Grammar Girl's Punctuation 911 - You need this book!

When I’m not writing, I’m editing. I’m a contract editor for a publisher. I also edit for friends and friends of friends in between assignments, and in between those assignments and requests, I edit myself. One thing editing has taught me is to be hyperaware of not making the same mistakes as the writers that I’m editing. While my job is primarily about spotting continuity errors, applying duct tape to plot holes and fact checking, I also try to clean up the grammar and punctuation as much as I can.

I’ve had many writers tell me that they do not remember how to properly use commas and other punctuation marks. I’ve had some tell me that expecting them to use them between independent clauses isn’t required anymore—well it is. I’ve had others blink at me like a deer in the headlights when I tell them that a semicolon should be used instead when there is no conjunction.

I read books on grammar. It’s part of my job. It’s me making sure that I am not sending my editors a nightmare. You cannot trust Word to put a green line under all your grammatical errors, because when it comes to commas, Word is frequently wrong.

This little 99 cent book is wonderful. Grammar Girl breaks punctuation down in plain English, and she gets the message across about how it should be done with simple examples. Any one who writes or edits should buy this book. It will never leave my Kindle.

It has replaced English Simplified as my favorite book for punctuation and grammar, and not just because English Simplified is overpriced because it’s a textbook. You don’t feel like you’re in English 101 with some grad student browbeating you for leaving out a comma with Grammar Girl’s Punctuation 911. If you write, you can’t afford not to buy and read this book.

Feds and Lawyers

I started at the beginning of the Prenup from Hell today to add the descriptions to the penthouse and other places. I was happily reading along until I hit a sentence that made no sense to me what-so-ever. I have no idea what it meant. I have no idea what it was there for, and I have no idea how I missed it the past 3 times that I've gone over the chapter. My Beta Team missed it too, and usually they catch all the weird stuff. But not this one sentence. I should have saved it and pasted it on my desktop with a note to NEVER do that again. And before you ask, I didn't save it, so I can't show it to you.

I'm over half way through book 1 in the series, and the plot bunnies for book 2 are popping up. I already had the basic premise figured out, but now Des wants an FBI team ala Mulder and Scully to investigate him. This might have been influenced by me rewatching the X-Files from the very beginning for the first time in years, but I think it'd be a great idea for book 2. I might see if I can introduce the agents at the end of book 1.

Sunday Morning

I live between 3 churches. There is one across the street, another up above our house, and the last is down the street. Right now the street is lined with cars of people attending services. I haven't been for a couple of years, but I might head to the Mission after Easter. The Mission is about 2 miles from my house. I like it there. It's 200 years old, and it's one of the most peaceful places that I've ever been.

Today I'm hunting for pictures for locations for the novel that I've been working on. It's funny when I was RPing Vampire the Masquerade, I'd go through magazines and cut pictures of what my characters' homes looked like. It never occurred to me to do the same for my novels. I suppose I did it with Dead Man's Hand, since I did epic amounts of research on 1906, San Francisco and the Earthquake, but it never dawned on me to do it with the Prenup From Hell.

Prenup is set about a dozen years in the future. It's fun because I get to invent tech for the boys to use, and I'm not tied down by historical restraints like I was with DMH. And I love creating the mythology of the creatures in my setting, but my descriptions of the interior of Des and Nick's penthouse always felt flat. I'm hoping that having pictures to inspire me will help.

New Blog

I think it's only fair that my first post on my new Blogger blog is about the frustration I just dealt with trying to set up something on Wordpress. I have avoided WP for years, preferring to build my webpages using html and css. I tried to install WP on my hosting site for one of my dotcoms, but since the site already has things uploaded to it I got an error.

I think that error saved me a ton of grief. Why learn to deal with WP when I already know how Blogger works, right?

I'm going to attempt to post here at least once a week. We'll see how that goes. My writing is going well, and right now I'm trying to decide if I want to keep using this name for my m/m writing or create another pseudonym. I really like being Lee Jay Stura. If it weren't such a pain in the ass, I'd have my name legally changed to it. Oh well it's not a decision that I have to make anytime soon.