I don't have a ruler but ... Pt II

Continuing from here but this post will be shorter, promise.

Recently I paid attention to how I use commas because it seems to me that many people overuse them. And I noticed that in early drafts of chapters and blog posts, I do it too!

And I realized that typing while I think is the culprit. I go along banging words out as they occur to me and when my thought process gets stuck, I stop typing--but first, I add a comma. It's like I have to capture every nuance of thought, even the pauses. For a first draft, that's absolutely fine. Now we're back to proofreading: okay, you've gotten a bunch of ideas down kind of as they formed. Great, you've got coherent thoughts and you want to tell people! Go for it.

Just proofread before you press “publish” or “send”, okay? It doesn't take long and it's not as annoying as flossing. Here's a tip from a copy editor I briefly worked with: Start with the last sentence, read that out loud, then move on to the second-last sentence, and keep going backwards. It's best to have another person follow along on their own copy because they catch things you might miss, but even doing it alone helps.

You can even do it between paragraphs. Whenever you temporarily run out of ideas, read over what you have so far. Once you get in the habit of proofreading it becomes automatic. Your first drafts and off-the-cuff posts will have fewer mistakes. More people will smile at you.

Too many commas can slow readers down. That’s exactly what you don’t want in scenes with fast-paced action or somebody’s hyped-up, tumbling thoughts. Even in blog posts, too many commas make me feel like I’m riding a cantering horse: bouncing up and down.

Commas. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, some are necessary and some are like those spiked strips cops throw across the roadway to catch speeding crooks. I don’t normally pontificate like this but some things just get in my craw and I have to snap about it.

Rant over, really. Feel free to disagree with me, it’s fine. Won’t be the last time, no doubt :D

image courtesy of DarkSide/stock.xchng

Six Sentence Sunday #38

         The scene I’m using for SSS describes the wedding of Neal’s best friend, Sandy, to Sophie. The entire scene is in Neal’s POV.  During the ceremony Neal had some difficulty trying not to think about the one-night-stand he and Sophie shared. He had a harder time with memories of his first love, Laurie, who died before he said those three little words “I love you.”  

April (and Sandy) grew up in Crescent City, Calif. An important bit of backstory is that although she now lives with Neal in Los Angeles, she still struggles with unrequited feelings for Sandy. For this scene, the ceremony took place on a beach; afterward, Neal and April go for a walk near the water. He’s told her if getting married means a lot to her, he’ll do it. She called that the most lopsided proposal ever, so he got down on one knee and asked if she would marry him. She pushed him over; something less than flattering slipped out of his mouth, as it sometimes does. 

He hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He snapped his head up. Oh shit, damn good thing she couldn’t grab any of her chef’s knives. He threw his arms open wide. “Well, what do you expect? I ask you to marry me and you push me into the sand.”  

Half the fun of SSS is seeing comments on excerpts of your own work, but the other fun part is seeing the other snippets. There’s a fair amount of romance in the excerpts though several are not typical at all! There’s really something to please every reading taste.

The official Six Sentence Sunday is scheduled to end on January 27 :( and I have enough excerpts to cover those weeks. It's possible another version of SSS will be up in the near future also. I want to thank everybody who has come by my blog and read these excerpts, whether or not you commented. I enjoy visiting other SSSers a lot. Until next week, happy writing and reading J

Six Sentence Sunday #37

The scene I’m using for SSS describes the wedding of Neal’s best friend, Sandy, to Sophie. The entire scene is in Neal’s POV.  During the ceremony Neal had some difficulty trying not to think about the one-night-stand he and Sophie shared. He had a harder time with memories of his first love, Laurie, who died before he said those three little words “I love you.”  

April (and Sandy) grew up in Crescent City, Calif. An important bit of backstory is that although she now lives with Neal in Los Angeles, she still struggles with unrequited feelings for Sandy. For this scene, the ceremony took place on a beach; afterward, Neal and April go for a walk near the water. He’s told her if getting married means a lot to her, he’ll do it. She called that the most lopsided proposal ever, so he got down on one knee and asked if she would marry him. She pushed him over. I’m skipping over his indignant exclamation; he asks why she did that and this is her answer. He’s stood up by this time.

“You are not asking me that today because you want a wife. We’re both too emotional for a serious discussion. We need to lighten up.”

Neal kept brushing his clothes off. Just because some ass divorced her years ago, now she wanted to push somebody around when they were at their most vulnerable. “Women . . . son of a bitch.”

 Half the fun of SSS is seeing comments on excerpts of your own work, but the other fun part is seeing the other snippets. There’s a fair amount of romance in the excerpts though several are not typical at all! There’s really something to please every reading taste.

The official Six Sentence Sunday is scheduled to end on January 27 and I hope to have enough excerpts to cover those weeks. It's possible another version of SSS will be up in the near future also. I want to thank everybody who has come by my blog and read these excerpts, whether or not you commented. I enjoy visiting other SSSers a lot. Until next week, happy writing and reading J

I don't have a ruler to slap your hand with, but ...

Sometimes, the world changes in unnecessary ways. You ever notice that? Soon as I decide I like a new product at the grocery store, dammit it's gone. A neighbor plows the snow out of his driveway and into the parking space in front of your house. So as I read blog posts and story drafts, when I see an unnecessary trend in how people use English, it pesters me.

Most word processing programs have spell checkers included. I usually use Blogger in Firefox, and that infamous red squiggly line appears underneath "alot" because it's incorrect. Do people turn off their spell checkers? Do they just not notice the red squiggle? Do they just not care? I don't know.

I'm not talking about occasional typos. When somebody repeatedly uses the wrong form of a word, it's almost certainly not a typo.

For example:

• "alot" instead of "a lot"
• "flush out" instead of "flesh out" (unless you really don't like the thing you're talking about. "Flush out" has a completely different meaning)
• "peak interest" or "peek interest" instead of "pique interest" 

Most U.S. editors and agents are not going to look favorably on a query that uses "alot" or "peak interest." I bought a self-pubbed story but had to put it down about 1/3 of the way in. When I popped on to Amazon to leave a review, I saw lots of comments about how badly edited the book was. So readers do notice this stuff.

There are rules for using English. Some of them can bend and some of them are meant to provide standardization so we all know what the heck we're talking about. 

Mistakes in blog posts are pet peeve of mine. When you deal with a publisher, you might find mistakes in the finished book that you had nothing to do with. Blogs are totally in our control. Proofread, that's all I'm saying. If there's time to put together a post, there's five more minutes to proofread it. Sometimes you miss stuff. I get that. My regular critters find mistakes in my chapters that I missed. But typos, left out words, and misuse of homophones don't happen often in my writing because I proofread.

Proofreading is not some mystic or arcane power. Anybody can do it. You don't have to be OCD to fix mistakes.

I have one more thing to say but I’ll keep that for next time. Thanks for reading! It's a grey day in my part of the Northeastern U.S. so maybe that's affected my mood.  Happy 2013 everybody!
Image courtesy of bjearwicke/stock.xchng