I’ve been a ghostwriter for 17 years now. It’s been a wild wonderful ride filled with the most amazing stories. I was privileged to hear them first and help get them out into the world. I’ve blogged before about the joys of ghostwriting and how much it has given me. I’ve been fairly successful. I’ve been involved – mostly as a ghostwriter, sometimes as a content editor – in nearly 50 books in those 17 years. In 2015 alone, I ghostwrote and finished three books (the last one just last month). But there are some downsides to ghostwriting. The biggest one is that I’ve been so busy writing other people’s stories that I’ve neglected my own. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t written my own books – I have. Over ten of them, in fact – fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Nearly all of them published before 2010. But for the last five years or so, as my ghostwriting business has grown, my own work has languished in drawers or my laptop file folders. I had and have plenty of great id...

Wishing you all the best of the season, dear readers... peace, joy, happiness, and... ...

Question: What I really want to know is what is the general consensus of dialogue tags? Is the old he said/she said still the preferred tag? Submitted by Margay Leah Justice, author of Nora's Soul . http://margayleahjustice.com/ Answer: Different editors have different preferences of nuance on this subject, but one underlying principle is consistently agreed upon. Dialog tags are a necessity for identifying who said what. Beyond that they have very little use. I’ll explain by example and analysis. *** “Why did you do that?” John asked inquisitively. His sister was on the floor, nearly passed out, with an empty bottle of pain killers next to her. Mary replied meekly, “Because I was just feeling so terrible. My head hurts so bad.” John asked angrily, “So you took a couple dozen pain killers? Mary, that’s suicidal!” “I’m so sorry, John. I don’t know what I was thinking,” Mary responded. John added hastily, “Well, we had better get you down to emergency in a hurry.” Mary agreed, “Yes...

Nowadays commas are on the decline in contemporary prose. Almost an endangered species. And there are many differing opinions about the use of them. This will not be an “official” essay on the correct use of commas. Dear lord, I would dare not presume to be of such authority to instruct you as to where, when, and in what order to include, place, and feel correct in your use of the useful, often necessary, but more often than ever before in literature shunned punctuation, the comma. I just intend to lay out some thoughts of my own on the subject and share some experiences I’ve had dealing with the ponderous and mighty question, “to comma or not to comma?” over the past several years. From Maryann - I was going to edit your opening paragraph, then I realized it is a joke. I hope everyone gets it. When I was writing my first manuscript intended for publication, I ROMANCED THE STONE (Memoirs of a Recovering Hippie), I was living in the same house with a young man, a recent college graduat...