A Comma-dy of Errors

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 4 Comments

by Margaret Lucke

I don’t recall what the sentence said. I no longer know the subject of the report that contained it, although you’d think these details would have impressed themselves on my mind.

All I remember is the yelling.

I was working in my first editorial job, for a firm of international economics consultants. My role was to tidy up the grammar and punctuation in the proposals and reports that the economists produced.

The sentence in question was critical to the central point that the document was making. But it needed one small change. I inserted a comma. After making a few other tweaks, I sent the report back to the economist who’d written it.

When it came back to me for the next round of editing, my little fixes were intact. Except for that comma—the author had taken it out. So I put it back.

A few days later the report landed on my desk again. Time for the final proofreading.

Once more, the comma was missing.

Now, some commas are optional. Some are a matter of style. But the presence or absence of a comma can be crucial to the meaning of the sentence.

Take the title of author and editor Lynne Truss’s handbook on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It comes from an old joke about a panda that comes into a café, consumes a sandwich, and then fires a gun at the waiter. As the panda walks out, the manager yells, “Hey, what did you do that for?” The panda calls back, “I’m a panda! Look it up.” The manager finds a dictionary and checks the definition: “Panda: a black-and-white, bearlike mammal found in Asia. Eats shoots and leaves.” Simple and straightforward. But add that comma after eats . . .

Or consider this sentence from an Associated Press article I saw a while back: “Netanyahu has been an outspoken critic of the international efforts to negotiate a deal with Iran, which does not recognize the Jewish state, and supports anti-Israeli militants like Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas.” Having two commas makes a nonrestrictive clause of the words in between them (the ones I’ve italicized). This means that if you take out those words, the sentence should retain its meaning. But when you do that in this case, you’re left with “Netanyahu has been an outspoken critic … and supports anti-Israeli militants …” Not what the author intended. You have to remove that second comma from the original sentence to make its meaning clear.

Of course other small changes in punctuation and, for that matter, spacing can alter meaning too. Consider the difference in response you’d get to these two ads:

Wanted: one nightstand.
Wanted: one-night stand.

And notice how changing periods to commas and changing their placement around gives you a different impression of an evening’s events (from KidsCanReadandWrite.com):

I ate. My mother washed the dishes. Then I went to bed.
I ate my mother, washed the dishes, then I went to bed.

A row of colorful commas

The comma in the economist’s report was like these examples—its presence or absence altered the meaning of the sentence. It needed to be there, yet the author kept taking it out. So I trekked down the hall to his office to explain why I’d added it and why keeping it was important.

He didn’t believe me. I was younger than he was, I was female, and I held only a lowly B.A. while he had Ph.D. He assumed that all of these factors were reasons to dismiss my arguments. In his opinion the comma was clutter, the sentence looked cleaner without it, and so it had to go.

I’m a calm and reasonable person by nature, not given to raising my voice. So I’m not quite sure how our discussion turned into a shouting match. But there we were, screaming at each other over a comma, while everyone else in the workplace gathered in the corridor outside his office to enjoy the entertainment

Finally the economist yelled, “Prove it! Show me the rule.”

“Okay, I will,” I snapped back, and I stomped away.

I spent the rest of the day scouring grammar guides and style manuals. Finally I found a statement about comma usage that was so clear and so close to the case of our particular little comma that I figured even he would get it. I ran back to his office and thrust the open book at him, jabbing my finger at the proof. “Here it is. See? See?”

I won. The comma stayed.

You Want to Know What???

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 2 Comments

by Janis Patterson

Am I weird? (Wait – don’t ask my husband that – we all know what he’ll say!) But regarding writing, I think I really am totally out of step.

Got an ad this morning from yet another one of those proliferating ‘publicity’ sites offering a new site/protocol/scheme for publicizing my books and ‘helping me to personally interact with my readers.’ I don’t get that. Yes, I know the lifeblood of a book is publicity, and I’m willing to pay for that, but interacting with my readers on a personal level? Really?

I don’t want to interact with my readers and turn them into friends. I have a lovely bunch of friends, some of many decades’ standing, and don’t need nor particularly want to make loads of new friends ‘with whom I can share things’ – especially not through the mechanical grist mill of the internet. I don’t see why my readers would want to talk about – or even be particularly interested in – my private life. My biography is on my website, and it covers everything, if not a little more, about me than any reader should want to know.

