As distressing as this is to everyone (myself included) having managed to put up the chapters of Witchfinder late yesterday, I don’t feel up to posting early today. Instead, I shall go and work — you know… the stuff I get paid for.
There might be Austen fanfic tomorrow and meanwhile I’m considering starting another serial on writing or some aspect of writing. Anyone have any suggestions?
According To Hoyt 
Happy writing!!!
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Surprised this didn’t occur to me earlier.
Any advice on writing blurbs?
It’s hard enough to write a novel under 300k for me. Distilling that novel down to 300 words is a nightmare.
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Will do a post on that when I finish this series. If I forget, poke me, okay. BTW, your link in diner does NOT work.
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Thanks, already been to the diner to see the correction. Thanks.
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Suggestions?? How about a series on character creation. I know some authors have their characters arriving like Athena and others have confessed to creating characters by rolling the die on their D&D books. Characters, their care and feeding, might cover main characters: protagonist, antagonist, love-interest(s) as well as secondary characters, such as sidekicks, henchmen, friends, servants, parents & siblings (both of protagonist and love-interest) and so on.
Related topics might include PoV: clarity of whose, switching among characters, limitations of certain character PoVs (f’rinstance, the PoV in Shane is a young boy whose narration describes the tension introduced into the household by Shane’s presence without recognizing the sexual aspects.)
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Okay, that probably ought have been: character creation and development.
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I can try. I do sometimes shove mine around. And h*ll I’ve had to create a few cold turkey. I can try.
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Worldbuilding.
Wayne
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Or for that matter, how about a round table discussion on using technology for editing?
The suggestion may sound really stupid. We’ve all got software with spell and grammar checking capabilities. A lot of writers just don’t turn on Spell Check. Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass when your character has a name that isn’t in the dictionary. Guess what? You can add the name, and later delete it from the dictionary.
Grammar checking is even more important. When every second sentence begins with either the word “and” or “but” the reader isn’t going to be impressed.
I learned about this while writing corporate documents. Tried the grammar checker, and just about choked. At first I thought that it was programmed wrong. When I rewrote the document using its suggestions, I could see how it had been improved.
Which doesn’t mean that all of the suggestions from a grammar checker are appropriate. IWork Pages keeps telling me that ‘wife’ should be replaced by ‘spouse’ and in a fantasy that isn’t true. There are times that ‘Politically Correct’ language is out of place.
Wayne
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I endorse Wayne’s suggestion.
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I retract my endorsement and apologize…profusely…VERY profusely…if that’s not too many filler words.
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Nah, very profusely is always good. :)
Actually the things you mention DO need to be looked over, and again, if I find I’m using a word too much I search it out and evaluate case by case. I just don’t do it without checking case by case. At one point in one book ALL my characters were pensive. There were — deep breath — 245 pensives in the first fifty pages. :-) So, take heart, it’s not just you.
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Don’t ask. You and Darius don’t even look alike! :-P
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Wayne
for fiction NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER use grammar check. No, I mean that. Particularly Word grammar check. I stopped using it when it informed me “don’t use ‘I can not kill you’ try ‘I will attempt to kill you.'” Seriously — it boils the flavor out of your writing. Don’t do it.
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I sometimes turn on grammar-check to look for times when I’ve made a sentence so complex that Word chokes.
…my Word only complains about real (or semi-real; I don’t think it knows when Passive Voice isn’t) grammar, though, not “spouse” and whatnot. Do I have a different setting tweaked on it? (I don’t have it set to “formal language,” if I recall correctly…)
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Beth,
You assume that I’m stupid enough to use anything produced by Microsoft. I’m not. I know too much about the company. Hell, I write about them on a regular basis, and I predicted their current slide into bankruptcy three and a half years ago. It isn’t happening as quickly as I thought, but if you read and understand their SEC filings, you can see the pattern.
That’s why Apple is worth so much more than Microsoft now. The company is in a slow motion collapse. Current management is incapable of stopping the slide. I don’t think that there’s anyone who could rescue the company.
My suggestion if you are still using Microsoft Word is to start planning your exit strategy. Check your options. There are other Word Processors out there. Libre Office (I’m writing a paid article on it right now) is improving by leaps and bounds. Three major point releases in a year and a half is damned impressive.
