I assume anyone taking time to read this blog has some sort of vested interest in language. We write, teach, or edit. For that reason, I also assume we each probably have our personal grammatical pet peeves. You know what I mean, those words or phrases that, when used incorrectly, run chills up your spine. We get our peeves from different places. Some of our peeves we inherit. My mother was always annoyed when anyone used the word ‘podium’ when they meant ‘lectern.’ She always said, “One stands on a podium, one stands behind a lectern.” So, of course, I don’t care that Merriam Webster and Random House dictionaries both say the words are interchangeable. In memory of my mother, I still roll my eyes me when people use ‘podium’ for anything other than the raised stage on which a speaker stands. Some of our linguistic pet peeves were instilled in us by teachers. ‘Can vs. may’ is traditionally a favorite of first and second grade teachers and often sticks with kids into adulthood. And som...

I’ll say this as nicely as I can: writing is not a physically strenuous profession. You know it, I know it, and most others know it. That notwithstanding, writing can take a major toll on your body, thanks to sitting at a desk or balancing a laptop on your legs for hours on end. Here’s were the relief part comes in: do yoga. Yep, yoga – the twisting, leaning, stretching stuff. At first glance, you may think that yoga has nothing to do with writing. How about a second look: most seated postures are awful for the body, putting strain on sensitive joints and cramping major muscle groups. Yoga helps you get up & moving, strengthening and releasing those muscles tendons, and joints. Anyone can do yoga, and I mean anyone. No matter your age, sex, weight, religion, or overall physical condition. Here are a few yoga poses especially for us writers, tested on many occasions by yours truly. Give yourself a 5-minute break that you most certainly deserve and try them out – no equipment nee...

Whenever possible, it’s best if you do first-hand research on the setting of your books. By seeing it yourself, you not only get the atmosphere of the setting, you can get the layout of the land, the slang of the people, even the feel of the city. Sometimes you can’t do the actual research yourself. Or what you need to know is not available on the Internet or it’s available but you’re not sure you can trust it. Sometimes you have to turn to friends. You’re already keeping a contact list, right? What you may not be doing is making notes in that list. Under the listing for your good bud Lawrence Boozer, you note that his daughter Vodka Boozer is a paramedic and his grandmother Tipsy Boozer used to be a dancer on Broadway. Right now you have no need to know the slang and life of a paramedic or what Broadway used to be like in 1940, but should you ever need that information, you’d have a “first-hand” source to ask. If I need to know about life on a ranch, I’d turn to my uncle. But if...

While cruising through the upcoming releases on writing-related topics at amazon.com, I found these new books of interest: 1. The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English by Roy Peter Clark. Little, Brown & Company, August, 2010. New York Times Book Review . 2. The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World . St. Martin's Griffin, July 2010. "The rapid growth of the Web has meant having to rely on style guides intended for print publishing, but these guides do not address the new challenges of communicating online. From Yahoo!, a leader in online content and one of the most visited Internet destinations in the world, comes the definitive reference on the essential elements of Web style for writers, editors, bloggers, and students." 3. The Complete Handbook Of Novel Writing: Everything You Need to Know About Creating & Selling Your Work . Writers Digest Books (...

Intro: If you have a job like I do, I hope you've adjusted to going back to work today after the Labor Day Holiday weekend! Even if you don't, how about taking a break for a few moments and learn what other writers are asking and what our editors are answering. Or, perhaps you'd also like to contribute a question. If so, please do so below.That's what the Ask the Editor Free-For-All is all about. Here's how it works: Today, and Every First Tuesday of the Month, The Blood-Red Pencil  holds our Ask the Editor Free-For-All. We send out e-mail blasts to e-groups, post on Facebook and other likely spots hoping to find those who will admit they don't know everything. We welcome your questions and will provide answers from our able editors. This shortcut will come in handy if you're submitting a manuscript to an editor or agent, engaging in self-publishing, or perhaps just getting your feet wet. The Blood-Red Pencil is at your service. Ask, ...

