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The GLAWS Editing Panel

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:58:08 GMT

I was honored to be asked to participate in a panel of editors addressing the topic “Beyond the First Draft: Editing Your Manuscript for Success” at the Saturday, May 18, monthly meeting of the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society (GLAWS), which meets in West L.A. This is the third or fourth time I’ve sat on a GLAWS editing panel, and it’s a lot of fun. One of my authors, John Fulford, four of whose books I’ve edited (so far), came with me.

When I appear before an audience in edit mode (so to speak), I always wear my T-shirt that says I AM THE GRAMMARIAN ABOUT WHOM YOUR MOTHER WARNED YOU. The first year I wore it, a dozen people took pictures of it (and me) with their cell phones. I like to tell a funny story about this T-shirt. Occasionally a woman will misread it and exclaim, “Oh, I’m a grandmother, too!” This most often happens at the grocery store, but once it happened at a GLAWS meeting. (But not this time.) Funny thing, though—no one has ever commented on the “whom.”

The other editors on the panel were Mike Robinson, Marcia Geffner, Deanna Brady, and Robin Quinn, who also served as moderator. My guess is that there was probably a century of collective writing and editing experience sitting before those microphones. Mike sold his first story at age nineteen. Deanna says she’s been editing since she was a child. Marcia spent a couple decades as a real estate writer. What was especially nifty about this panel is that we five have different editing processes and styles, which means everyone in the room can find an editor they’d be comfortable working with. Deanna and Marcia spoke about meeting in person with their authors and learning about their expectations for editing and what level of edit they want. Me, I just sort of jump into the deep end of the pool with my authors and we swim together. I also tend to be fairly…er…directive, as when I tell an author he’s used up his lifetime supply of semicolons (which got a laugh from the audience) or issue a little editing fatwahs, like against “grab” in all its forms because the author uses it in every other sentence (another laugh). Years and years ago, one of my authors said I’m a subtle as a Mack truck. I took that as a compliment. Of course, I also endeavor to practice what my mother taught me: Always say please and thank you.

I took handouts to the meeting. One, “The Editing Process,” explains in twenty-seven steps what I do with a manuscript. I also took the printed final draft of a unique book titled Chocolate Cake and Coffee (which I spent five months editing) to show the audience that the author, Tammy Sedin, had done the right thing by printing it and asking someone who’d never seen the book to proofread it. The other panelists agreed that proofreading is important.

Robin asked questions she’d sent to us via email earlier in the week. The first one was “Some writers say they do not like to read the competition. Why is reading widely in and outside your genre important?” The consensus of the panel was that we read to learn what good writing looks like, how other authors construct a plot or build characters, and what kinds of books actually sell. Another question was “what methods of initial composition are helpful in making a book successful?” Mike talked about outlining, which we all agreed is very helpful. So, we also agreed, is just sitting down and starting to write and doing what I call a “mind dump.” Just get a first draft written, the panel said. Then, using the metaphor I most often use, start weeding the garden and pruning the trees.

To answer another of Robin’s questions, I had a copy of The Elements of Style to wave at the audience, plus half a dozen examples from books I’ve edited of violations of Rule 11, which is that an introductory phrase or clause has to refer to the grammatical subject of the sentence. Here’s an example: “Walking back, my hands shake….” (The hands are walking?) As I read the examples to the audience, they immediately got it. The problem is that we see stupid violations of Rule 11 all time in newspapers and magazines and blogs and hear them on TV from people who are supposed to be smarter than that. Guess not. Rule 11 doesn’t have to apply in the dialogue we write, of course, because people don’t always speak gooder English, but it should be correct in the narrative voice because it helps us avoid ambiguity. (And look illiterate.)

To answer another question about dialogue, Deanna said that people don’t usually talk about their feelings (they speak with feeling) and that it’s best to omit the common little conversation openers like “Hi.” I said we should listen to how people actually speak and notice the rhythms of their speech. As we talked about dialogue tags (“he said,” “she replied”), Mike wisely urged the audience to avoid adverbs. “Yeah,” I said, “no Tom Swifties.” After Deanna said that the dialogue we write should be so clear and personal that a reader knows who’s speaking without dialogue tags, I spoke about stichomythic dialogue (one-liners exchanged by two people) and explained that it’s really helpful to add the occasional dialogue tag or stage direction to help readers keep track of who’s talking. Deanna added that she certainly hadn’t meant to suggest that we should omit dialogue tags, to which everyone nodded.

When Robin asked about “ensuring the richness of language while keeping it economical,” one of my co-panelists spoke about searching for good synonyms so we don’t have to keep repeating the same word, but I said, “Stay out of the thesaurus.” English has a huge vocabulary because all those synonyms are not precisely and totally synonymous, which means word choice is important.

Although we four panelists have differing ideas on some topics, for most of the two hours we sat there nodding as we shared with an audience of hopeful writers what we know about working with an editor. Basically—pay attention to what your editor does to and says about your manuscript. You hired this person to help you. Afterward, John said he’d enjoyed the afternoon and found it very helpful.