What difference is it to the readers how I take my coffee or what color my kitchen curtains are (or if I have curtains in my kitchen at all!) or what I name my pets? How does knowing that affect their enjoyment of my books? Or, more to the point, what business is it of theirs? They are buying my books, but should that also give them access to my private life?

One thing that these ‘I really want to know the real you’ type readers never seem to accept is that the time spent with them discussing pets, kitchen curtains, coffee or any other personal thing is time taken from my writing the next book. ‘Oh, but I’ll only take a little bit of time,’ they croon, ‘I don’t want to bother you…’ without realizing that if I spend ‘a little bit of time’ with everyone who wants a piece of my life all my writing time will be gone and there will be no more books, as I refuse to sacrifice a moment of my family/home time for anything on this earth.

Why is being privy to another’s life – another whom you will probably never meet in person or have a real relationship with – considered so important? Isn’t it my stories that caught their attention to begin with? Why can’t they be satisfied with them? It’s none of their business how I drink my coffee or decorate my house or anything else.

I write the books. They buy and read the books. That is the basic equation, and is all both writers and readers should need.

And although the holiday is over, my new anthology THE FOURTH OF JULY MURDERS is still available on Amazon… Four authors. Four murders. Four wars. It’s great fun!

It All Started With Nerve

~ Janet Dawson ~ 3 Comments

Well, actually, with the Readers Digest Condensed Books. Wikipedia tells me it was Volume 57, published in the spring of 1964. The last book in that volume was by an author I’d never encountered before.

His name was Dick Francis.

I devoured that book. And every single one since. Francis wrote over 40 novels. I love all of them. In addition to being wonderful, they are comfort reads, old reliables—rather like a bowl of chili on a cold rainy night. I can always count on Dick Francis and his steadfast, practical and courageous heroes. Especially Sid Halley, who appears in five books, the closest thing to a series Francis ever wrote.

All his books have something to do with horse racing, for Francis was a steeplechase jockey for many years. And a sportswriter for a decade and a half before turning his hand to fiction. In the early books, his protagonist is a jockey, such as up-and-comer Rob Finn in Nerve, his second novel. In his fourth, Odds Against, Sid Halley puts in his first appearance, as a jockey who has retired due to injuries and is now working as a private investigator. In later books, protagonists have other professions—glassblower, banker, photographer—but there’s always that connection to horse racing. Among my other favorites are his sportswriter hero James Tyrone in Forfeit and pilot Matt Shore in Rat Race.

Dick Francis and I share a birthday—Halloween. I was thrilled to meet him several times, at book signings and once at the Edgar Awards ceremony. That was in 1996, the year he was awarded Grand Master and won the Best Novel award for Come to Grief—a Sid Halley book.

By that time, I was writing mysteries myself. With eight books published featuring my longtime protagonist, Oakland private eye Jeri Howard, I decided I really wanted to write a horse racing novel. When I started the book, I quickly learned how much I didn’t know about horse racing. Books, the internet and Dick Francis will only take a writer so far. Write what you know is a commonly used catchphrase, but I use another one. If I don’t know, I go find out. So, Jeri and I went to the races.

An email message to an acquaintance led me to a friend of hers who knew a woman who trained racehorses. Which is how I wound up at a Bay Area racetrack at six in the morning. I spent the whole day following the trainer around from stables to grandstands, talking with trainers, a vet, even a horse player who tried to educate me on statistics, which are still a mystery to me. I even got a tour of the jockeys’ changing room. Of course, that scene had to go into the book. When I’m presented with such great material I have to use it. That’s why Jeri is in the changing room, bantering with a jockey dressed in nothing but a towel. It was all great fun and I hope the resulting novel was fairly accurate. That’s A Killing at the Track, by the way, which has Jeri investigating the murder of a trainer at a fictional racetrack. More bodies turn up and Jeri actually wins a few bucks playing the ponies.

I’ll close with another comment about the Readers Digest Condensed Books. I don’t know how long Mom subscribed to these, but I do know these abridged volumes introduced me to a lot of good books and authors. Abridged or no, the whole point was to get people reading. And I certainly did.

