paragraph theme, Carol now seeks to help new authors find the words and strategies that will make their writing most pleasurable for readers. She has edited romance novels, science fiction, historical fiction, mysteries, how-to books, and scholarly works in political science, biology, philosophy, religion, homeopathy, and psychoanalysis. In her own field, literary analysis, she has contributed to the production of a major literary anthology and editions of such famous authors as the Brontë sisters, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and William Wordsworth.

In her spare time, Carol enjoys vindicating maligned or misunderstood historical figures, from King Richard III (the supposed murderer of his nephews) to her own ancestor, Martha Carrier (hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692). Though she prefers the distant past to the present, she enjoys browsing the Internet and contributing anonymous reviews to the IMDb. She writes and edits the TV Tome websites for the TV series Monk and one of its stars, Ted Levine. She also likes playing Trivial Pursuit and spending as much time as possible with her grandchildren.

A voracious reader whose interests range from etymology to paleoanthropology, Carol lives with her houseplants in an apartment lined with books and photographs. Like the Romantic poets, she believes in love and natural beauty, and, perhaps less romantically, in friendship, family, and laughter. Her love of nature stems from her childhood among the mountains and pine trees of Flagstaff, Arizona, and though she now lives in the desert community of Tucson, she has not lost her affection for her former home. She hopes to live there again some day, but only if someone else shovels the snow.