GLAWS is an interesting and useful organization. Here’s something from their website:

          GLAWS excels in many areas:
               An ongoing education by successful authors and industry experts who present relevant broad-based and genre-specific information at our monthly Special Speaker Events,
               Networking with other hundreds of other writers through our bi-annual parties, social and special hospitality events.
               Peer-to-peer Critique Groups to improve one's work,
               Public Outreach and Bookfair Events for published and self-published GLAWS members to expand their platform, visibly as an author, and sell books.

“the unpassioned beauty of a great machine”: A Recycled Essay about Recycling (a True Story)

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:20:51 GMT

Because we’re approaching Earth Day and every day I receive emails from nonprofits concerned with the green movement and recycling asking me for donations (which I often make), I decided to do a little recycling of my own today. The following piece is from a book I began in about 1990. The title was to be Finding Beauty: Cultivating a Fuller Awareness of the Hidden Beauty in the World Around Us. I wrote a bunch of essays, fairy tales and stories, and poems, found quotes about beauty in Bartlett’s, secured permission from the Oxford English Dictionary to quote their definition of beauty…and then I showed it to my literary agent. She shook her head. “Too esoteric. It’ll never sell.” After she retired, I took the manuscript to my second literary agent. He submitted it to half a dozen small publishers. No dice. Still too esoteric After he died, I showed it to my third literary agent. “Wiccan it up,” she said. So I Wiccaned it up. She gave it a try. “All the bookstores,” she reported back, “are gonna think it goes on the same shelf with makeup advice. Wiccan it up some more.”

That’s when I gave up. (At least that was a good lesson for me about the significance of titles. Beauty has many meanings.) I copied the whole thing on a CD and stuck a one-inch pile of correspondence (e.g., “I love your writing, but no thanks”) from publishers and my agents in a paper file. I put the file in the cabinet and forgot about it except when I pulled out some of the stories to be published in magazines.

And now I’m recycling a recycled essay about recycling. It’s a true story.

“the unpassioned beauty of a great machine”
—Rupert Brooke

Because a cat is a digestive system that purrs and I live with two cats, I collect empty cat food cans. I keep trying to recycle them, but everywhere I go they’re rejected because they’re steel.Yesterday I took my cat food can collection to a scrap yard next to the Riverside freeway. I’d never been anywhere like it before. First, I was directed to drive my Toyota up on the truck scale. (I learned that my car weighs 2,420 pounds. With me in it. That’s good to know.) When the woman in the watchtower far above my head—but face to face with the truck drivers she normally served—opened her window and leaned out, I yelled up and explained about the bags of cat food cans that filled the trunk of my car. She grinned, ducked back in, then poked her head out again and said their minimum was twenty pounds. I said I just wanted to recycle the cans. She said okay, they’d pay me the minimum. Drive forward, she called down. Go through the chain link gates and turn left.I soon found myself in line behind a stake truck carrying two tall piles of stripped and flattened cars and in front of a Chevy pickup loaded with six dead and doorless refrigerators. One of the drivers gave me a companionable nod.

Forklifts and Bobcats chugged around the yard, weaving deftly among the mountains of scrap metal—mutilated household appliances, vehicles and pieces of vehicles, rebar, pipes, shelving and siding, contentless frames, monster springs and ordinary bedsprings, coils of wire and rolls of mesh, unidentifiable chunks knocked off of motors and machines. As I watched, two forklifts and a Bobcat filed toward a distant corner of the lot, bearing their steel and copper loads before them like the Three Kings. Trucks pulled in and out, their drivers knowing exactly where and when to stop. Another forklift came toward our line and picked up half the load off the truck in front of me, eight flattened cars stacked like the proverbial pancakes. When something that looked like a truncated metal highway cone got jammed in the forklift’s right wheel, the man directing all this traffic whomped at it with a wrench till it fell off and then the other Bobcat hopped over to pluck it out of the path and carry it away. All this without a word spoken, without even a lion tamer’s rod and whip to direct the growling machines.

The cliché description of this activity might be to compare it to a ballet. To my eyes the cliché is accurate. The forklifts and Bobcats spiraled around each other with scant inches to spare, dancing from truck to scrap mountain and back again with no wasted effort. The truck drivers, familiar with the routine, awaited their turns and crossed deftly to their proper places, turning eighteen-wheelers in spaces that I’d never essay in my Toyota. The traffic directors gestured with a precision that even an innocent like me could follow. The only random elements in this mechanistic universe were me and my little Toyota.

Because it was so noisy, the wrangler spoke to me with his hands: pull out of line, drive forward, stop over there, turn around, back up to the base of that scrap heap, open your trunk. He had the courtesy not to laugh when I lifted a dozen plastic garbage bags filled with cat food cans and dropped them in the dirt, surely an insufficient sacrifice to Vulcan’s smithy. Another gesture told me to drive back to the watchtower.

I stopped on another scale under another high window. I noticed that my car still weighed 2,420 pounds. Another woman looked down and attached a ticket to a clipboard welded to a chain on pulleys and lowered it to me. Her directions likewise wafted down upon me: go to the front office. At the front office window I picked up my cash for my cans. Twenty-five cents.