Here is a handy checklist from Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King. This is a book I recommend to my editing clients and something I like to look at for my own work every so often. • How many ing and as phrases do you write? Remember, the only ones that count are the ones that place a bit of action in a subordinate clause. • How about ly adverbs? Both tied to your dialogue and within your descriptions and narration. • Do you have a lot of short sentences, both within your dialogue and within your description and narration? • Do you use a lot of italics? We mean a lot of italics. And you don’t use many exclamation points, do you?!! • Are there any metaphors or flowery phrases you’re particularly proud of. Do they come at key times during your plot? If so, think about getting rid of them. • How much time have you spent moving your characters around? Do you cut from location to location, or do you fill in all the space in between? • How much detail...

One of the biggest problems with technology is that it becomes obsolete frighteningly quickly. Stall as you might, there comes a day when you simply have to face the dreaded Upgrade. And thereafter comes the head-scratching and hair-pulling questions: “Where’s the button that used to be here? I used to be able to do X,Y, and Z, and now I can’t figure it out. Some of my menu options aren’t even available anymore.” I’ve just run into a snag myself on Word 2010 while writing one of the modules for Word 4 Writers. One of the tools I talk about is Word’s AutoSummarize feature for pruning a document , but Microsoft have removed this feature from Word 2010. I’m now really glad I’m using 2007 on my laptop, which is where I do most of my writing. But I’m annoyed on behalf of my Word 2010 students who have lost a handy tool simply by being the most up-to-date technology-wise. This month we’re introducing an “Ask the Word Experts” slot on the first Thursday of each month. If you’ve upgraded W...

From our guest humorist, Tracy Farr: Writing Tips: What to Write About What do you mean, you can't find something to write about? Aren't you looking hard enough? Aren't you paying attention? Hold on, maybe you're looking TOO hard. Maybe it's right under your nose and you can't even see it. "You mean I should write about my mustache?" Why not? It's there isn't it? So write about it. By the way, it needs a bit of a trim, and I think you have some spaghetti sauce stuck in it. Ideas are everywhere. You see that UPS driver? The one who just delivered that package to your next door neighbor's house? Looks mighty suspicious to me. Looks like he's casing the joint. Looks like he's not even the regular delivery guy, but an escaped convict who highjacked the truck and is looking for easy access to a house. He'll end up terrorizing the lonely widow who lives there, who doesn't turn him in because he looks like her long-dead ...

Anyone who writes has been there: All your work in building three-dimensional characters, compelling settings and a taut story arc has led to a moment where your story will undergo a seismic emotional shift. You're about to build in the reward for the readers who pick this book up. It's going to be great. You have one job here, and it's one of the toughest chores writers face: You need to get out of the way. Step off the gas and cool down that prose. Wait, what? Let's think about this in cinematic terms. One of my favorite movies is Heat , the 1995 cops-and-thieves flick starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. The crucial scene in that movie occurs when DeNiro's high-end crime team tries to take down a bank as Pacino and the LAPD bear down on them. The background music falls away. Faces get bigger in the frame. You can hear breathing amid a hail of bullets and see palpable fear. And every time I watch that scene, my pulse quickens and my nerves are set on edge. ...

Recently Craig Lancaster wrote about pet peeves and whether we really should be holding onto them so tightly. I’m guilty of dozens of peeves and have bitten my tongue blue trying to be polite to my family who are equally guilty of misusing my peeves; sometimes deliberately. Craig’s post reminded me that we had some Ask the Editor questions about the proper use of who, whom, which, and that . These are some of my favourites, so, even though these were answered in the comments of that post, I thought I’d add my little memory tricks for determining the proper use of these words in context. Who and Whom Quick fix:  Switch "who" and "whom" with "he" and "him" - if you can use “ him ” then you can use “ whom ”, in most cases. "He is the author. I like him." "He is the author whom I like." It seems "whom" is falling away from general use. What do you think? Should we stop using it altogether, or should we try to pr...

