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duskpeterson"There is nothing inherently wrong with the passive voice, but if you can say the same thing in the active mode, do so . . . Your text will have more pizzazz as a result, since passive verb constructions tend to lie about in their pajamas and avoid actual work."
--Capital Community College's Guide to Grammar and Writing.
I published or reissued thirty e-books this year. Woohoo! I only managed to get half my backlist published, but I wasn't sure I'd come even close to doing that much. I'll try to get the rest published next year, as well as new stories that I wanted to get published this year, but which got pushed further down my publication schedule because the editing was taking so long. To those of you who have already read my older stories and have been waiting for the new ones, I apologize.
I didn't get much writing done this year. That was expected, because of my heavy publishing load, but now that I've got myself on a regular publishing schedule (one e-book a week, as you may have noticed), I've decided that I'm going to devote every fourth week next year to writing. This is partly because I'll have all my backlist published after a certain point next year, partly because I'm worried that I'm becoming rusty in my writing skills, and partly because I'm beginning to feel emotionally unbalanced without that writing time.
I'm not going to worry overly much at first about which writing projects I work on; I'm just going to focus on trying to get the hours in.
Meanwhile, I've discovered these handy automated editors - free editors:
Pro Writing Aid.
Christopher M. Park's Manuscript Analyzer.
EditMinion.
There are others out there, but these are the free ones that I like the best. They have to be taken with a grain of salt - I always doublecheck their grammar pronouncements against Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (which is online in whole, by the way), because there's a lot of bad grammar advice drifting around among professional grammarians - but these tools have already caught one bad typo of mine that Microsoft Word didn't catch (it was a homophone, "birth" when I actually meant "berth"), and they've alerted me to a number of recurring weaknesses in my writing . . . as well as a recurring strength I didn't know I had, namely the frequent use of alliteration. My Muse does such wonderful things when I'm not watching.
I find these sorts of tools - like beta readers - mainly helpful for future stories. If an automated editor (or beta reader) tells me that I'm overusing adverbs - as these tools revealed that I am indeed doing - then I'm not going to go through an otherwise fine thirty-thousand-word novella and prune the adverbs. Instead, I'll use that knowledge to keep a watch on my adverb use when I write the next novella.
Thank you, folks, for all your lovely comments to my previous Daily Life entries, which I'll reply to as soon as I get through the current publishing cycle this week.
--Capital Community College's Guide to Grammar and Writing.
I published or reissued thirty e-books this year. Woohoo! I only managed to get half my backlist published, but I wasn't sure I'd come even close to doing that much. I'll try to get the rest published next year, as well as new stories that I wanted to get published this year, but which got pushed further down my publication schedule because the editing was taking so long. To those of you who have already read my older stories and have been waiting for the new ones, I apologize.
I didn't get much writing done this year. That was expected, because of my heavy publishing load, but now that I've got myself on a regular publishing schedule (one e-book a week, as you may have noticed), I've decided that I'm going to devote every fourth week next year to writing. This is partly because I'll have all my backlist published after a certain point next year, partly because I'm worried that I'm becoming rusty in my writing skills, and partly because I'm beginning to feel emotionally unbalanced without that writing time.
I'm not going to worry overly much at first about which writing projects I work on; I'm just going to focus on trying to get the hours in.
Meanwhile, I've discovered these handy automated editors - free editors:
Pro Writing Aid.
Christopher M. Park's Manuscript Analyzer.
EditMinion.
There are others out there, but these are the free ones that I like the best. They have to be taken with a grain of salt - I always doublecheck their grammar pronouncements against Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (which is online in whole, by the way), because there's a lot of bad grammar advice drifting around among professional grammarians - but these tools have already caught one bad typo of mine that Microsoft Word didn't catch (it was a homophone, "birth" when I actually meant "berth"), and they've alerted me to a number of recurring weaknesses in my writing . . . as well as a recurring strength I didn't know I had, namely the frequent use of alliteration. My Muse does such wonderful things when I'm not watching.
I find these sorts of tools - like beta readers - mainly helpful for future stories. If an automated editor (or beta reader) tells me that I'm overusing adverbs - as these tools revealed that I am indeed doing - then I'm not going to go through an otherwise fine thirty-thousand-word novella and prune the adverbs. Instead, I'll use that knowledge to keep a watch on my adverb use when I write the next novella.
Thank you, folks, for all your lovely comments to my previous Daily Life entries, which I'll reply to as soon as I get through the current publishing cycle this week.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-17 05:00 am (UTC)