In the cacophony of that scrap yard, even with all its filth and jagged edges, there was order. There were grace and precision and purpose. A drill corps comes to mind. Or a Tofflerian Second Wave symphony orchestra in which all the bowing is synchronized. Busby Berkeley might have choreographed the people and machines in that yard, and I also found myself thinking of Charlie Chaplin sliding through the gears of his 1936 movie, Modern Times. In Italy and France before World War I a new artistic movement arose. Called “futurism,” its aim was to depict the energy and dynamism of modern life as symbolized by powerful new machines and sleek new automobiles. Encouraged by F.T. Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto, Umberto Buccioni and other artists generated canvases so strong and busy they seem to move. That day in the balletic recycling yard, I felt as if I might have been looking through the eyes of those artists.

Beauty in machines? In this heartless, mechanistic age? How can we possibly find any kind of beauty in smoke and exhaust and repetitive movement and mindless labor? You’d be surprised at what you can find, and in the unlikeliest places, too. I certainly didn’t expect to find anything even faintly beautiful in a junk yard, but there it was. It is, of course, a matter of focus.

In 1976, I was fortunate enough to visit the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition of machinery from 1876. Those century-old machines were enormous. Some of them were two stories tall, they filled enormous rooms, and they were masterpieces of beauty. Their giant cylinders and pistons were of shining metal. Although their wheels and cogs were arranged for peak efficiency, they also showed me the harmony of design, for the parts came together just so. And those machines still worked. Today, when a mobile device does the work a room-size computer did a generation ago, those building-size machines seem monstrous, clunky, out-of-date. But they still work.

Reader, find a machine or an engine. This can be the engine of your car, the innards of your blender, a lawn mower, a garbage truck, an electric drill, some obscure part of your computer. Size doesn’t matter. Does this piece of equipment do its job? How are the components arranged or linked together? How do they work together? Search the Web or your library to find pictures, diagrams, and descriptions of machines and how they work. If you’re fortunate enough to know an inventor or a scientist or a technician, ask that person about design principles. Take another look at David Macaulay’s books, of which my favorite is The Way Things Work. Not only is the art beautifully done, but as we read Macaulay’s books, we see the beauty of the precision, design, and execution in every-day machines and systems we take for granted and never really look at. Let us look at our machines and engines with fresh eyes. Yes, there’s beauty there.

Finding Newer New Goddesses (and how I name them)

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:27:19 GMT

Although Finding New Goddesseswas published a decade ago, I started writing it before the turn of the century. This was shortly after I read the truly ovular (a feminist book cannot be “seminal”) book, Found Goddesses: Asphalta to Viscera, by Morgan Grey and Julia Penelope. Surely you remember the invocation to Asphalta:
Hail, Asphalta, full of grace:
Help me find a parking place.

Grey and Penelope invented the term “Found Goddesses.” In the introduction to their book, they write that they know “something momentous when it happens right under [their] noses. The concept of a modern parking goddess was practical, immediate, and obvious. Why, after all, would Artemis or Demeter wander so far from their ancient spheres of influence to materialize parking spaces” (p. 1)? Their book is filled with puns. Never in my life have I been able to resist a pun. So guess what? Punny goddesses started showing up in my imagination. I was helpless before them. I started writing them down. And still am.

Because I was working on a Y2K project in 1998–99, the first new goddesses I Found (I capitalize this word in the Mary Daly fashion to show its singular meaning) were the computer goddesses. That was, of course, several computer generations ago. One of my buddies on the project was Andy, who carried three-inch disks in his pockets and taught me how to do email attachments. When I asked him one day if he was a silicone-based life form, he said yes. I wish he’d taught the project’s two engineers as much as he taught me. One day they decided to give us a new server. They didn’t bother to do a test run. Boom! Sixteen computers crashed. The project was down for two days.

Thanks partly to the Y2K project, the first computer goddesses I Found were Compuquia and Nerdix. Compuquia is obviously the goddess of technological nincompoops like me. I wrote Nerdix for my friend Sandra, a self-confessed Mac addict who was forever installing and uninstalling and reinstalling stuff. Our phone conversations sometimes turned into epic accounts of the work she was doing on her computer. Today, alas, her health is declining, so she leaves her motherboard alone.

Lately I’ve been thinking about newer new goddesses. My original computer goddesses have names like the Queen of Disks, Mr. Floppy, the Silicon Man, and Whizziwig (pronounced WYSIWYG), goddess of the Internet and the World Wide Web, who is “the true Great Cosmic Mother, and Her domain is the High AltaVista, where She tends the Great Green Fields of Baud, planting and tending Her vast crops of kilobytes and gigabytes and coaxing each golden url and pixel to bloom.” But I wonder if this is still funny to people who may have never heard the acronym WYSIWYG and who sleep with their iPhones. And who uses AltaVista anymore? It got Googled practically out of existence. In those long-ago days, I also Found Dot Compost (who eats spam—you’ll recognize a certain Pythonesque influence) and Linker Belle, the search engine fairy. Those goddesses seem pretty old fashioned today. The goddesses I’m Finding now must be their granddaughters.

Who’s marching around in my head these days? Henny-Penny, the Twittering Goddess. Omnivoria, Goddess of Social Media. She’ll eat up all your time and energy. Seamy, Goddess of Facebook. “See me!” she cries. “Pay attention to me!” Rude’n’Stoopid, Evil Godmothers of People Who Don’t Turn Off Their Mobile Devices in Theaters and Movies. Texticulotta, Goddess of Text Messaging. I’m going to have to get a friend who actually texts, though, to help me spell her messages right. Spl hr msgs rite?