Earlier volumes included books by authors who later became favorites: Victoria Holt, Anya Seton, James Michener, Mary Stewart—and the redoubtable Agatha Christie. As for Volume 57 from 1964, the tome that introduced me to Dick Francis, it contained two other books I enjoyed and remember to this day. The first was nonfiction, written by Gene Smith, titled When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson. The second was by English novelist Paul Gallico. It was called The Hand of Mary Constable, and it had seances, a ghostbuster and twists galore. Great fun.

Guest Blogger ~ Tilia Klebenov Jacobs

~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

Researching the Mystery

By Tilia Klebenov Jacobs

Often you can tell when a writer’s research begins and ends with a keyboard search:  telltale signs include incomplete knowledge and/or cliché-based assumptions, creating eye-roll moments in our readership—something it’s safe to say none of us wants to do. So when Professor Google falls down on the job, it’s time to fold up that laptop and do a different kind of investigating, one that involves people instead of pixels.

            First, an example of what to avoid.  Some years ago I was reading a novel with a scene set in MCI-Cedar Junction, a maximum-security prison in Massachusetts.  Our protagonist steps inside and notes that the foyer smells like vomit, a sensory detail illustrating the degradation of the incarcerated.

            Slight problem, however.  I used to teach at that prison, and on precisely zero of the many occasions I’ve been there did the foyer smell like vomit.  The only time it smelled of anything other than air was one day when an inmate was mopping the floor, at which point it smelled like Pine-Sol.  That, combined with a variety of hilarious gaps in said author’s knowledge of prison security protocols, absolutely trumpeted the fact that he never bothered to visit the facility or even call.  I have not picked up one of his books since.

            I should add that he absolutely nailed his description of the exterior of the prison.  In other words, he googled it, saw what the place looked like, and ended his investigation there. 

            Circumventing such blunders consists of several steps.  First, find an expert.  Second, contact them and politely ask for a few minutes of their time.  If you are on the shy side, Step Three is, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic.”  The words “I’m a writer” convey more gravitas than you might expect, and the phrase “I’m writing a book with a character like you, and I want to be sure I get it right” is usually greeted with enthusiasm.  Most people are delighted to share their expertise, especially if they belong to a profession or culture that is frequently misrepresented in popular media.  On behalf of my books, I have interviewed prison guards, FBI agents, a Marine who served in Afghanistan, a parole officer, a rabbi, and more; and in almost every case, the interview went over time because we were enjoying ourselves so much.

            My most recent book, Stealing Time (co-authored with Norman Birnbach), is set largely in 1980.  While we wrote it, we had the very great pleasure of plumbing the expertise of John Barelli, former head of security at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Jonathan Campbell, a Boston-based architect.  In both cases, our question was this:  how can our bad guys rob a museum—in 1980?  We needed specific information about rooftops, scaffolding, and museum security in that era, and the internet was tired of our questions.

            I discovered Mr. Barelli via his memoir, Stealing the Show:  A History of Art and Crime in Six Thefts.  It describes his tenure at the Met from 1978 to 2016, years that neatly overlapped the era of our book.  I emailed him to ask for an interview.  He replied in the affirmative, and he and Norman and I spent a delightful evening chatting about security arcana of the late twentieth century.  Since my partner and I needed to insert one of our baddies into the museum, we asked how long it would have taken for someone to be hired as a security guard at that time.  Were there extensive background checks?  What about fingerprinting?  Mr. Barelli laughed.  “Back then, we had a saying,” he told us.  “‘If it breathes, put a uniform on it.’” 

            Thus reassured, we wrote a scene in which our criminal is quickly hired to guard a hall full of precious gemstones.  Our editor later urged us to change it, since he was confident the guards’ union would have prohibited such slipshod operations.  But we had done our homework with an unimpeachable source, and were able to allay our editor’s concerns. The scene stayed put in all its scintillating historical accuracy.