There’s lot of other options – check Wikipedia which has a list of available Word Processors. I would suggest avoiding Open Office and IBM’s Lotus Suite, most of the developers moved to Libre Office.
Point is, you can’t count on Microsoft. Odds are that the company won’t survive. Economically, well, you just don’t know how unstable it is. I do. I do this type of evaluation all of the time. Hell, I get paid to do it.
Wayne
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Oh by the way, if you have Open Office, don’t try to install Libre Office until you uninstall Open Office. Libre Office thought I had an older version of Libre Office open. [Wink]
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LOL. No Wayne. I’m much more of a fossil than that. I use Corel Wordperfect. Yep. There’s still five of us left.
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Loved Wordperfect, great intuitive program, but now I work on campus and OIT has declared they will not support Wordperfect, or Macs, or any computer that has the power to do more than Word, Xcel or solitaire, which is a bit of a problem when you are trying to teach video-editing, or imaging and other such memory intensive issues like people in the fine arts are wont to do. Living behind the Mircosoft iron curtain is annoying. And the MS Office has recently destroyed the “file” button, the single most ubiquitous menu option in the history of the GUI interface and replaced it with a meaningless cloverleaf. If Microsoft redesigned the traffic signs, the instantly recognizable red octagon that means stop to everyone, would be replaced with a purple triangle this year, and an orange trapezoid the next. But then I think I’ve given this rant before.
At least you can export to MS Word from wordperfect. Trying to go from Word to wordperfect is like trying to cross checkpoint charlie during the height of the cold war. Someday something will come around to break us out of the office gulag.
Until then, viva la revolution!
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I’m going to have to go to word, too, because of publishing through the various outlets. It’s the only thing that will pry the corel wordperfect from my hands.
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I keep waiting for someone to make a credible kludge that will export from WP to Word, so that I can use WP and none will be wiser.
There just has to be some grad student willing to do it, but so far none of the convertors I’ve tried are even decent.
Sigh.
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Wayne,
You’re forgetting a few things.
1. Just about bloody everyone uses Word somewhere. Either it’s the standard where they work, or it came with the computer and that’s all that the person in question knows about.
2. If you’re dealing with the legacy system, that’s Word all the way.
3. No word processor has grammar checking that’s worth the pixels it displays with. Not one.
4. Even with the simplest possible layout, switching between Word and anything else is capable of screwing it up. Spectacularly, at that. How do I know? At my job, Word is what gets used. At home, depending on which system I’m using it’s either Open Office or Libre. Anything more complex than plain text is likely to acquire random changes to line spacing, font, whether italics or underlines are on or off.
5. Have you ever tried to work with comments added through the Word review feature in Open Office? It sucks. O-O’s navigation through comments stinks on ice. If the document isn’t saved precisely in the correct fashion, the comments vanish. Since the majority of the known universe works with Word and has no reason to care whether someone else has it or not, if you can’t access Word features, you’re screwed. To put it nicely.
Now, please pull your head out, stop obsessing on your personal technological demons – or your personal tech gods – and actually discuss the topic.
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Kate,
Agreed. Open Office had problems. That’s why Libre Office exists, and why LO3.5 was released just the other day. LO3.4 was buggy. LO3.5 (crossed fingers) appears to have addressed the problems.
I’m editing Shirley Meier’s novel “Sparks in the Wind” right now. First pass was in Apple’s IWork Pages. It has weaknesses, but it has a fairly decent interface, that doesn’t get in your face when you are working. When you need something, you hit a button, and the menu you need pops up.
Then I used Pages to output a DOC file for Shirley with Track Changes turned on so she could see what I’d done, which was mostly fiddly stuff. Shirley’s a pro. I had a bunch of small issues, mostly punctuation related, or words that didn’t quite fit. Words where a modifier might be missing for example.
Then I used Pages to output an ePub file, and read the book on my iPad. I found a bunch of small things that I’d missed in the first pass. Apostrophes, double commas, a “should” that should have been a “shouldn’t”, as I said, small stuff.
I also ran the DOC file I sent to Shirley through LO3.5 as a cross check. It picked up on errors that Pages (and my eyesight didn’t catch). I found more double spaces, more odd punctuation, etc.