Maybe you’d like to know a bit about my process. Don’t believe it for a minute when I say they appear before me, fully formed and named, like when Athena sprang out of Zeus’s head. I only say that for dramatic effect. Writing is hard work. I edit myself (as I’m doing right now) more than I do any of the authors who send me their work to edit.

I start when I spot something I want to satirize, like the so-called cyberuniverse and modern computing devices. Next, I spend a few days running word associations through my mind, often while I’m washing dishes or watching the Eyewitless News…well, you know the equation: busy hands + idle brain = creativity. As I’m falling asleep at night, I wander through literature and history. But I have to be careful not to get too obscure. Not everyone is familiar with, say, Cymbeline or The Magic Flute or The Mikado, not to mention the English Wars of the Roses (which I’m currently reading historical novels about) or details of the history of musical theater. I need to be careful with allusions.

Fairy tales and pop culture are nearly always accessible. That’s where I started when I was looking for a Twitter goddess. Tweety-Bird? Too obvious. Though she might tweet thot i saw a pssyct. How about bird sounds? Cluckie? Chirpie? Squawkie? These are not only too obvious, but they’re also neither mellifluous nor funny. Names of birds? Vultura? Crowetta? Little Sparrow? (Nope—I don’t want to insult Edith Piaf.) I saw Henny-Penny in a newspaper headline the day the meteor exploded over southern Russia: "Henny-Penny was right: the sky was falling."

What I often do is find a word and then twist it into knots or add a feminine ending, like Omnivoria, from “omnivore.” Or I work with pronunciation (Seamy) and immediately write the line that opens up the pun and that the reader can hear. That’s because puns are often oral, and even when we’re silently reading, we hear a voice in our head reading out loud. (I tell my authors to remember this when they’re writing dialogue.)

I play with spelling (Rude’n’Stoopid), too. It’s a means of emphasis. The double O in “stoopid” is stupider than just stupid (get it?) and shows my opinion of people who text during plays and movies. Then it occurred to me that the ’n’ means there are two evil godmothers. Can you just see them? Are they Disneyesque evil queens or are they dressed for success?

I’m not altogether sure how my brain dredged up Texticulotta. I was brushing my teeth and “testicular” came into my head. Why? I dunno. But it was a start. The words “testimony” and “testify” are cognates. (It’s said that men used to hold their hand to those sacred body parts for the same reason we lay a hand on the Bible.) But this is the goddess of texting, so “tes” turned to “tex.” The “-lar” had to be magnified; we’re familiar with “–lotta,” meaning “a lot of,” which is also the necessary feminine ending. And that “ticu” bit in the middle might echo “tickle” and/or “tick you off.” See how these things grow like amoebas? This goddess—like some people I know—texts way too much. To add to her sins, she’s also verbizing nouns.

So there we have it, or at least a start. Now all I have to do is actually write a paragraph or two about each of these newer new goddesses. Later!

P.S. Housekeeping report. I finally worked my way up to dusting my collection of 346 witches (not counting me and the babe in the back seat of my car) yesterday. At least the ones (plus the Blessed Bees) in the living room. One Swiffer will handle about sixty-five dusty witches and tchotches. And, contrary to the suggestion in the commercials, you still have to move things to dust around them. I guess I need to invoke the Queen of Clean, who occasionally works with Yuckrootie (a shadow goddess of cleaning).

Select. Copy. Paste. Voilà!

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:40:20 GMT

A few days ago, I read a Care2Causes blog by Kristina Chew about plagiarism. Chew opens her blog by noting that Germany’s minister of education recently resigned and was stripped of her Ph.D. because she had plagiarized her dissertation. The second paragraph tells us that seventy students at Harvard were sent home because they’d all cheated on a take-home exam. Their exams were identical down to typos. “Everybody cheats,” Chew wrote, “not just because it’s just too easy. We cut and paste because we’ve got the technology to do so. Courtesy of Wikipedia and the Internet, there’s a seemingly endless amount of material to draw on and so much that it’s easy to think, ‘how will someone every [ sic.] find that I’ve taken words that were not my own from this obscure site?’”

Back during the high renaissance, when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation on the persona of Cleopatra in the English plays about her (between 1592 and 1898), plagiarism took a lot more work. I was writing my dissertation in 1975–76, and “consumer computers” were just being developed. I don’t think I ever saw a computer on the campus at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, though I do remember the first computer at Southeast Missouri State in Cape Girardeau, where I earned my M.A. That was in 1968. The computer filled an entire, air conditioned room with elevated floors. Also Wikipedia didn’t go online until 2001. Plagiarism was a lot harder to commit back then. You couldn’t just select and copy and paste. If you wanted to copy something, you had to key it in yourself, and I doubt that anybody can type well enough not to make any errors. (See the sic I added in the quote in the first paragraph.).

