Last night I attended our local screenwriters group’s meeting. At the meetings we table read  five to six pages of scripts that a member brings in. A table read is where different members play the part of characters as the script is read out loud.

Reading one script (there were three scripts we read last night)  it was obvious that the writer had not read the script out loud. If he had he would have caught a couple of errors and the script would have read much smoother.

Granted it is hard to read your own writing out loud. You got to find someplace where you can do it and no one will hear you.

It feels silly and embarrassing to do. Indescribably embarrassing to have someone finds you doing it.

I do it. I’m wrapping up a book and getting it ready to send it to an editor. I’ve read the book out loud twice. Then a friend asked me to help set up the equipment for a podcast. I hadn’t done anything like that in years. So I dug out the microphones, cables, miscellaneous stuff and set it up. I did a test recording to insure everything works. I had the draft of my book next to the computer so I read a couple of pages from my book. Or I tried to read a couple of pages of my book. I would read a sentence and have to stop to finish marking up the sentence with corrections to make it read better, sound better, smoother.

I was reading pages from the back of the book. I had read those pages out loud and fixed them twice before. Now I need to read the book again out loud, this time reading into a microphone. I’m in the middle of writing another book. I don’t have time for this. Still, one thing you learn, if your going to be good is; don’t fix it in post.

Post means post production, it comes from the screen writing world, but applies to photography, writing, and life in general. Don’t depend on the editor to fix it. Don’t depend on technology to fix it. Don’t depend on your writing group to fix it. Don’t wait until later to fix it. Do it right the first time.

You’re going to have enough fixing to do anyway.

So hang a do not disturb sigh on the bedroom door. Take your manuscript and a folding chair into the closet. Close the closet door and read the manuscript out loud into a microphone while recording it on your computer. The microphone and recording will add the little bit that will bring out errors you would gloss over if you just read it out loud and not record it.

Stay strong, write on.            Professor Hyram Voltage

Back in the 1980s I build a simple device to assist a portable radio setup. It didn’t work in the field. It didn’t work back home either, but I didn’t have time to check it out before the trip.

Fast forward 30 years. A use for the device came up so I dug it out. With the help of the internet I found the information needed to get the device working.

After rebuilding the device, it still wouldn’t work. I replaced many of the components in the device. That didn’t get it working either.

I spent a good part of yesterday working on the device. It’s not that complicated a circuit. At the end of the day it still did not work and I was depressed. Late in the night I had an idea and rebuilt the cord that connects the device to the radio. It’s a cord, simple wires. No batteries needed for a cord.

Early this morning I plugged the device in and it worked. Last night I cut the ends off the cable and installed new connectors. It could have been a bad connector, a bad solder joint, a bad piece of wire at the end of the cable. It doesn’t matter, the device works.

On the wings of success today flew by and I got a ton of stuff done. Unfortunately I didn’t get any writing done yesterday or today, but I got stuff done. It’s a horrific downer when simple things, that you built, don’t work, and a major high when you finally get them to work.

Having trouble writing? Then do something simple and get it done. Celebrate the completion. Then write.

Stray strong, write on.         Professor Hyram Voltage

As I was taking my morning walk today, I swung by the city library. When I walked in they were putting out a new load of books from the ‘Friends of the Library’. People donate books to the Friends of the Library and the Friends sell the books at very modest price with the proceeds going to the library. These books range from someone cleaning out a closet to people with too many books wanting to make some space it their lives.

The book range from old best sellers (and sometimes not so old), to ancient children’s books, to books that were not as good as the buyer thought they would be. I once found a signed murder mystery book by a well known author in the pile.

This morning I picked up a couple of books on railroads. I’m not a railroad fanatic, but I write Steampunk and it’s important to get the details right. Also the books had pictures of how people dressed in the late 1800s. This is very valuable information. Steampunk readers can be very picky about the details.

One book also showed the sleeping arrangements for foreign trains. In the US, the Pullman car was the king of railways and is the most shown in the movies. One picture showed a British train with people sleeping in what I would call the overhead baggage bin if it was on a airplane. It also showed how one family had hung blankets down the side of the over head sleeping bin so the people sleeping on the wood benches below could have some privacy. Sleeping or hiding in an overhead bin on an old train is going into one of my novels.

Check out your local library, some of the information is not free but it can be cheap.

I always wondered why writers never talk about writing in libraries. It’s quite, the chairs are nice and the big library in the next city has an expresso bar that the library runs attached to the side of the library. The library is also cheap and the good ones are air-conditioned and heated.

Stay strong, write on.             Professor Hyram Voltage

No not really.

Microsoft recently release a study of documents written on computers running Windows software. One of the big finding is that too many people use too many commas in their writing.

That doesn’t answer the question of where they got the documents and where they store those documents. They say there is no personally identifiable information that would tie the document back to the writer. What if the document is a personal letter with the writer’s name and address in the letter or even passwords and login information. Too many companies have been hacked lately, Microsoft could have a very incriminating letter you wrote in their data bank waiting to be hacked and that letter held for ransom or that letter put out to the world destroying your life.

Back to commas. The way the article was written I interpreted it too mean that the majority of people (that means over 50% of the writers) use too many commas.

The article also said that too many writers don’t use commas when they should. Again, (should a comma be after again? There’s a 50/50 change it shouldn’t be there.) I took this to mean that over 50% of the writers don’t know where to put commas.

The article did not say what set of rules they used to judge where commas should be placed. In America there is no set standard. I’m sorry grammar Nazis, there are no set rules and you’re just making them up and calling everyone else stupid for not using your set of rules. If Microsoft used the Chicago manual of style then you would have a comma after the item, in a serial string of items, that comes before the conjunction. If they used the APA style manual you do not put a comma before the conjunction. Comma usage varies a lot more than that in different style manuals.

Scribendi just had a email newsletter that demanded that you must have a comma after each item in a series including after the item before the conjunction. Then they mention the APA style handbook without telling you that the APA demands no comma before the conjunction. The APA is used by many magazines.

There was a court case where a woman (sister 1) sued her sisters. Her mother’s will said the estate should be divided between sister one, sister two and sister three. Sister one argued that she should get half of the estate since there was no comma between sister two and sister three. Besides sister one quit her job, paid her own money to help her mother in her last years, where the other two sister didn’t do diddly. The judge went with the way he was taught in school and they all got one third. I will let you decide if justice was done. Nothing is as simple as I wrote above and leave the writing of wills and contracts to specialist.

Go with the Harvard style of commas for items in a series and put a comma after the item before the junction.

Stay strong, write on, and don’t use so many commas.  Professor Hyram Voltage

Warning Rant Below.

I had a talk with a budding young writer the other day. When I mentioned the  trouble I had with grammar she said let the editor take care of it.

This may be an attitude of the cell phone generation, but I strive to do quality work. I work hard to make the grammar better. As my old photography teacher stressed, Take the best picture you can. Don’t plan on fixing it in the darkroom, photoshop, or in production.

One good place to find information on grammar usage is The Purdue Online Writers Lab https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/. The Purdue OWL sites the American Psychological Association style guide and the Modern Language Association style guide. The APA style guide is for papers written for the Social Sciences and the MLA style guide is for papers written for Liberal Arts.

The information in the Purdue OWL is very good but the style guides they site are not for works that are intended to be read by the general public or to be sold. Buyer be ware.

Stay strong, write on.                      Professor Hyram Voltage.