I’m now waiting on Shirley to finish her read through. I’ve got two other people doing cross checks as well. Both of them are fast readers, odds are that I’ll be able to sit down and be able to finish everything by the end of the week.
Truth be told, I could probably upload the book today. But I’m a bit of a perfectionist. This is a damned good book, and it deserves the best I can give it.
As to Microsoft, have you read their SEC filings? Do you know where they keep the money they report? Hint. It isn’t in the United States.
Apple is in a lot better shape financially, at least at present. Without Steve Jobs, well, give them 2-3 years for the products he was involved on to get out of the pipeline. After that we’ll see. I suspect without his genius the company will be in deep trouble.
Wayne
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Wayne, let me get this straight. An author, a creative person, has entrusted her novel to you, and you’re doing multiple passes with various software programs? You have the *audacity* to call that “editing”??? No. No. No. No. That is not editing. That is … manipulation in private for your own enjoyment.
You have about as much of a clue what “editing” is about as a eunuch-from-birth has about female pleasuring.
Stop this nonsense. You edited technical manuals. Whoop de do dah. Tell me, is Shirley Meier writing a technical manual? If so, you’re the right person for the job! If it’s *fiction* that is supposed to do anything other than become a cure for insomnia, I pity the poor woman.
We all know of “editors” who have so butchered manuscripts that it is close to impossible for the author to restore — because their beating heart was ripped out of their chest and smashed into a proximity of a Hallmark greeting card heart.
You, Wayne, are a menace. Not to mention the worst kind of program-snob imaginable. The confluence of two such creativity killers is mind boggling.
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Lin,
Did I mention reading the book first? Problem is, when I read Fiction, I immerse myself in it, and I miss things. Lots of things. One of the family jokes is that Dad can watch a Television show three times before he notices something obvious. My kids think that this is hilarious.
I only have that problem with Fiction. Give me a company’s annual report, and I can point out to you where they are glossing over problems on the first read through. Or a political ad. The family sits on me when political ads are being aired.
So yes, I used the automated stuff to look for all of those little things like weird punctuation, odd sentences, extra spaces, etc. I’ve now read the book four times, hit it with three different Grammar checkers, two different spell checkers. The last time I read it was on my iPad in iBooks using a Pages outputted ePub file (a process I highly recommend, errors show up that you won’t see on a Mac or PC screen).
I’m going to hit it again with a different Dictionary tonight, and use that run to build up a Character List and Glossary.
This has all been done extremely carefully. “Sparks in the Wind” is a very strong book. Shirley has done a marvelous job of world building. The characters are, well, incredible. The problems that I’ve been working on are all minor stuff, like double periods at the end of sentences, the overuse of a couple of filler words (which Shirley agreed with me when I showed them to her), and of course getting the formatting ready for upload.
Wayne
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Then you area patently ill-suited to be an editor of *any* kind of fiction.
Think if you were a surgeon and made the same statement.
This isn’t your field. You and it don’t belong together. It’s like asking someone who’s tone-deaf to do sound balance on a symphony.
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No, just means I have to do it slower, for now. I couldn’t read corporate filings and get everything the first pass when I started, I had to learn what to look for, one step at a time. This is the same, but looking for different problems. You learn by doing. If you aren’t willing to learn, well, I know where to find you, and what the stone above your head will say.
Wayne
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Nothing “stupid” about using Word programs, if you know how to whip them till they kneel and obey. Of course, one has to re-train each new version, which is why I generally don’t upgrade. (And they’ll save as RTF, which other things need, so if MicroSoft goes belly-up, I can just go do the conversions if nothing else winds up reading Word files (oh, look, Libre Office claims it will; I’m set, then). I don’t upgrade my OS quickly, either, because I don’t want to lose Painter 7…)
I’d switch to Pages except for a final convert for the Meatgrinder, but Pages doesn’t have some of the features that Word has, which I happen to use. I’d switch to AbiWord, but the screen display has kerning flaws that even I can recognize and be driven crazy by. OpenOffice hasn’t come up on my radar because, well, Word kneels to me and calls me Queen.