Since I was writing about plays published in the 17th and 18th centuries, I spent a lot of time either with my head in a microfiche machine or reading rolls of microfilm. The only copy I could find of one play, The Play-House to be Lett (1663) by Sir William D’avenant (who claimed to be Shakespeare’s godson, but wasn’t), had been microfiched from the parchment copy. That means I could see both sides of each sheet at the same time and I also had to wade through the Restoration spelling and typography with those funny S’s that look like F’s. I typed my chapters on a portable typewriter, and the final, approved, signed-off version was typed (by the department secretary) on an IBM Selectric. I have one of the two bound copies on my bookshelf. It sure would have been easier if I could have found the eleven plays I studied online, but that wasn’t even remotely possible.

Over the past decade-plus, I have edited quite a few works of academic discourse. One of the first was a Ph.D. dissertation titled That Which Stimulates and Numbs Us: The Museum in the Age of Trauma, which the author describes as “a theoretical study that straddles the fields of psychoanalysis, visual studies, museum studies, and post-Foucauldian French philosophy.” It was fascinating! (And about half as long as my dissertation.) Another early project was an incomprehensible master’s thesis by a school psychologist. More recently, I’ve edited five Ph.D. theses by candidates at Lancaster University in northern England. They, too, were interesting. My challenges were to remember British punctuation and to help the Greek and German candidates with more idiomatic English. I also edited a D. Min. project (dissertation) by a Unitarian minister on the topic of cruelty to animals. The day I edited the chapter about Chicken McNuggets, I went outside for my walk and found a chicken walking down 4th St. in Long Beach. I’d never seen or heard it before, never did again.

Very few of my authors plagiarize, although some of them try to include lyrics from rock songs without getting written permission from the copyright holder. Copyright law is exceedingly complex, but in general terms, you can quote poetry or song lyrics if the author died more than seventy years ago…unless his estate holds the copyright. Homer, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton are pretty safe; popular songs require permission. When my authors use lyrics, it’s not dishonesty but naiveté. Most of them don’t know until I tell them.

How do I recognize possible plagiarism? The person’s writing style changes. When someone who writes like he’s never read a book in his life suddenly spouts postmodern litcrit jargon, my little Editor OCD bell starts ringing. This happened in the early nineties when I was teaching at a for-profit university (where students work all day and go to school one or two nights a week). An insurance adjuster suddenly wrote a perfect literary essay. Ding, ding, ding. I asked him about it. Did he want to add a footnote? No, ma’am, he did not. I did a bit of research on my own, found his source, and went to see the dean. The student tried to sue the school because I was picking on him.

What is the solution to plagiarism? I think it’s simple—give credit where credit is due. Cite your sources. Make footnotes. If you use a lot of an author’s work, thank him or her in your acknowledgments. Don’t just do a Google search for your topic, find something that looks interesting (but may not be accurate), and steal it. If it’s good, summarize it. Quote one or two sentences if they’re so good or telling you couldn’t say it as well yourself, but cite the source for these sentences. Do your own work and work hard so it’s something you’ll be proud of. Do not select, copy, and paste.

Good Words, Bad Words--Which Do We Use?

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 21:32:59 GMT

A few weeks ago, a blogger I know explained why she hadn’t been posting any blogs lately. She had a health challenge, she didn’t feel good, and she didn’t want to write any grumpy blogs. I’m less kind than she is. I’m writing a grumpy blog to start the new year. Abuse of the English language makes me exceedingly grumpy. (This is a surprise?)

The January 1 edition of my local paper, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, contained an article about Lake Superior State’s 38th list of words and phrases they’d like to banish from the English language. At the top of the list was “fiscal cliff.” I didn’t keep count while I was watching MSNBC or PBS or Eyewitless News, but I know that “fiscal cliff” was a really hot topic that I got really tired of hearing about. Also on Lake Superior State’s list are “double down,” “bucket list,” “trending,” “superfood,” “boneless wings,” “spoiler alert,” and “guru.”

Another word the list wants to ban is “YOLO,” which I’d never seen before. It means “you only live once,” which is probably not true. I accept the idea of reincarnation and see our lives like grades in school with a little time to rest between grades. Hopefully (yikes—here’s a usage that should perhaps be banned; adverbs modify verbs and adjectives, but maybe not entire sentences. But I like it.) as we come back to a new life we know a bit more than we knew in the last life. Except for the Dalai Lama, of course, there’s no way to verify reincarnation as a universal truth. One of my authors says he was a movie director in the 1930s, which is why the style of his novels is so cinematic. I don’t think he’s young enough to have had a life in the Thirties, and, besides, he can’t identify any movies he might have directed. But that’s beside the point. He writes good stories about unforgettable characters. YOLO is of course one of those text-messagy acronyms like OMG, LOL, and ROTF. Which are really abbreviations, the difference between acronyms and abbreviations being that we pronounce acronyms as words whereas we pronounce the letters in abbreviations. LOL of course means “laughing out loud,” but my son told me a story yesterday about a man who had written a very affectionate note to his daughter and signed it LOL. The daughter asked if he was being sarcastic, and the father said, “It means Lots Of Love, doesn’t it?” No, it doesn’t.

The list makers also don’t like “kick the can down the road,” which seems to mean to procrastinate. I understand that most of the clichés and jargon we use come from sports (“reach first base,” “hit it out of the park”), but I’m not aware of any sport that kicks cans. When I hear someone say “kick the can down the road,” what I see is Cher in Moonstruck kicking the can in the road the morning after her night at the opera.