This is a participation post. Please read it and comment because a number of us need some input. We writers know that our solitary work often requires months, or even years, to complete. But that’s not the end. Instead, it’s another beginning, for we must then deal with editors, designers, agents, publishers or printers, marketing…and the Internet. Sometimes we may wonder whether the end result is worth all the hassle. In decades past, the publishing model pretty much followed procedures and trends of the big houses. Editing and marketing were handled by publishers, and writers were nurtured along the road to success. Of course, some vanity houses did exist, but their wares were viewed as inferior and unworthy of note. Today, we have a very different scene. Technology has opened doors to previously unavailable options, and Kindle (et al.) has turned the reading world upside down. This is good, right? Yes! It’s great for those who surf the Web and grasp with ease the intricacies o...

The goal of a fiction writer is to engage the reader in the emotional life of a character who will face the thing we humans fear most: change. Even if your character wants this change—even if she is excited by it—readers expect part of her will also fear it. To take us on the full ride you need to constantly apply new pressures that create a catalyst for change, and then let us in on that change in glorious detail. Take, for example, evolution—that's some serious change. When the fish first flopped onto land he didn't grow feet and hop around to commune with others of his kind that very day. The reader wouldn't buy that anyway; she knows how things work. Growing appendages was a process and the reader wants in on it. What did the fish notice first? How did it feel—did it hurt? The reader will empathize with the fish as he faces his perceived disfigurement, relate with his abandonment by his fellow fishes, feel dizzy with him as he gets used to breathing all that fresh a...

A friend recently called to share a special moment with me. She had just gotten a whiff of a sweet smell that immediately made her think of her grandmother who had talcum powder that smelled like a sweet gardenia. My friend recalled childhood visits to her grandmother during which she would sneak away to sniff grandma's talc. "And of course the powder on my nose gave me away." My friend, who says she is not a writer, but has written some of the most powerful poetry I have read, thought I would be interested in her little moment as an illustration of how to ground a character in a scene. We are urged to use all the senses to accomplish this, and we often mention smells. We have a character react to the odors of food cooking as they enter a restaurant. Or we have a character notice the tangy odor of salt by the sea. But how often do we go deeper to the memory the smell evokes? Or how often do we make an association to a pleasant, or not so pleasant, occurrence in the cha...

I pay the bills as a newspaper copy editor. This is an altogether different creature from a book editor. Those of us who punch daily deadlines are the short-order cooks of the publishing world; we read and edit reams of copy in a compressed window of time. In many ways, the pressure-cooker aspects of the job lend themselves to the cultivation of pet peeves -- little word burrs under our saddle that we automatically change to something more palatable (to us, if to no one else). But copy editors aren't alone in this tendency. Anyone who spends time pushing words -- writers and editors -- ends up adopting some of these needy pets. It's all well and good until a few pets become an unmanageable zoo that detracts from the more important aspects of job. Here, then, are some common peeves that often require too much care and feeding to be worthwhile: Split infinitives: In the 1994 film Quiz Show , Charles Van Doren (played by Ralph Fiennes) rather pedantically points out that a TV...

Here is a list of some important and interesting words for writers to think about, know and use. Have fun! ACTION: Action and plot grow out of compelling, interesting characters. Suspense, action, and conflict are what keep the reader interested. Action is presenting the real life evidence through characters, by showing, not telling the story. BEATS: Beats can be the little bits of action interspersed through a scene, especially in dialogue. For example: “I don’t even want to go there,” I said. He laid a hand on my arm. “You want me to drive?” CONSONANCE: Is the close repetition of the same consonants of stressed syllables, especially at the end of words, with differing vowel sounds. Example: Boat and Night. DISSONANCE: Is a mingling or union of harsh, inharmonious sounds that are grating to the ear. Often used to create a disturbing or tumultuous atmosphere or confusion or bewilderment in poetry. EUPHONY: Is the harmony or beauty of a sound that provides a pleasing effect ...

In my March 26th post , I listed a sampling of upcoming conferences through August 2010. This month I’m taking a look at conferences scheduled for September through December. The list is representative of events across the country available to help you improve your writing skills and get feedback from editors and agents. You can find more information at Shaw Guides . For a series of informative articles about conferences from Writer's Digest editor Chuck Sambuchino, check out the Writers Conference category of his blog archives. The focus of these conferences is writing. Pitch sessions are available at several. All of the information for each conference or workshop can be found at its official website. Click on the conference name and follow the link. September Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Conference Denver, Colorado September 10-12, 2010 Alaska Writers Guild Workshop Anchorage, Alaska September 11-12, 2010 Wrangling with Writing 2010 Tucson, Ariz...

“Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.” ~ J. P. Donleavy Perhaps, but writing is also turning one’s worst moments into great reads for readers and personal understanding for the writer. I’ve written many stories that began from a “worst moment” in my life. Because writing has always been so cathartic to me, it seemed natural that I would weave my real-life angst into creative fodder. In writing stories, I can explore the whys and hows of my situation through characters, allowing me to take a step back from the situation and see things from another perspective. Every good story starts with a conflict, and if I can develop a story that satisfies readers while working through my “worst moments,” then to me that’s a win-win situation. What is writing to you? ----- Writing in 140 is my attempt to say something somewhat relevant about writing in 140 words or less. ----------------------------- Shon Bacon is an author, editor, and educator. She has published both cre...

What are the most common errors you see when line-editing manuscripts? I've been a copy editor for the last 10 of my 23 years in newspapering, and recently I've been keeping loose track of the kinds of errors I spot in the news copy I read five nights a week. Tell us how often these kind of mistakes pop up in your own red-pen adventures. In no particular order (and leaving out typos because spellcheck usually identifies those, and often they're mistakes of speed-typing rather than deliberate ignorance): Sentence-Smoosh Syndrome. Example: "The sergeant, who found the car to be stolen, attempted to pull it over, but the man refused to stop, and a pursuit began, going down Auto Center Way, onto Kitsap Way, and eventually to Chico Way." I realize that in fiction, long sentences can convey a certain intense dramatic flow or sense of unrelenting action. But it takes a high degree of skill to keep from losing a reader by cramming too many thoughts into one cerebr...

Less than a year ago, I appeared on this site and audaciously banged the drum for my debut novel, 600 Hours of Edward . It was the first stop of a hastily thrown-together blog book tour, and as I look back on it, I realize that “hastily thrown-together” is an apt descriptor for much of my promotional efforts in those early days of the novel’s emergence. So here I am, back in this cozy seat as I approach the January 2011 release of my second novel, The Summer Son . I’ve learned a lot about promotional work in the past several months – enough to know that I still have much more to learn. Here’s a short list of what I’m doing better this time around: 1. I have a much more robust, focused blog book tour planned: 10 stops instead of seven, at sites with established readerships that are good bets to be interested in my book. 2. I’m taking advantage of a slower rollout: Lining up blurbs, putting together mailing lists for ARCs, seeing if some buzz can be ignited. The current ...

Even a few years ago, most professional writing advice doled out at conventions and forums said, “Never self-publish,” because it was seen as the mark of an amateur, a lunatic, or simply an impatient writer yet to put in the requisite years of craft. Aside from that perception of “vanity publishing,” the commercial barriers were considerable. Even if you managed to print up hundreds of copies of your book, you had an uphill battle getting them into stores. Technology has eliminated most of the barriers to entry. You can now upload a digital file and be “published” in minutes. There is no overhead and you actually have the chance to reach whatever audience you deserve, assuming you can find it. For those who have used up the A-list of agents and the few publishers who will look at unagented manuscripts, it’s hard to argue against it. For those with out-of-print mass-market novels, it’s a no-brainer to seek a new audience and earn easy money for work already completed. Print-on-dem...

Building a book like The Real Alice in Wonderland involves not only creativity and design skills, but an impressive array of technical knowledge in an evolving industry. It sounds simplistic to say that a designer designing a book needs to remember that she is, ahem, designing a book, but it’s true—and it’s vital that the designer know not just that a book is being designed, but what kind of a book. Books demand design considerations that more typical designer projects—brochures, flyers, billboards, folders, even annual reports—don’t typically pose. Moreover, they’re not the sorts of things that any one is born knowing. Take, for example, the question of the gutter. Every book has one. It’s the crevice in the center of the book where all the pages are bound together. In books like The Real Alice in Wonderland the binding method means that type and critical images must be positioned so that they end before the page disappears down into the gutter. The thicker the book, the deeper the...