            The second expert, Jonathan Campbell, was easier to find because I went to high school with him.  Once again, I needed very specific information for our baddies, whose plan involved climbing scaffolding in order to break into the museum; and once again, the internet failed to answer some basic questions, such as,

  1. Is this possible?
  2. How?
  3. What will our degenerates find on the way up?

During a delightful February afternoon, Jonathan led me cantering about the rooftops of Boston in search of verisimilitude.  I learned that,

  1. Yes, it’s possible.
  2. But dangerous.  Anyone seeking to climb scaffolding needs to adhere to the “three points of contact rule,” meaning that at all times one must have at least two hands and one foot, or two feet and one hand, in contact with the structure; unless, of course, one wants a very brief flying lesson.
  3. Roofs are messy.  Based on my experience, our band of reprobates might reasonably be expected to find pigeon poop; ductwork for HVAC; plastic buckets full of rainwater and chains; and stray tools left behind by construction workers.  All of this makes such areas difficult to navigate, which was bad for our baddies but good for us.

            Factuality is not meant to set a reader’s pulse a-twitter; for that we have finely etched characters, snappy dialogue, and wicked plot twists.  Instead, it is a load-bearing wall:  we may not be aware of its function, but it holds our disbelief aloft.  Unconventional kinds of research can be fantastically rewarding, and they give our work both solidity and sparkle that come from no place else.

STEALING TIME

Good news for everyone who loved Back to the Future, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Time and Again: the newest page-turner is Stealing Time, a smart, funny caper that will steal your heart.

When there’s no time left, you have to steal it!

New York, 2020. Tori’s world is falling apart. Between the pandemic and her parents’ divorce, what else could go wrong?

Plenty! Like discovering that a jewelry heist forty years ago sent her grandfather to jail and destroyed her family.

New York, 1980. Bobby’s life is pretty great—until a strange girl shows up in his apartment claiming to be a visitor from the future. Specifically, his future, which apparently stinks. Oh, and did she mention she’s his daughter?

Soon Bobby and Tori have joined forces to save the mystical gemstone at the heart of all their troubles. But a gang of thugs wants it too, and they’re not about to let a couple of teenagers get in their way.

This time-travel jewelry heist will keep you guessing till the end!

Buy links: https://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Time-Tilia-Jacobs-ebook/dp/B0DFRC8CJH

Bookshop dot org (paperback):

https://bookshop.org/p/books/stealing-time-tilia-klebenov-jacobs/21866719?ean=9798991024914&next=t

Bookshop dot org (ebook):  

https://bookshop.org/p/books/stealing-time-norman-birnbach/4ad038134b3d849a?ean=9798991024907&next=t

Barnes and Noble:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stealing-time-tilia-klebenov-jacobs/1147240874?ean=2940181321410

Tilia Klebenov Jacobs is a bestselling novelist and short story writer. She is vice president of Mystery Writers of America-New England, and is proud to say that HarperCollins calls her one of “crime fiction’s top authors.” Tilia has taught middle school, high school, and college, as well as classes for inmates in Massachusetts state prisons.  She lives near Boston with her husband, two children, and pleasantly neurotic standard poodle.

The book has its own website:  https://stealingtime.net

Tilia on FB:  https://www.facebook.com

Tilia’s website:  http://www.tiliaklebenovjacobs.com

 Norman Birnbach is an award-winning writer who has published over a hundred short stories and articles. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall St. Journal, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New York Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,  and Militant Grammarian. He has also studied gemology at the Gemological Institute of America. Stealing Time is his debut novel. A native New Yorker, he lives outside Boston with his wife, three children, and dog, Taxi.

Norman’s website:  https://normanbirnbach.weebly.com

FB: https://www.facebook.com/nbirnbach

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/normanbirnbach/

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/stealing_time_book/

Tilia and Norman met when they were students at Oberlin College. 

Guest Blogger ~ Denise Forsythe

~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

5 Tips on Researching a Novel

by Denise Forsythe

As a writer of both short stories and novels, I’ve grown accustomed to research. It is a part of writing, much like plotting and editing. Because I’m naturally curious, I have to limit the amount of research I do on any given subject.

When I began writing Misconception, a domestic suspense thriller, I had no idea how much research I’d need to do. That’s because up until then I’d been a short story writer and only needed to research small bits of information to propel my plot forward.

A tried-and-true pantser, the ideas that combined to form the plot led me to realize just how much research was needed.

