The Comma Gang tried to convince the Run-on townspeople that what they proposed was comma sense.
Category Archives: 2016
Monday morning writing joke: “Fishy”
Q.: What do you call a fisherman who can cast a rod with either her left or right hand?
A.: Bi-poler.
***
I went to a seafood disco last week… and pulled a mussel.
Filed under 2016, Monday morning writing joke
How Amazon’s crackdown on scammers is impacting indie authors
How Amazon’s crackdown on scammers is impacting indie authors
Source: How Amazon’s crackdown on scammers is impacting indie authors
“Holly’s Corner,” part 12
[Writer’s note: What began as a writing prompt — photo and first paragraph — has become at least the start of a story. I will endeavor to add short sections to it, at lest as long as there is some interest. It might be a little rough in parts, but that’s because it is coming “hot off the press,” which could be part of the fun of it. In the meantime, you are free to jump off from any part of this story thus far and write your own version. Click Holly’s Corner below to get Parts 1 – 11.]
by David E. Booker
She looked up, saw him, and recoiled back in the chair, her feet swiping through the vomit.
Father Brown left the room again.
I didn’t want to, but I got up and stepped into the other room and told him he didn’t need to come into the room again, that I would handle it.
“But you have a low threshold for puke,” Brown said. “You’ll probably vomit on top of hers.”
It was a cool, rainy day down at Holly’s Corner.
“I would suggest you take her outside and I will clean up.”
“That would involve going back in there,” I said.
“Would you prefer I did?”
“No. That’s what started all this.”
I turned back to the room and stepped inside.
#
“Things ain’t always what they seem to be,” Rachel said.
I had escorted her outside and we had made it to the sidewalk before she started feeling queasy again. We made it to the alley behind the building and as is the case of many alleys, it became the home of something you don’t want to see on the main street.
There wasn’t much to her second upheaval, and when she was done, we walked a couple of doors down to The Time Warp Tea Room, where I bought her a water and a soda, hoping one of the other might help settled her stomach. I bought nothing for myself, just in case. I had almost thrown up in the alley, too.
The Time Warp Tea Room is an eclectic mix of vintage motorcycles, pinball and early video games, and a pressed metal ceiling bought from a company in Alabama and installed over the main part of the large main room. The rest of the ceiling is square tiles used often in modern drop ceilings. A large wooden circular table dominates the back of the main room and a dark-stained wooden bar with a mirror and fretwork fills much of the wall to your right as you enter. A photo of Cas Walker and an album cover of Dolly Parton’s are part of the bar décor.
We were sitting at one of the booths on the opposite wall.
“It’s not what you think.”
She had said that already, but it had been a little while ago and in a less sober state. I nodded and tried to let her get past it. She picked up a pepper shaker from the table and shock it once at me. “People killed for this at one time.” She then picked up the salt shaker. “And this used to be worth more than gold in some circles at one time.”
“How does that pertain to your recipe?”
“You must know, I don’t hate my step-sister. Or I do my best not to, but she does get on my nerves at times.”
“And this is one of those times?”
She glared at me as if I were interrupting her, which I was.
“I am willing to share the rewards from the recipe with her, but she says it was her mother’s recipe and it should be all hers.”
“Is it?”
Rachel hesitated. Not usually a good sign.
“If I tell you the truth, what does it get me.”
“The knowledge you won’t have to cover anything up, remember what lies you told, and in what order.”
“You mean people who tell the truth remember things in the exact same order every time.”
“Not every time. We can all get forgetful or tell a story out of order no matter how many times we’ve told it. But usually the same facts are there and the order can more easily be corrected. The value of telling the truth is that you only have to remember one set of facts. Even if you don’t always remember them in the right order.”
“Doesn’t sound like much.”
“Nobody ever said there was profit in truth.”
“You sound like a philosopher or shrink doctor.”
“I hang around with a priest. Some of it might rub off.”
Rachel gave me a quizzical look. My sense of humor tends to bring that out in people.
“Truth be told, the recipe belongs to a dead woman, a woman our father was sleeping with when she died.”
“Then how did your step-mother get it?” I asked.
