Hello, dearies! My apologies for the screaming yellow headphones; where fashion dictates, necessity overrules. Your Style Maven spent most of the weekend in coffee shops, surrounded by giggling teens and twentysomethings. It’s not the volume, it’s the inflection. I was bombarded by monologues composed entirely of questions. “So, I went out with John? And he took me to that new restaurant? And the waiter had, like, this weird eyebrow thing going on? So the whole time we were eating, I was wondering if it would fall in my dinner? You know?” Yes, lovey, we know. Do you? Too many question marks, whether written or implied by inflection, can be distracting and confusing. Let us consult the CMOS for guidance, okay? Used to indicate a direct question, the question mark can also express surprise or editorial doubt. Are you sure you want to wear that? When a direct question appears within another sentence, it is also set off with a question mark. When did sleeves that a...

Little Pickle Press publishes children’s books that present relevant topics of the times, and help parents and teachers begin conversations with their children about subjects like the environment, ethnicity, entrepreneurship, and other values that children and parents worldwide can embrace. To help adults further guide children through the basic concepts introduced in the picture books, the publisher also offers free expanded lesson plans available for download at their website. These are a great help for busy educators as each offers three exercises to reinforce the book's concepts, as well as many Internet links to related topics and information! Today we welcome, Meredith Moran, who is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education at Stanford University. Meredith researches and writes the lesson plans that complement the LPP stories. The latest project is for BIG (written by Coleen Paratore and illustrated by Clare Fennell), which was just released ...

One of my favorite descriptions of sound storytelling structure comes from Peter Rubie and Gary Provost’s How to Tell a Story—The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tales : Once upon a time, something happened to someone, and he decided he would pursue a goal. So he devised a plan of action, and even though there were forces trying to stop him, he moved forward because there was a lot at stake. And just as things seemed as bad as they could get, he learned an important lesson, and when offered the prize he so strenuously sought, he had to decide whether or not to take it, and in making that decision he satisfied a need that had been created by something in the past.   Such a story works because of the way it plays with reader expectation. When an event dashes the expectations of a character we care about, the reader expects he will ultimately succeed when he pursues his goal to set things right. Since the stakes for failure are high, we flip the pages, wondering what he’ll do in the f...

Today we welcome Susan Wittig Albert to the blog. The latest in her Darling Dahlias cozy mystery series was just released and she joins us to tell about it. One of the pleasures of writing a series of novels is the delight in discovering something new about the continuing characters: buried things, secret things, things the characters themselves don’t know (or won’t tell you). That’s why I’m hooked on series books. I’ll bet you are, too. For those of you who haven’t yet met the Darling Dahlias, let me introduce them. The Dahlias are members of a garden club (named for Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone) in the small southern Alabama town of Darling during the early 1930s. The town is fictional, but it’s modeled after the town of Monroeville AL, which   in turn served as the model for Harper Lee’s town of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, the courthouse in Darling is a twin of the courthouse in Maycomb/Monroeville. Isn’t that a coincidence? (And can’t you just see Gregory ...

This is a good lesson in how not to irritate your readers, or audience. Thanks always to my friend Slim Randles for sharing his humor. For more wit and wisdom check out his national-award-winning book “A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right.” Read a sample at www.slimrandles.com The closed-season school board meeting was called to order half an hour late by its chairman, J. Buckdancer Alcott, because the board members saw Windy Wilson sitting in the audience. Windy had no children, and he sure as sugar wasn’t a teacher, but he could talk. And he was patiently biding his time. Despite the board’s foot dragging through the agenda, Windy didn’t give up and go home. Finally, Alcott said it was time for public feedback and asked if anyone wanted to speak. Windy raised his hand. Alcott looked desperately around, but Windy’s hand was the only one raised. He nodded in Windy’s direction. “My name is Alphonse Wilson,” he said, standing, “and I live here.” “We know who you are, ...

