Commas…The Continuing Story
Lady Rosalie Skinner
You can read Part One, Commas…To Avoid Confusion, here. Commas. The story continues to unfold. In this second installment, we will take a quick look at how commas work with…
grammar
An Unholy Love: Me and My Ellipses
Amy Rose Davis
I recently re-read my novel Ravenmarked, and I had a rather eye-opening realization: I have an unholy love of ellipses. It’s always kind of scary to read things you wrote…
The Colon
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the much maligned and unjustly despised semicolon. Okay, that was kind of biased wasn’t it? It’s pretty clear that you’ll have to pry my…
Relax, it’s only Tense.
When the fantasy writer writes it is probably a good idea to have some idea of tense. There are some who claim to know of over thirty different tenses, though…
The Case of the Capital in Fantasy
When going through the final edit of a galley, the tension mounts. This is the last opportunity to make changes, fix rogue quotation marks, commas and capitals. It is during…
Rhythm and Time – Part 2: Add a Little Harmony with Adjectives
Two weeks ago, I started my series on rhythm and time in writing by talking about verbs. I think verbs are the bass line for all writing, because if you…
Strengthen Your Voice
Rosalie Skinner posted a great article several weeks ago about what agents and editors hate to see in manuscripts. One of the things the agents mentioned was passive voice. Passive…
Cutting the Flab: Eliminate Extraneous Words
As a marketing writer and freelance copywriter, I spent several years trimming sentences and blurbs to fit in newspaper ads and on postcards, brochures, and other marketing collateral. Then I…
Strengthen Your Prose: Distancing Verbs
For the next few articles on my “writing craft” weeks, I’m going to talk about some of the ways to improve your writing by eliminating words and phrases that weaken…
Avoid Rejection: Five Ways to Polish Your Manuscript
One: Let It Sit Like a vintage port, your writing can improve with maturity. Sounds odd and hardly proactive, but leaving your completed manuscript to sit for a while can…
Run-ons, Fuses, and Comma Splices
Two weeks ago, I wrote about sentence fragments and how they can add punch and style to your writing. Today, we’ll look at another common writing error: The run-on (fused)…
Avoid Rejection – Editors’ Pet Peeves
Hi, my name is Rosalie and I am the first to admit there is a lot about writing I don’t know. There is however, a lot I have learned about…