Also, at least two places I might write for use Word templates; one pours the Word file into a converter for Quark, and the other is the Meatgrinder. (Which is not half so picky as the first one there!) So till they switch, no point not writing in what I’m comfortable writing in, y’know? (Of course, I don’t make the assumption Word likes me. I know that it’s full of loathing and hate, leashed only by my iron fist.)
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I’ve been feeding Meatgrinder DOC files outputted from Pages and it is 100% happy with them. The issues I did have, at first, came down to me messing up. I think on the first document that I invented ways to foul up links that had never been seen before.
I was expecting something complex, tried to produce something complex, and well, created a mess. Instead the process is so simple that when I actually RTFMed I ended up kicking myself.
There are caveats to that statement.
1) All changes must be accepted.
2) Track Changes must be turned off before export.
As to using LibreOffice with Meatgrinder, I would expect the same tricks to work. You probably don’t know a lot about how document files work. I used to work as a programmer, and when you have track changes turned on, you are actually keeping more than one copy of the text in the file.
When you accept the changes, it removes the copy. This cleans up the file, so that Meatgrinder doesn’t get confused. Turning off “Track Changes” turns off the capability to have an extra copy, but should be done after all changes are accepted.
Notes are another issue. If you have notes in your file, get rid of them. Any file you pass to Meatgrinder should be pristine, whether it comes from Word, Word Perfect, Open Office, Libre Office, Pages, or Google Docs.
One document that I uploaded for a friend, who had been working on it for nearly ten years, was so full of formatting artifacts, that we COULD not get rid of (he was using Microsoft Word) that we ended up exporting it to straight text, and then reformatting it. It was way faster doing it that way, than fighting with Word, which can be a real PITA when it comes to formatting.
The DOC file format is well documented (no pun intended). Almost anything can produce a version that Meatgrinder will accept, as long as you keep it clean.
Wayne
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My spouse is a programmer, so I hear about this stuff. I never have Track Changes on. I don’t solicit comments on the doc file itself. I never have notes. My Word files start clean and end clean, and Meatgrinder has never given me guff.
Word is my little word processing slave with powerful search-and-replace features. When Pages gets those search-and-replace features, then it can be my workhorse. Till then, it’s my iPad word processor. (And I have written short stories on it, in part and in full.)
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Hum, and I love Pages “Search and Replace” on the Mac.
I do a lot of writing on the iPad too. Don’t carry a laptop when I leave the house now, I just email my current document to my iPad and work on it there. The iPad is fine for writing. Editing is another matter. I can’t edit using the on screen keyboard. I have a Bluetooth keyboard which I can use, but the keys aren’t the best, so I tend to leave editing until I get home and can use my MacBook.
It all comes down to comfort, and what allows you to work the best. A friend of mine swears by her IBM Thinkpad. Tried it, and ran screaming.
Wayne
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I don’t have comments on my files, either. Dan is a coff software architect so, yeah. My problem though is that I REALLY don’t like word. So I work in Word Perfect. The transition between Word Perfect and Word means I end up with spurious periods at the beginning of a line. Not always — about every tenth time. This drives me nuts. Also, on a file created in word, I’m supposed to have a “section break” code. I’ve done everything to that file, including taking the text and repasting “clean” It still gets kicked out. I’ve given up. It’s JUST a short story, anyway.
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Copy and paste doesn’t work? O_o (And then 2 carriage returns, Insert: Section Break, 2 more carriage returns?)
You’re not saving as docx, are you? Meatgrinder only takes .doc…
Okay, okay, I’ll try to stop trouble-shooting. Picked the habit up from ze spouse.
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No. Most of the time I have no issues. It’s a story in ten or so…
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Weeeeeeeird indeed. I suppose the only other thing to try would be to copy-and-paste into something else (e.g., TextEdit on a Mac), save as plain text, then copy-pasta from that into Word and re-add formatting. Which is… probably more work than it’s worth, if you don’t have HTML-style markers for bold and italic in the text. (Raw HTML markup in my draft is my little “off-site backup to LiveJournal/Dreamwidth” quirk.) :(
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I love the copy-pasta typo. Sorry, but it’s funny. :)
I don’t use Mac. I think I need to run it through an html cleaner. Word does weird stuff when you don’t originally do the document on it (and sometimes if you do.)
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I really want to make a Mac & Cheese joke here, and therefore confess intent to pun with malice aforethought.