Today, we're continuing the What's Your Answer feature by exploring this month's theme about writing and grammar books. I'll pose questions and offer my answers. Then, it's your turn to answer one or more of the questions in the comment section. If you answer one, you're welcome to expand. More than one means curbing your answers. You're welcome to include one website or blog link as well. My Questions: Have you bought or read any writing or grammar books lately?  No, I'm afraid not. For many years, I subscribed to Writers Digest Club where I purchased a book a month. Almost all of them were in some way related to writing or grammar. I've got a full library of such books, but have not read one of them from cover to cover. That said, they're a great security blanket. Do you recommend any new writing or grammar books? I don't own an edition, but I've heard lots of good things about the Chicago Manual of Style, which is frequently u...

Today we welcome Michelle Gagnon, a former modern dancer, dog walker, bartender, freelance journalist, personal trainer, model, and Russian supper club performer. To the delight of her parents, she gave up all these occupations for an infinitely more stable and lucrative career as a crime fiction writer. Michelle has four bestselling and powerful thrillers under her writing belt, and now has written a young adult novel in the same genre, which was just released a few days ago. Switching from adult to YA of course got our editorial antennae twitching. So we’re going to bombard her with a few questions. Dani: Welcome to the Blood-Red Pencil, Michelle. I first have to ask you why, why, why? Why the switch to YA? Are you the parent of teens? What made you jump genres? Michelle: One of the reasons I switched to YA for this series was that a friend pointed out that I’ve had a strong teen character in nearly all of my adult thrillers, and he suggested I try writing an entire thriller f...

Please welcome Ginger Moran, author of The Algebra of Snow , to The Blood-Red Pencil today. When I was in graduate school there was only one door to publishing—the one that lead to the big commercial houses in New York. The only way in was through an agent and it was pretty hard to get one unless you had a guide or mentor who would introduce you to an agent. And those were the good old days. Those were the days when there were more than six commercial publishing houses, when the editor you started with was the one you had for your publishing lifetime, and they actually edited your work and helped you get it in shape for publication. In fact, they would take something that was relatively unreadable and turn it into—if not a bestseller, then something like a reasonable-seller. Make no mistake about it—publishing at the commercial level was never an easy process, nor did very many writers hit that level. I haven’t seen any statistics, but I’d hazard a guess that more writers got co...

How do you handle the dialogue when an important character (or any character, for that matter) doesn’t speak English? How do you create and maintain the authenticity that helps to transport your novel into a believable story with wide audience appeal? Granted, most of our readers are English-speaking—either primarily or solely. Too many foreign words will likely turn them off, which doesn’t contribute to our creation of a best-seller or even a good seller. Obviously, we want to craft a story that the reader understands and populate it with characters who inspire our audience to love them, hate them, root for them, clap when they get caught—you get the idea. It’s rather like the serial movies from my childhood days when the hero’s entrance evoked cheers from the audience and the fall of the bad guy met with resounding applause. So how do we retain the flavor of realism without putting English words in the mouths of characters who don’t speak the language? We allow that charact...

“That’s not a word.” You can almost hear the know-it-all fifth grader saying it, hand on jutted hip, eye roll and all. You also might hear this from your editor. If her comment pointed to an out-and-out error, fix it forthwith, and be glad of the public embarrassment she saved you. If on the other hand you used the word purposefully and creatively, and because no other English word delivers the right shade of meaning, your editor might be holding you back in the venerable art of word invention. Children’s literature is full of made-up words, because children reach beyond their vocabularies all the time to amusing—and often revealing—effect. A page torn from the linguistic annals of my grandchildren: commenting on his older brother Liam’s behavior, three-year-old Levi borrowed from his mother’s sense of right and wrong when he said, "That’s not a-poopie-ate, right mommy?" I say we wordsmiths can learn from their fearlessness. The world of language would be less fanci...

