July 2008

Grammar Vampires

July 31, 2008

Since I frequently work in the fantasy genre, and since I’m something of a gamer and a geek by hobby, fantasy elements are bound to creep into these posts fairly regularly. With that in mind, Monday’s post seems like a good segue into the introduction of one of my favorite terms, as well as a [...]

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Making Grammar Interesting

July 28, 2008

Before anyone was Eating, Shooting, or Leaving, a series of lesser-known books were already making grammar fun and accessible. The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed is for punctuation as The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager and the Doomed is [...]

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Measure Once, Cut Twice

July 24, 2008

The hardest kind of editing is self-editing. You will always find things you want to tweak, things you want to change, maybe even some sneaky little errors that your eye skipped over the first ten times through. The hardest part of self-editing is knowing when to stop editing. Know the difference between things that are [...]

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Some Tools of the Trade

July 21, 2008

In this digital age, we all do much more writing with a keyboard than with pen and paper. It’s possible to know and correspond with people for years without having any idea what your friends or associates’ handwriting looks like—something that would have been inconceivable even a couple of decades ago. Writing is a different [...]

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Fun With Words

July 17, 2008

I love words. I love the way they fit together to evoke vivid images, the way they can be wielded with great power, or with a feather’s gentle touch. I love that their subtleties can be twisted into clever plays on themselves, by mistake as well as by design. Humor is an important facet of [...]

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Creeps to watch out for

July 14, 2008

A manuscript is not a linear creature. We go back and change. We revise a sentence. A paragraph. A concept. We reorder chapters. New content integrates with old. Ideally, it does this seamlessly. However, a manuscript is also not a body of water. The changes made to the early pages don’t ripple naturally through the [...]

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A different kind of search engine

July 10, 2008

Sometimes if you don’t remember the title or author of a book, you can still find it by searching on the name of a character or a fictional city, but how do you find a book again if you only remember the plot? Allreaders.com has the answer: a search engine that allows you to find [...]

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Welcome!

July 9, 2008

I thought I’d start off here with a link to one of my favorite resources: The Chicago Manual of Style‘s online edition has a great Q&A page. It’s a really useful tool for finding answers to those gray-area questions that fall between the lines in the book itself.

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