![]() Author has written 4 stories for Twilight, and Pride and Prejudice. Beta reading: I am currently helping out as a prereader for WrittenWithJoy on her wonderful Bella-Jasper story, Longing. If you haven't read it, go do it. It's awesome. Aside from that, I am pretty flat-out with life. I am happy to beta/pre-read the occasional one-shot or even two- or three-shot, but I don't have the capacity for another long story at the moment. More about me: I am an Australian mother of 3. I am part of the sandwich generation. That is, I have three (relatively) dependent kids, plus ageing parents, one of whom now takes up a lot of my time (though he doesn't live with us!). (When I first wrote this I had three kids, one or two of whom were still in primary school. But time passes and now I have three kids, one of whom is really an adult! But still living at home.) I write and edit for a living, but not fiction. Fiction is for fun. I use Australian English spellings. *Random Punctuation and Grammar Trivia* I use way too many em rules (aka em dashes—like that). I'm trying to wean myself off them... Grammar and punctuation rules are there for clarity. Sometimes, it's okay to break them, for effect. Especially in dialogue. But don't do it too often or by accident, or your readers won't trust you. (I am talking to myself there, lol.) And for pity’s sake, ALWAYS use closing punctuation inside your quotation marks for dialogue. Always. If there’s not an exclamation mark, question mark, ellipses or em-rule, use a comma (if it’s followed by attribution) or a full stop (if it’s not). Like this: “I told you do to it this way,” she said. “I don’t want to see you close your dialogue without punctuation ever again.” In British English, you can use "that" in place of "which" but never the reverse. "Which" is only used for NON-defining clauses. In US English, they are not interchangeable at all. It's perfectly okay to start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction (and, but, so...). The 2017 Elements of Style said so. It's also okay to split your infinitives and finish with a preposition: "To boldly go, creating new worlds and ideas, no matter where they come from." Unless you're writing in Latin, in which case, no split infinitives for you! And finally, any website (or person) who tells you "you must" do something, as far as style goes, is usually wrong. Unless they tack on "if you want to follow the AP Style/Chicago Manual of Style/whatever." So there. Eg Closed ellipses (...) and open ellipses ( . . . ) are both acceptable. As long as you are consistent. Except, you know—do use punctuation before your closing dialogue marks. Really. |