This month here at The Blood Red Pencil we've been looking at various aspects of language, and there have been some interesting posts on the use of slang, the clever use of made-up words, and the importance of using the right word in the right time period or for the right character. In thinking about what I might contribute to this theme, I toyed with the idea of writing about the way journalists, especially broadcast journalists, fracture the English language. Some of the breaks are just funny bloopers, but others are mistakes that are more embarrassing than funny. For example when a commentator during the Olympics said, "He was a whole feet shy." Or another who said, "You've got to perform well to be able to medal." Like we didn't know that? I decided to go in a different direction, however, when I started reading a humorous book by Bill McCurry. Bring Us the Head of the Velveteen Rabbit   is filled with short, yet funny and insightful e...

Please welcome fantasy author S.K. Randolph to the Blood-Red Pencil today. While in college, I was introduced to fantasy fiction for the first time. I read and reread Tolkien’s Trilogy and The Hobbit , immersed myself in Narnia, and devoured everything I could find by Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Patricia McKillip, Sharon Shinn, and the list goes on. This resulted in an ever-deepening desire to create my own world, to write fantasy. In 2003, while on a sabbatical from Interlochen Center for the Arts, I began my first novel. Immediately, I encountered a stumbling block—naming my world/worlds and the characters that inhabited them. Always a lover of word games, I started playing with anagrams as means of achieving this. The puzzles, the acts of discovery, and the outcomes fascinated me. First, I selected the word of origin based upon a characteristic of the place, object, or character to be named. For example, I needed to name a tower at the center of a forest fil...

Lately, thanks (or curses) to one of my kids, I've taken up playing Words With Friends . People think that because I write books, I must have a massive vocabulary. Not so. I write contemporary commercial fiction, which is what I read. I like characters to sound like the people I hear every day, and I don't want to interrupt them and say, "What does that word mean?" Likewise, I don't like stopping the flow of a story to look up a word. On a side note to the latter, if I'm reading on my NOOK, it's not as big a problem because if I touch the word, I get a pop-up menu that will display the definition. But if I'm confident I understand the context, I don't bother. A lot of times, when playing Words With Friends, I'll toss letters on the screen and see if they're accepted. Sometimes they are, which usually surprises me. If you're reading an historical, the language will be different from a contemporary romantic suspense, or a fantasy...

As a ghostwriter, I often help people write their memoirs or their family histories. In this role I get to ask a lot of questions, but preparing my interviews can be challenging because research of personal stories cannot be done by searching through public information on the Internet. You have to go fishing in the personal pond, which can be murky or shallow. One of the ways I fish for interesting and colorful details about my memoir clients’ lives is to ask about how the people in their story talked. Like most writers, I love words, so one of my favorite research topics is on the language used by various generations. Knowing the popular slang of an era adds color and authenticity to a memoir (or fiction.) Asking questions of the client about how their parents talked, or how they talked when young, is a good way to bring back buried memories. One thing that defines a generation is their way of speaking, especially the slang developed in their teens and twenties. These words often re...

LAST SEGMENT OF OUR CONTINUING SERIES - 18 Stories! 15 Authors! Talk About A Project! The Corner Cafe: A Tasty Collection of Short Stories is riding high in sales, after a spectacular performance at its first freebie weekend on June 9 and June 10, 2012. The book is ready, but the work's not over. Dani Greer, owner of The Blood-Red Pencil, along with Morgan Mandel, Helen Ginger, Maryann Miller, Shonell Bacon, and Audrey Lintner, all contributors to the collection and members of The Blood-Red Pencil, are sharing our ongoing experiences with you about the project in this series. Perhaps, what we've discovered will aid you in your own endeavors.  Morgan Mandel  I hope you've enjoyed my ongoing series,which I am closing out today with my answers to the interview questions. It seems appropriate for me to be last, since one of my contributions to the collection,"The Closing of the Corner Cafe," appears last in the book. This story describes the rise and ...