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Woulds’t thou be a breeder of groans? Get thee to a punnery. Go!
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Such groans are ill-bred indeed, but methinks they multiply parthenogenesis, splitting sides and spreading.
What I actually wanted to warn against was the tendency for stories written on Macs to be cheesy, but I lacked confidence in my ability to deliver the goods without heavy-handedness.
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Sorry Beth, that should have gone to Sarah. Sometimes I hate Word Press. Sigh.
Wayne
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There are also times the passive voice is entirely appropriate, when you want to create uncertainty about who or what is the actor or an event, but Word treats all examples of passive voice like sexual offenders.
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I think that people are missing my point with using automation. I got reports that said:
1) Passive
2) Prince – should be possibly Ruler – Sexist
3) Husband/Wife – replace with spouse
This isn’t the sort of thing I was looking for. I was looking for the small grammatical things that we all do, all the time, and don’t notice, ehh?
Yes, I’m Canadian. And if you record me speaking, you’ll probably hear a few “ehhs” escape my lips. You’ll also find too many sentences beginning with the words “and”, “but”, “maybe”, which is fine in conversation, but not in the rest of the story!
We use filler words all the time. Words that have no meaning, that only take up space. If you are being paid by the word, and can get away with it, well, go for it.
BUT… Do your readers really want to read filler? Or would your 100K word novel be better if we removed 100 usages of the word “and” from the start of sentences?
I think it would be a better novel without the filler. Remember Ron Goulart? The man packed more action into less words than any other writer, and tossed in tons of wacky concepts that still have me giggling today. The Boy Scout Liberation Army! What a hoot.
Wayne
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Wayne,
Now you’re getting weird. There are filler words and there are filler words. One of the last things I do before I put anything up is a search for filler words. Stuff like “very” and “finally” and also whatever the word-du-jour is — i.e. the word my brain got stuck on. Then I carefully judge every instance to figure out whether to keep it in or not.
HOWEVER listen up, okay? THERE IS SUCH A THING AS STYLE. And novels are about style and voice. (Shorts too, though arguably less at least when I wrote per word.) If novels were about “action and events” I could tell you Darkship Thieves in ten pages. I know because that was the size of the synopsis I sent Toni. And if you enjoy reading synopsis and Cliff’s Notes, then you’re absolutely right in what would make YOU happy. Not other people.
Minimalist is a style. It is NOT the only style. For the record I could never stand Hemingway and read him only as required for school.
If you can’t understand that for stylistic reasons I might want to say:
He was dead. He was very, very dead.
Instead of simply “He was dead” I recommend you stick to writing computer manuals.
If you can’t get the difference between saying:
If you think filler words are never needed and therefore a program can remove them, you are not a fiction writer.
and
And if you think filler words are never, ever needed, and therefore a program with no human aesthetic judgement is competent to weed them out, you are not now nor have you ever been, and possibly will never be a writer
— I recommend you fall on your own pen. There is no hope for you.
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Not arguing against style Sarah. I’m arguing against accidental verbiage. The things we do without knowing it, because ehh, that’s the way we speak, ehh?
Conscious, controlled emphasis is what we are aiming for. It is the uncontrolled, unconscious stuff I’m concerned with. The stuff that sneaks in when we aren’t looking, and makes our writing not quite as professional as it should be.
Wayne
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Thing is, my pet filler words are idiosyncratic. I doubt there’s a grammar-checker alive which can tell that I need to remove the word “that” 90% of the time. (My internal copyeditor is getting better at tweaking those before or immediately after they get written, but they still crop up.)
I doubt I’m such a special snowflake as to be the only one who has quite grammatical filler-words. (My other habit, which Word’s grammar-checker can help with, is to make extremely long, complicated sentences that may not have wasted words — but they require sentence diagramming to untangle; I know what they mean, but the grammar checker chokes. …I may have gotten better about doing that when I’m not actually trying. I think.)
(I am a special snowflake in that my internal copyeditor is yoked to the same harness as my internal author, and they pull in tandem. Next person to tell me to “turn off the inner editor” when writing gets a virtual smack upside the head.)
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YES. My pet filler words are insane. Like I’ll fall in love with something like “plash” and use it EVERYWHERE. Also, they change every other day, so…
AND lol. Beth? Are you sure you’re not me?