Of course I have my own ever-growing list of words and phrases I’d like to ban, and I’ve been known to tell my authors not to use this or that word anymore. One author used various forms of the word “grab” so often, I issued a fatwah against the word in all its forms. I told another author he’d used up his entire lifetime supply of his favorite word (which I have forgotten). The words I’m weary of seeing are almost all business legal, and medical/psychological jargon. Jargon is useful if you’re addressing people who already speak that faux language. That’s because jargon is shorthand. It’s a substitute for thought. When you use shared jargon, you know the people you’re addressing know what you mean (and probably agree with you), and neither you nor your reader or listener has to give the concept or the context any thought at all. But what about people outside your specialized field? What about people who have no idea what your jargon means? As I keep telling my authors, we need to remember that our readers don’t live in our heads with us. I also quote Stephen Sondheim, who said, “Clarity is everything.” He was talking about his song lyrics, but it’s true for any writing or speaking unless your intention is to be obscure and ambiguous. If you want to be obscure or give the impression that you know things lesser people don’t, well, yes, use jargon.

Here are a few of my banned words. “Skillset” (or “skill set”). “Out there.” I edit books by authors who write that there are people “out there” who do or know something. Out where? Outside their area of specialization? At large in the world? In outer space? Another one is “clearly.” But what is clear to me may not be clear to you. “Literally” is sometimes used for emphasis. One of my authors, a college teacher, wrote that he “literally bombed” the students in his class with questions. “Were there body parts all over the classroom?” I asked him. “Blood all over the floor?” He got it and dropped the “literally.” Well, no, he didn’t literally drop the word. (Would it bounce if dropped?)

I often tell my authors to be careful with figurative language because it can add unintentional humor. Even though I know it’s impossible to do, I would also like to ban mixed metaphors. Here’s my current favorite example, spoken on a Sunday morning news show by a very intelligent broadcaster. “What I don’t understand about trial balloons is just pull the trigger….” What this seems to say is that a balloon has a trigger. I’m pretty sure that’s not what she meant.

Another usage that makes me crazy is “processes” pronounced “processEEZ.” So-called expert businesspeople use this on TV all the time. Where did this wretched usage originate? When we’re talking about taking more than one class, we don’t say “classEEZ.” When we visit the optometrist, do we look at new “glassEEZ”? “ProcessEEZ” is stupid. But I once heard something worse. An marketing expert was being interviewed on TV. She was talking about crisis management. And she said “crisisEEZ.” Three syllables. Where did she go to school??

Thanks to borrowings from every other language on the planet, the English language has a vocabulary that’s bigger than any other language. That doesn’t mean we can’t invent new words. I invent them, too. Did you notice that “text-messagy” up in the third paragraph? I also sometimes accuse people of “complexifying” an issue, which means to purposefully make it lots more complex than it already is. And I once called someone a “theologizer,” which I did not mean as a compliment. I guess I should apologize.

I’ll close with a true story. I once belonged to Toastmasters, Intl., a splendid organization. At each meeting, one member is chosen to serve as grammarian. The grammarian introduces a new word, which the members use in their talks. It’s a good way to build your vocabulary. Unless you ask me to be grammarian. At one meeting, I gave the club a new word: “unwidgeonable.” I even defined it. (Don’t ask. I don’t remember.) Everyone used “unwidgeonable” at least once during the meeting. Then, as the president was about to end the meeting, my buddy George spoke up. “The doctor fooled you all,” he said. “She made up that word.” They never asked me to be grammarian again.

A Midwinter Ritual

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:37:43 GMT

Midwinter, or the winter solstice (December 21), is the shortest day and longest night of the year. I like to think of Yule, an old pagan name for the solstice season, as a time when we get to take a nice, long, peaceful nap between all those holiday parties. For this ritual, you need two candles (silver and gold), a blanket, and a small gift for yourself.

Did you know that Santa Claus is a shaman? He wears red and white and black, the three sacred colors of the ancient triple goddess, and he’s fat because he’s well-fed. (A traditional shaman once told me never to trust a skinny shaman; if his people don’t provide for him, he’s not doing his job.) Santa flies from the frozen north, where the Saami (or Lapp) shamans still wield their full traditional powers. He’s drawn through the air by magical reindeer whose antlers symbolize the surging force of life. The Christmas tree is the world pole. From Mongolia to the American Southwest, shamans customarily ascend the world pole to make their astral journeys. Santa knows everything, especially if we’ve been good or bad, and like karma itself, he brings us our just desserts. His gifts are the gifts of the spirit made material. His attendants, the toy-making elves, are the Old Ones who help the deserving and play tricks on the undeserving. Santa is not a god, but let’s honor him along with the solar gods and goddesses in our midwinter ritual.

Because this ritual is about rest and revival as the light is reborn, you need a blanket or quilt, preferably one that’s handmade and full of snuggly memories. You also need a small gift to yourself, something you really want. This is your gift from the goddess Ops, consort of the elder god Saturn, who was the god of agriculture during humankind’s golden age and is both Father Time and the Grim Reaper. The week-long Saturnalia of ancient Rome was named for him. His consort is Ops (her day is December 19), from whom we get our word “opulence.” Your gift can be a crystal or a book or any small thing you really want.

