Welcome to Fritinancy

Fritinancy: A chirping or croaking, as of a cricket.

I’ve been a little bit obsessed with words for as long as I can remember. When I was 4 I threw a weeping fit because I couldn’t decipher the lettering on a billboard. When I was 8 and newly elected as my Brownie troop’s recording secretary I made an executive decision to call my notes “moments” instead of “minutes” because “moments” sounded nicer. I edited my high school newspaper, a weekly that rolled off the presses in our very own print shop. (Thank you, Los Angeles High School, alma mater of John Cage, Anna Mae Wong, Johnnie Cochran, Dustin Hoffman, and Ray Bradbury—all before my time.) I attended UC Berkeley’s journalism school and edited the arts section of the Daily Californian. I was for a time the only woman on the San Francisco Examiner’s copy desk. From there I went to New West magazine (later California), where my boss was Jon Carroll (later a long-running columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle), and worked alongside a pantheon of writers: Greil Marcus, Ruth Reichl, Charlie Haas, Mary Roach. When that little Eden dissolved, I freelanced for an assortment of magazines, parlaying my investigative book about tampons into health-journalism gigs. It was the silver age of magazine journalism; I actually made a decent living.

And then I really sold out: I accepted a copywriting job at Banana Republic, then still under the leadership of founders Mel and Patricia Ziegler, who had created the company’s quirky and beloved catalog. (Now a collectible.) I graduated to editorial director, in charge not only of the clothing catalog but also a book catalog, advertisements, and miscellaneous bits of microstyle like hang-tag copy. I’d still be at BR today if our corporate overlords didn’t decree that one slightly disappointing quarter required the excommunication of nearly the entire creative department, me included.

I spent several years toiling in a not-too-bad wilderness, writing catalog copy, annual report copy, and corporate speeches. I ghost-wrote a few books and researched and wrote parts or all of a few other books. (Here’s a story about one of those projects.) I also turned my experience in Banana Republic product naming into a new career as a name developer. In 2006 I launched a blog, Fritinancy, to support my naming work, and I discovered that I liked writing even when I didn’t get paid to do it. Imagine that.

And now this: a new platform and (I hope) some new ideas. Thanks for joining me.

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