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*checks* One extroverted, attention-demanding, mild-Asperger’s girl-kid, 4 cats, no boys… I don’t think I’m you! (And my pet filler-words are a bit less subject to change. I tend to fall in love with something and KEEPS IT FOREEEEEVER MY PRECIOUSNESSSSSS! :D )
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Only after the fact did I realize that everyone of my character’s looked at each other “wistfully” or “suddenly”
If you took those out. The book would be a pamphlet.
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As an editor, the technology really is irrelevant. It makes it easier. But then sometimes you still have to go back to pen and paper.
I had a young journalist I was trying to mentor. Her writing just was _not_ improving. Didn’t seem to matter what I did. So finally I made her print out each and every story double spaced and I went after them with a red pen, classic editing marks and notes in the margin. It’s not the tech. It’s the editor.
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But it is the tech Pat! You found the tech that your writer could understand, and used it. Matching technology to the person you are working with is how you are supposed to use it.
I brought up my specific example because I see a lot of stuff where basic training in how to use the software tools that the writer already has, would save them a lot of grief.
It doesn’t mean my suggestion is the only valid suggestion. It did work for me, but heck, I’m a computer geek, who used to make money programming Shareware, and don’t along with people all that well.
Other non-computer suggestions should definitely included if this is the way Sarah decides to go. I’d be happy to learn about them.
Wayne
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Yep. All good fiction writers I know get someone else to edit them. Okay, in my shorts — at least in some of them — I wrote them long enough ago I have enough distance to edit myself. Only it makes me want to throttle young me, and that’s sad.
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It isn’t sad. Just means that the your from now knows more.
Life does that to you.
Wayne
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Wayne, first of all, technology is not used for editing. It may be used for proofreading and copy editing, but not for editing. Sorry, but it’s not. It can help implement the edits that are made or suggested. It can be used to highlight or suggest alternative ordering, wording, etc. But that isn’t editing. Since you like to be specific in your comments, let’s be specific about that.
Second, as for your comment above about “being stupid enough” to use anything by Microsoft, get over yourself here. We know you don’t like them. We know you think you are the expert in this area. But that has nothing to do with the basis of the post. More than that, Word is still the industry standard for those authors who are working with legacy publishers and a number of small presses. Why? Because it is the most widely used word processing program. It has one of the best review capabilities. So, I repeat, get over it. As long as a writer wants to work with most publishers, they should have a copy of Word.
Now, before you start going on about how there are alternatives they can use, I suggest you look at my post over on Mad Genius Club several weeks ago about the hidden code that occurs in a document that goes from one word processing program to another. Even if you are going to self-pub, you need to make sure that you and your beta readers/editors/whatever are using the same program to keep from having a lot of unnecessary headaches.
One last thing, as much as you hate Microsoft, there are others who feel the same way about Apple. Microsoft may be in trouble, but so is Apple. Neither is going to disappear any time soon — in my opinion and, also in my opinion, this blog isn’t the place to debate it UNLESS SARAH SAYS WE CAN.
My advice to any writer is to use the word processing program they are most comfortable with. Find out what program their editors use AND how the editor does their editorial comments. If the editor sends back comments within the document, have the same program they do. If they don’t, if they are still using hard copies to show edits, then you don’t have anything to worry about.
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Gotcha!
Hehe.
Wayne
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Wayne,
Are you trying to get yourself on moderation for trolling?
Do grow up. You’re welcome to opine all you like on your pet topics on your own site. This is Sarah’s blog and this is the second time in a week you’ve gone off on an “I hate $COMPANY” tangent.
Control yourself or take it elsewhere. Your call.
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Kate,
I don’t hate Microsoft. I know about thirty people who work there. I’m a filker, there are a lot of people in the Filk community who work for Microsoft.
The company has severe financial problems, which would take about 10K words to explain. This is not unusual. Most companies are not financially stable, unless they are backed by a Government, like Sinopec.
Or they have a “water empire” position, which is where Microsoft was until the mobile market broke open, destroying their monopoly position. Their partner, Intel is in the same position, with ARM Holdings gobbling up a huge share of the microprocessor market over the last couple of years due to mobile.