Light your silver candle and set it somewhere safe, then sit on your cozy blanket and invite the elemental powers of fire, water, air, and earth into your space. Invite Santa and the Christmas tree angel, too. Ask them to take the same places the guardian angels take around Hansel and Gretel in Humperdinck’s opera—at your head and feet, right and left hands, above you and below you.

Frau Holle is the German goddess of winter. When snow is falling, we can see that she’s shaking out her sheets and tablecloths. As I see her, she looks a bit like Cinderella’s godmother in the Disney movie. Invoke Frau Holle with these words:

          Frau Holle, Grandmother of All,
          it’s winter, and I am cold.
          Frau Holle, Grandmother of All,
          it’s dark, and I am frightened.
          Frau Holle, Grandmother of All,
          it’s the nighttime of the year, and I am weary.
          Frau Holle, Grandmother of All,
          take me in your arms—
          hold me, rock me, cradle me,
          and watch over me while I sleep.

Wrap yourself up in your blanket, or at least wrap it around your shoulders. Imagine Frau Holle coming to tuck you in for the night. Let her sing you a lullaby—the aria from Hansel and Gretel, “All Through the Night,” Brahms’ “Lullaby,” “Mockingbird,” or any other lullaby you love. When the kind goddess has finished singing to you, she sits in her old rocking chair nearby and takes out her eternal knitting, which becomes the blanket of snow that covers the land.

Now in your imagination you get to be an animal. Become a bear in your burrow. You’ve eaten enough holiday meals to sustain yourself through the winter, and now you get to take a nap. First make sure your candle is safe, then take your midwinter nap. If you actually fall asleep, that’s all right. Sleep peacefully through the longest night of the year. Imagine Santa Shaman visiting you and bringing your gift. Have a brief dream conversation with him if you want to.

When you wake up, make animal noises. Yawn and stretch. Winter’s over! The sun has been reborn! Untangle yourself from your blanket and crawl out of your burrow. Light your gold candle and greet the newborn sun with these words:

          Hail, Golden Saule, Beautiful Hathor,
          Mighty Apollo, Gentle Jesus—
          Morning greetings, solar gods and goddesses.
          Hail, climbing power of the rising sun,
          fiery dawn and newborn day,
          illumination and warming joy.
          Night is done, midwinter has passed, and I rejoice!
          Welcome, rising sun!

Give thanks to Frau Holle for watching over you during the night. Say thank you to Santa Shaman for the gift he brought you. Thank Goddess Ops for all the precious and small gifts you know you’ll be receiving all year long. Sing a Christmas carol, and then begin your new day.

          Joy to the world,
          The light is born.
          Let earth begin to sing.
          Let every heart
          Rejoice in the light.
          And heaven and nature sing,
          And heaven and nature sing,
          And heaven and earth and nature sing!

During Yuletide and all the winter holidays, share your joy with your family and friends.

[Note: I’ve just adapted this from a longer ritual I wrote in 1990 for my second book, A Woman’s Book of Rituals and Celebrations. Recycling is a good thing.]

Fun and games with a dead language

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 20:28:47 GMT

I think I’ve written before about one of the silly mind games I like to play. When someone asks me what my sign is, I say, “Cancer. One of the top twelve.” Then I watch the wheels go round in his head until he says, “Oh.” Sometimes the person I’m talking with catches on fast and says, “And I’m Taurus, another of the top twelve.”

I mention this because I’m inventing a new game. One of the books I’m currently reading is a fascinating work by Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: a Biography of Latin and the World It Created. This is a history of the language that (after classical Greek) was once considered the most important language in the world. From its earliest days until Vatican II, when the Roman Catholic Church permitted masses in vernacular languages, Latin held the universality that English has held for the last couple of centuries. So here’s my proposed new mind game: “Back when I was studying Latin in high school and Julius Caesar was sending daily dispatches of his Gallic wars straight to my Latin class….” Or, “A couple thousand years ago, when I was reading Caesar’s reports hot off the presses….” Then, as I watch the wheels go round again, I’ll get to say, “Of course I’m not really two thousand-plus years old. And I bleach my hair!”

Just so we all know, Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) was a Roman enfant terrible and an homme even more terrible, who had three of his own wives plus, it’s said, the wives of all the Roman senators. One story about him is that when he was kidnapped by pirates as a teenager (or at age 25), he outtalked them and ended up becoming a sort of pirate king. (It’s kind of like O. Henry’s “Ransom of Red Chief,” but without the humor.) Caesar spent nine years conquering Gaul (modern France), and when he marched back to Rome and crossed the Rubicon River in northeastern Italy, his action started the civil war that led to his assassination, the end of the Roman Republic, and the foundation of the Roman Empire. (Cleopatra was in Rome when Caesar was murdered; she promptly went home to Egypt.) Caesar’s death was dramatized by Shakespeare. I have a DVD of the 1953 movie starring Louis Calhern as Caesar, James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, and Marlon Brando as Antony. Without even a tiny hint of Stanley Kowalski—Brando could really act.

Back when I was in high school in the 1950s, that famous Republican Golden Age, Latin was one of the popular electives. “Take Latin,” they told us. “It’ll teach you to think logically. You’ll learn how English grammar works. You’ll learn a lot of history. It’ll make it easier if you decide to take another language.” I bought it. I took two years of Latin.