The book contains medical research on infertility, psychological research on personality types and disorders, employment research on workplace disputes and criminal law research, including jail/prison conditions for female inmates.

What worked for me and what I will share are five tips on how to get through the research hurdle.

1) To avoid long gaps in writing while researching subjects, consider doing just enough cursory research. That means conducting research prior to or early on during your first draft. That way you’ll avoid having to correct large parts of your story or manuscript later on. In my case, as I was writing Misconception I decided to set the story in Chicago. I felt the large city coupled with challenging weather would set a moody tone for the domestic suspense thriller. This is especially beneficial when you are deep into developing characters and plot points. Once you are at a point to take stock of what you’ve written so far, you can continue researching and filling in any gaps. This can also reduce the chance of falling into a rabbit hole by limiting what you need to advance the story.

2) Create a system to keep track of research sources. I use Scrivener to write my manuscripts. The software provides a handy corkboard to place website links right next to the page where the information will be placed. It’s important to obtain at least two to three resources for each subject, to ensure information or resource isn’t outdated or incorrect.

3) While artificial intelligence resources can be helpful, I would caution their use. Though a resource like ChatGPT can narrow down resource options, it isn’t a replacement for doing your own thorough research. Some resources I used included: WebMD and Health.com for medical conditions, university educational programs for fertility specialty information, past news coverage of sports and team rivalries, news coverage and/or documentaries on jail conditions, fertility health associations, hospital chapel coverage by local newspapers and a website called Lifeway that offers examples of funeral sermons.

4) Check and recheck sources. It’s a good idea to use respected sources for medical and legal research and avoid copying what you see on television or in movies. Tapping into my past experience as a paralegal working for a New York City DA’s office, I knew my knowledge of criminal law wasn’t enough to flesh out the details of Cassie Nichols’ harrowing journey through the Wisconsin legal system. Make sure to drill down to the state, and sometimes the city, when it comes to researching criminal law. I researched specific areas from a state and local angle, going so far as to find real accounts of what jail conditions are like and locating transcripts of initial court appearances so I could use the information as a guide. If you are good at deciphering medical jargon, by all means do so. If you’re not, don’t be afraid to reach out to an expert. A helpful website to assist in locating an expert in a field is HARO or helpareportout.com.

5) Do a final fact check while the book is in self-editing mode. Things change, especially when it comes to legislation. My book was about a third of the way complete when I discovered that it couldn’t be set in Chicago, as planned. During research I learned that in the state of Illinois, in vitro fertility treatments are covered by insurance, whereas in Wisconsin they are not. This was an integral aspect of the plot, given the tension between the main character, Cassie Nichols, and her husband Jake. The financial strain burdened the already stressed couple, adding to the tension. Because I wanted to retain the moody weather as a backdrop to intensify certain scenes in the psychological thriller, I chose to move the setting to a fictional town in southeastern Wisconsin near where I grew up.

Though research may seem daunting, with a little strategy it doesn’t have to be painful.

Misconception

Cassie Nichols wants a baby. Badly.

She’s certain a baby will anchor the crumbling relationship with her husband, Jake, who she suspects is having an affair.

But after a miscarriage and continued trouble getting pregnant leads the couple down the frustrating and expensive road of in vitro fertilization, Cassie finds herself running out of time.

Pumped on hormones, fueled by anxiety, and believing it is the only way to save her marriage, she does the unthinkable to ensure a viable pregnancy.

Now, the happy family she envisioned remains out of reach and is instead wrought with lies, deception, and murder.

universal buy link: https://books2read.com/misconceptionbyDeniseForsythe

Denise Forsythe is the author of the domestic suspense novels Misconception and the forthcoming Misconstrue.

An award-winning and recognized writer of mystery, horror, and science fiction short stories; you can find these works under the pen name Denise Johnson (see author page).

A member of Sisters in Crime, Inc. and multiple Sisters in Crime chapters, she is a Charter Member of the Sisters in Crime

Grand Canyon Writers chapter and its current vice president.

She resides in the Southwest with a precocious Labradoodle that keeps her on her toes.

Visit her at her website:deniseforsythedotcom to learn more about freebies, upcoming book projects, and book signing events.