The computing market is undergoing a paradigm shift. I do not think that Microsoft will be able to shift fast enough to survive. Apple, with its moves on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad was ahead of the curve, at least this time. Next time? They’ll probably go down to some company that’s smaller, leaner, and hungrier. That’s the way business works.
Wayne
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Wayne,
And this is relevant to Sarah’s post how?
You are arguing at a tangent. Again. I called you on trolling for a flaming, you complain that I got your motivations wrong and say nothing about your trolling for flamewars.
Accept that you fucked up, and stop trying to save face. Apologize. Now.
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Thanks, Wayne. You just confirmed that all you are doing is trying to bait folks. Too bad, Sarah doesn’t need trolls on her blog. So I’ll follow the rule of not feeding the troll any more. One more name to add to the ignore file.
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Well, it *was* amusing, for a *while*, watching him trying to be the “expert editor” thing without knowing the difference between being a glorified human spell-checker and an *editor*. Like watching a kid who can (barely) fly a kite claim to be a pilot. Except it got a little old. What do we know about Wayne:
1. Canadian.
2. Filk.
3. Is worthless without a software program.
4. Likes obscure software programs so he can be the “expert” because nobody else gives a rip.
5. Thinks, for some reason, he’s entitled to lecture award winning authors and professional editors because he’s done the odd technical manual.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? The sheer breadth of self-importance!
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Lin, I’ve given up responding to him. He’s a self-admitted troll and there is a reason for the rule, “don’t feed the troll”. For another thing, I’ve seen, and taken part in, “discussions” like this one where he only wants his opinion heard, he wants to show how much smarter he is than everyone else, and where he proves he isn’t interested in having a dialogue. It’s not worth it. Besides, notice how he keeps coming back when someone calls him on being stupid about something. Look how he came back when Sarah told him upthread to get over himself and quit being weird about this. He likes the attention. Unless and until Sarah decides that her only recourse is to ban him, I say everyone just needs to ignore him. Maybe then he’ll either grow up or go away. Either is better than how he’s acting now.
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Lin,
You forgot to mention that I’m crazy :)
Hey, technology does have its uses. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen complaints about books which had problems that a simple spell or grammar check would have fixed. If you’ve got the technology, why not use it?
Wayne
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Amanda is correct, but I’m going to give this another stab. Hopefully it will be fatal.
Wayne, you’re the guy who tightens lugnuts and thinks he’s an engineering expert.
What you are describing isn’t *editing*. It is nit picking. Most authors have anal-retentive friends or family who do that for free. Without recourse a bazillion different programs that *add* garbage like double periods at the ends of sentences. You put something through multiple programs, then another program finds an artifact that was inserted because of what you did, and you pat yourself on the back.
You,sir, are not even a *copy* editor (much, much, vastly much different from an “editor”. The difference beween Lady’s Bathroom and Lady.) And you don’t qualify for that.
You are becoming a tiresome twit. You have had this explained to you. Please stop torturing the English language in your grasp at self-aggrandizement.
And, btw, I would be *very* careful about throwing around an author’s name as you have Shirley Meier’s. Because your little romp has cost *her* at least one reader and possible fan. I don’t want to read anything you had any part of, especially, God help us all, as “editor”.
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Well that was worth another 850 words.
I hope you enjoy it. I’ve already got one dissent.
Wayne
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Wayne,
Today is NOT the day for this. Get over yourself. I mean that. Today is REALLY not the day for this. Be told.
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Wayne,
I hate to break it to you, but your dick doesn’t grow whenever someone disagrees with you. The kids at your elementary school were lying when they said that.
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Kate,
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that when I give up, I don’t succeed. I can fail a thousand times, and succeed on the thousand and first. That is what made me a good salesman.
This also makes me a stubborn jackass at times. I’m sorry if that offends you. It also means that I tend to get where I’m going eventually, even if I end up with a hell of a lot of bruises on my face.
I can put up with bruises.
Wayne
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Wayne,
You don’t offend me. You’re beneath contempt.
Oh, and some helpful advice? Not only does pulling it not make it bigger, but wanking is best done in private.
Not only would I not have purchased anything from you, I’d have been informing your bosses that I’d never touch anything from their company because they cared so little for their customers they’d allow a salesman to be a prick in their name. Then informing everyone else I knew what kind of asshole your bosses hired.
