My name is Armen. I’m a freelancer offering proofreading, editing, and/or transcription services to writers–particularly indie writers–because stories and the people who tell them mean everything to me.
Ever since discovering a story’s power to entertain and enlighten us, I’ve been in love with reading, writing, and storytelling. I played make-believe until an embarrassingly late age, and then I transitioned into the grown-up version of playing make-believe: playing tabletop role-playing games and writing fanfiction. In my spare time, I also write my own stories and create fantasy and science fiction worlds to get lost in, play guitar, sing, and craft tchotchkes and doodads.
I believe our capacity for creativity as humans makes life worth living, and that fictional worlds tell us a lot about our real world and ourselves. Well-crafted characters, vivid fantasy realms, and immersive plots not only make for good literature, but they also make telling reflections of what is important to us in the real world. Because of this, they provide us with tools for understanding our own emotions.
Language is also incredibly important to me. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics (University of Oregon, 2015) which offers me a unique perspective as a reader and writer. I can analyze the very medium of the narrative from a variety of angles and apply that to writing and editing.
In studying Sociolinguistics, for example, I learned how to tease apart the various social forces that might affect how a person’s speech (read: character’s dialogue) changes in different contexts. On the other hand, studying Historical linguistics, I was able to understand how language develops and shifts over time. This is broadly useful for anything from finding anachronisms in historical fiction, to creating new languages for sci-fi or fantasy worlds, to analyzing generational differences between characters.
My studies also ingrained in me that what is considered “correct” language is typically decided by people in power with an agenda. That fact informs my work as a proofreader and editor because it reminds me that language is malleable. Rules are guidelines, and they can be broken to profound effect.
There are writers who made words up wholesale (C.S. Lewis), or decided that English syntax needed to be more flexible (e.e. cummings and many other poets), whose works have outlived them. We have style guides and standards for a reason—they make things cleaner and more consistent for readers—but at the end of the day, language is ours to play with and mold to our liking.
As long as we’re breaking “rules” on purpose, it’s stylistic experimentation and not a typo.
The most genuine answer to this question is that I needed a business name, came up with a random combination of words, and then it stuck because I said it too many times. (You have to be careful not to say a name too many times, because it’s easy to get attached.)
But another very real answer is that I am a big fan of birds–corvids in particular–and I believe that they have been unfairly maligned for too long. We encroach on their habitats and then have the gaul to call them thieves? No longer, I say! Therefore, the name is in part to honor the beautiful creatures.
The overly sentimental answer is that I think magpies’ reputation for collecting bits and bobs symbolize what we do when we create. I think that telling stories requires sorting through all the shiny things that we have accumulated in our psyches over the years and weaving them into something new. Like magpies, we decorate our “nests” with ideas that have come before.
Rather than being derivative, acknowledging and leaning into our inspirations in our art is honest; all art inherently builds on previous work. When we are truthful with ourselves and each other about where our ideas come from, then we are not copying what came before but continuing its legacy. We are taking what affects us from everything we’ve experienced and transforming it into something that is both familiar and new.
So, to me, to be an “Honest Magpie” is to put ourselves and the things we love into our art with sincerity and artistic integrity.