“Tricia’s mom suspected my father of sleeping with a neighbor lady and one day while Dad and the woman were away, she broke into the woman’s house looking for evidence. She didn’t find any, but she found this recipe. According to the story Tricia’s mom told me once, this recipe was out on the counter and just for spite, she stole it. She didn’t even know what it was. She was just angry and looking for some way to let this woman know that if she was going to steal from her, she was going to steal from this neighbor lady.”
“Does this neighbor lady have a name?”
(To be continued.)
Filed under 2016, photo by David E. Booker, Story by author
Photo finish Friday: “Flowering sunlight”
Lily in the light.
Filed under 2016, photo by David E. Booker, Photo Finish Friday
Haiku to you Thursday: “First day”
Full moon fading West. /
Orange-red rays stroke the East. /
Summer’s first day.
Filed under 2016, Haiku to You Thursday, poetry by author
Writing tip Wednesday: “Guidance from an author”
Neil Gaiman
- Write.
- Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
- Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
- Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
- Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
- Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
- Laugh at your own jokes.
- The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
Filed under 2016, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
Monday morning writing joke: “Give and take”
A cactus and a vampire walk into a bar. The bartender can’t decide who’s the bigger prick.
***
Q.: What do you call a zombie with rod and reel?
A.: Hooked.
Filed under 2016, Monday morning writing joke
The end of the end (stop)?
Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style
By DAN BILEFSKY
LONDON — One of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying
The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age
David Crystal
The conspicuous omission of the period in text messages and in instant messaging on social media, he says, is a product of the punctuation-free staccato sentences favored by millennials — and increasingly their elders — a trend fueled by the freewheeling style of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter
“We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full stop,” Professor Crystal, an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, said in an interview after he expounded on his view recently at the Hay Festival in Wales
“In an instant message, it is pretty obvious a sentence has come to an end, and none will have a full stop,” he added “So why use it?”
In fact, the understated period — the punctuation equivalent of stagehands who dress in black to be less conspicuous — may have suddenly taken on meanings all its own
Increasingly, says Professor Crystal, whose books include “Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation,” the period is being deployed as a weapon to show irony, syntactic snark, insincerity, even aggression
If the love of your life just canceled the candlelit, six-course, home-cooked dinner you have prepared, you are best advised to include a period when you respond “Fine.” to show annoyance
“Fine” or “Fine!,” in contrast, could denote acquiescence or blithe acceptance
“The period now has an emotional charge and has become an emoticon of sorts,” Professor Crystal said “In the 1990s the internet created an ethos of linguistic free love where breaking the rules was encouraged and punctuation was one of the ways this could be done”
Social media sites have only intensified that sense of liberation
Professor Crystal’s observations on the fate of the period are driven in part by frequent visits to high schools across Britain, where he analyzes students’ text messages
Researchers at Binghamton University in New York and Rutgers University in New Jersey have also recently noted the period’s new semantic force
They asked 126 undergraduate students to review 16 exchanges, some in text messages, some in handwritten notes, that had one-word affirmative responses (Okay, Sure, Yeah, Yup) Some had periods, while others did not
Those text message with periods were rated as less sincere, the study found, whereas it made no difference in the notes penned by hand
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter and the reading of messages on a cellphone or hand-held device has repurposed the punctuation mark
“It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it,” he said “It’s like when you say, ‘I am not going – period’ It’s a mark It can be aggressive It can be emphatic It can mean, ‘I have no more to say’
Can ardent fans of punctuation take heart in any part of the period’s decline? Perhaps.
The shunning of the period, Professor Crystal said, has paradoxically been accompanied by spasms of overpunctuation
“If someone texts, ‘Are you coming to the party?’ the response,” he noted, was increasingly, “Yes, fantastic!!!!!!!!!!!”
But, of course, that exuberance would never be tolerated in a classroom
At the same time, he said he found that British teenagers were increasingly eschewing emoticons and abbreviations such as “LOL” (laughing out loud) or “ROTF” (rolling on the floor) in text messages because they had been adopted by their parents and were therefore considered “uncool”
Now all we need to know is, what’s next to go? The question mark
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