You mean we’re not heathen socialist infiltrators?
I’ll have to rebrand.
~C. L. Dyck, here
Early History, Totally Random C.V., and Known Aliases
Writing
Canadian freelancer Cathi-Lyn Dyck has been reading, writing and avoiding arithmetic since the age of five or so. Her first publication credit was in 2004, in the realm of poetry. From there, she expanded into a freelance humour column in the local newspaper, press release writing for area non-profits, homeschooling-related magazine articles and book contributions, and the study of fiction writing.
She is the sole owner and author of this here Scita > Scienda, where she practices writing whatever on earth she feels like and receiving feedback on it.
For a fried brain supposedly unable to string thoughts together, your writing once again captured life exquisitely.
~Randy Brandt, writer and reviewer, here
Wow that was an amazing piece of writing. I felt the cold and misery in that even though I am sitting in beautiful morning sun here in Melbourne…
~Dorothy Adamek, ACFW member, here
“exactly what I needed–good and solid and beautiful and TRUE. Chill giving.”
~Heather Young, artist, here
Ha! That was rich – and wild! Great story…
~Violet Nesdoly, poet, here
Editing, Critiquing and Being a Snobby Reviewer
Cat is an exacting but tenderhearted freelance editor (see here for details). Her skills have variously been described as “exceptional,” “unbelievable,” “the clearest I’ve ever seen,” and “superior to the majority of trailer park denizens hanging around Houston’s seedier bars.”
Her notoriously fussy standards lead to very few literary reviews around here, all of them incorrigibly snobby and crushing to the fragile psyches of writers, because otherwise what fun would it be?
Warms my heart to see another person who really “gets it”.
~Kerry Nietz, author of A Star Curiously Singing from Marcher Lord Press, here
Whoa! Thanks, Cat! You’re too kind!
~Johne Cooke, Overlord, Ray Gun Revival Magazine, here
Thank you so very much for your kind words. They are deeply appreciated.
~Marc Schooley, author of The Dark Man from Marcher Lord Press, here
Related Skills and Branding
Skills: Cat helped her husband Dave establish Westman Bible Conference over the course of 2009, contributing on graphic design, IT, networking, public relations, and event logistics. For some reason, it still went off as a success.
Branding: This has not stopped people from calling her things. She is variously known as Catbert the Evil Editor, the Prairie Ninja, and C.L. Hobbes. Attempts to achieve mainstream acceptance under the pseudonym of “Quiet and Unassuming Wallflower” remain the one unmitigated failure of her career to date.
Complete Lack of Definable Educational Background
Cathi-Lyn was unschooled until junior high school, and retains her early guerrilla training in critical thinking, information gathering and analysis. Since converting from a background of atheism/agnosticism to evangelical Christianity in her late teens, she has made an ongoing study of social apologetics–using a biblical worldview to respond to cultural and social questions on their own footing.
Great argument, Cat.
~MS Quixote, here
Fine use of logic there, Babe.
~Dave, here
Good stuff, as always.
~Hank Harwell, here
You’re fun.
~Some guy named Michael, here
Platform and Testimonials
Started early in 2009 as a curmudgeonly personal journal of rogue scholarship forays, with no intention of attracting an audience, Scita > Scienda has morphed into a warm and supportive cozy stop on the internet byways. Scienda’s sensitive, sane and affirming little community is a constant pleasure to interact with, and an uplifting, comforting influence on an almost daily basis.
You are a terrifying person and possibly unbalanced. Those long Canadian winter nights may be having an adverse effect.
~Randy Brandt, via email
Oh, I should explain. Randy’s from my neck of the woods originally, quite literally just down the road from here. He and Marc got acquainted elsewhere, and thus he has made his way here as the ill-gotten gains of Quixote’s misadventures.
~C.L. Dyck, here
Pocas veces he sido insultado mas elocuente.
~MS Quixote, here
I don’t have a collection of stuffed animals but I do have a collection of dragons…
~Heather Young, here
HA! And well done. Who could ignore such a CV? I see bright things ahead! (And thanks for the mention in your round-up post. Glad you liked the armchair trip to Craigdarroch.)
Thanks! It’s all for spoof, really…
Very well done! Good work and a pleasure to read for those of us who are curiouser than we maybe oughta be…
For an autobiography, you quote me and others quite frequently. Is that fair?
Besides writing this because I was bored, I wrote it because I was lazy.
“reading, writing and avoiding arithmetic since the age of five or so…………”
Ahhhhh, we’ve been hiding out together.
You bet. Welcome here, Hillary.
Hi, I just wanted to pop in here and say that after discovering your blog yesterday you’ve been added to my Inspiring Internet Heroes list (got here via Shamus Young, the other Inspiring Internet Hero of mine). Thanks for your amazingly insipirational writing, and you can be sure I’ll be back often — there’s all the archives to read, for instance…!
Wow, thank you so much! Shamus is an Inspiring Internet Hero of mine as well (I pretty much just lurk at Twenty-Sided). I look forward to conversing with you further, Paul.
I’m a longtime lurker at Twenty-Sided, too, and his Autoblography series was wonderfully uplifting. Like him, you have a way of seeing the world and spelling things out that just Makes Sense, and it’s very refreshing.
And don’t thank me, you now have a pedestal to fall off.
I promise to try to fall entertainingly.
We get along well with the Youngs. Heather’s a good friend of mine, and we share a lot of common ground in our child-raising.
From what I’ve read so far, it’s a pretty healthy patch of ground, too. Actually, a friend and I were discussing your blog and wondered if you were familiar with the works of Dorothy L. Sayers? Here’s a quote from one of her non-fiction books that seems to chime well with some of your posts:
“There is in many parents a striving to control their children, and to make of them, if not precisely automata, yet beings as fully subordinate to the will of their procreator as the characters of a novelist are to their creator. On the other hand, there is in the human creator [God] a parallel desire to create something that shall have as much free will as the offspring of procreation.” — Dorothy L. Sayers, in Mind of the Maker
I know who Sayers is, but I’m woefully unfamiliar with her writing. She has a lovely way of putting it. My greatest hope for my kids is that they exercise an educated and *self* controlled free will.
Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of adults out there in the world who are threatened by anyone else’s autonomy, as if its mere existence automatically infringes on their own. The children in their lives receive the brunt of that…which offends me when I come across it, and then I write stuff.
And then we get to read it: it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good!
I’ve only read small bits of Sayers’s non-fiction works, but her fiction is top-notch as well. She held to excellent values and wasn’t afraid to instill that in her writing.
Speaking of ill winds:
I’ll have to see if my library has any Sayers. It continually amazes me what I can find there.
Haha, quite! My favourite is the Bedstead Men. *goes to put Flanders and Swann on*