A good salesman looks for ways to make the customer happy. An asshole salesman does what you do.
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Wayne,
I am replying only because Sarah is not able to tonight due to family and other pressing issues. However, rest assured that she and I spoke about this. You have crossed over the line not once, not twice but a number of times. Not just in this thread but in your comments to other posts as well. Sarah warned your earlier today to stop. You didn’t. She has issued her final warning in her response to you at 7:28 this evening. Unless you want her to ban you — and this is something she doesn’t do lightly — I recommend you go back and consider your actions here. I’d start with the fact that you have started using this blog to flog your own blog, and without Sarah’s permission.
Just an FYI, if you have any doubts that I don’t have the authority to speak for Sarah, check with any of the barflies or followers of Sarah’s Diner of facebook. You will find that both Kate and I are her backup moderators.
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Wayne,
It is true I talked to Amanda about this, and she posted on my behalf — but let me clarify:
I don’t normally object to people posting links to their blogs. I thank you very much for your post on free fonts and stuff, and a link to your blog in those circumstances would be more than welcome. My problem with what you’ve been doing the last few days is twofold — first, you’ve been trying to get people riled up under the impression this facilitates interest or makes you cute or something. It doesn’t. If this blog turns into a source of stress for me, I shut it down. And I agree with Kate on you’d not make a sale by annoying me — this is something you’ve referred to in the past, and I can imagine would only work if you were a salesman for sado-masoch inc, now with more whips, which people would want to buy to use on you. Seriously. If you indeed had a sales career, I wonder how many more sales you lost than you made, without even being aware of it.
Second, you are — from my perspective and my experience of 21 years in the field, as well as the experience of EVERY PROFESSIONAL I KNOW INCLUDING KRIS RUSCH AND DEAN W SMITH (and yes, we talk about this stuff) — dead wrong about grammar check. Normally our first advice to newbies is “turn off your grammar check.” If editing or even copy editing were that simple, the publishing houses, which are pinching every penny till it screams, would not pay people to do those functions. They all have word processing programs, and if any grammar program were good enough they’d KNOW it and use it. I find this an important point because the LAST thing I need is for a newby to take your advice and botch their piece. EVEN if grammar/style programs were exquisitely sensitive and far more sophisticated than they are, they would fall short. Suppose in the future there is some program you can plug into the computer that say “edits” you to sound more like the loaded in sample of someone else’s work. There’s this stuff for art programs, where you can push a button and Van Gogh it, though it’s more a novelty than serious art, of course. Suppose you could Hemingway something, or Heinlein it by applying an electronic patch. Suppose it worked perfectly (It wouldn’t. Heinleining something is a mind-trick, not a word-trick.) What you’d have at the end would be a recital piece. https://accordingtohoyt.com/2011/07/09/recital-pieces/ AT BEST it would lack flavor.
Having read Lin’s comments, I have to agree. I URGE you to stop doing that to the work of a professional. PLEASE.
But you refused to concede the point — that’s fine. You can have your cake and eat it too for all I care, and I only hope you won’t kill too many works of fiction that way.
BUT THEN you didn’t stop when I told you to. And, though it’s absolutely none of your business, yesterday was a really bad day to do this to me, as I’d suffered a minor but painful injury and also had rather horrible news from my family. While I’m trying to deal with both physical and emotional pain, I will be less than gracious. This included telling Kate to go ahead and post a personal comment, which would otherwise have triggered my alarms and which even she — the mad Aussie herself — thought was edging over the line. THIS was done, though, in the hopes you’d at least sulk for a little while, and stop coming back with arguments when I’d asked you/told you to stop. This in turn would give me time to get over my own personal issues and be able to deal with you again.
As we all know it didn’t work.
I don’t like banning people and I’m NOT banning you. At your best you’re a valuable commenter. At your worst — and this is the second time you’ve displayed your worst on this blog, though the previous time was a while back — you’re an annoying gadfly. I can’t control that last mode for you, but you must learn to control it for yourself.
From now on, my request to the rest of the commenters here is to GAZE past your comments when you get in this mode.
And Wayne, do try not to get in your antagonistic mode. I TRULY don’t want to ban you.
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