What I remember best about Latin II is that we had a page or two of Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico ( Commentaries on the Gallic War) to translate every night. Latin was a complicated language. Ostler writes, “As every schoolboy [ sic.] once knew, Latin had four different classes of verbs…known as conjugations.” (p. 24). Verbs were conjugated in six tenses (present, imperfect, future, perfect, past perfect, future perfect), two voices (active and passive), and three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative)…“altogether a large set of combination.” These combinations has up to six forms to express person and number (I, you, he/she/it, etc.) plus infinitives (to do, to have done), participles (doing, done, about to do), a supine (in order to do), and a gerundive (which is to be done) (p. 24, n). Nouns followed five patterns called declensions, with different forms for the noun’s function in a sentence: nominative (subject), accusative (object), genitive (“for a noun dependent on another noun”), dative (for a recipient), ablative (for a source), locative (for a place), and vocative (for an addressee) p. 25)

Whew! Is it any wonder that when our Latin II class was voting to ask Miss Doyle to teach a Latin III class, I voted no? I knew all that stuff and wasn’t sure I wanted to know more. To this day, however, I wonder what we might have read and translated in Latin III. Probably the great Roman poets and historians from the Golden Age—Ovid, Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus, and that bunch. I didn’t read these authors until graduate school, when I read them in English translation in my classes in 18th-century literature. I’ve never been a Latin scholar. When a friend asked if I wanted to take German I, I remembered that someone had said German nouns have a dative case. That was enough to make me say no again. I took French instead. I’m glad I took Latin, though, because I’ve always been fascinated by the lessons of history. I bet I’m not alone in seeing parallels between ancient Rome and the U.S.

I wish I had time to sit around and read all day, but I don’t, so I’m still working my way through the book. I’m up to Chapter 11 now. I’ve read about how, after the takeover of Latin by the Roman Catholic Church, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the migrations of the Germanic tribes across Europe, the grammatica of classical Latin was altered and Latin’s daughters, the Romance languages, were born. I’m learning something on every page. It seems that an early Christian bishop invented silent reading; before that, people always read aloud.

Although Latin got changed a lot during the so-called Dark Ages, the lives of ordinary people didn’t change much when Rome “fell.” They just went on doing what they’d been doing. A good book about this is by Peter S. Wells, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered, which I also recommend. And while we’re on the subject of the fall of the Roman Empire, see if you can find a 2007 movie called The Last Legion, which stars Colin Firth as a legionary who takes young Romulus Augustus, the last western emperor, to England and they somehow wind up entangled in the Arthurian mythos. It’s so awful it’s funny. And Ben Kingsley’s in it as Merlin. If you want accurate information on the Roman emperors, there’s Michael Grant’s book, The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial Rome 318 B.C.-A.D. 476

But enough recommendations. I’ll end with a paragraph from Ostler that I stopped and read three times. “Languages create worlds to live in, not just in the minds of their speakers, but in their lives, and their descendants’ lives, where those ideas become real. The world that Latin created is today called Europe. And as Latin formed Europe, it also inspired the Americas. Latin has in fact been the constant in the cultural history of the West, extending over two millennia. In a way, it has been too central to be noticed: like the air Europe breathed, it has pervaded everything:” (p. 20).

Collecting Witches

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:24:46 GMT

Halloween is almost upon us. For pagans, it’s a sacred holiday—a holy day, which is what “holiday” means. It’s a lot like Día de los Muertos, when we gather in ritual space to remember our ancestors and friends deceased from this earth but living in other worlds and welcome them back to our world if they want to come for a short visit. For the last decade or so, however, intolerant people have decided we should not see Halloween associated with anything holy, even if the word itself comes from “hallowed,” as in “hallowed be thy name” in the famous prayer. These people want to force their children and everyone else to believe our holy day is nothing more than a mere harvest festival or a just a night for stupid zombies, dead presidents, Frankenstein monsters, cartoon characters, and ghouls, spiders, and superheroes to run around.

Halloween’s coming. Just look in any store. What do you see for sale in September and October? What we saw back in the mid-80s, when I first started collecting witches, was a multitude of witches. That was during the second wave of feminism, when Marija Gimbutas was excavating the sites and writing about the civilization of the Goddess in Old Europe. When Z. Budapest introduced feminist spirituality to feminist politics at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. When Starhawk wrote the first edition of The Spiral Dance. When Max Dashu was researching and archiving her Suppressed Histories. When other ovular books were being published. Yes, “ovular.” A book on feminist spirituality can hardly be called “seminal.” (Books of feminist wisdom do not squirt out of Freudian symbols.) In those days, we were reinventing an old religion, rehabilitating the word “witch,” and reconstituting the wisdom of witches. Today, as intolerant people are trying to take us back to the 1950s (when the world was mostly witch-free), I guess we need to start all over again.

My collection currently hovers—note that I use that verb on purpose—at between 340 and 350 witches that range in size from an inch tall to as big as a Muppet. I’ve done witch censuses around my home, so I’m pretty sure I’ve got them all counted. But “one never knows. Do one.” (Thank you, Fats Waller.) Some of my witches are expensive works of art, some are authentic collectibles, some are majorly cheap and tacky. That’s OK. I cherish them all.

I've included photos of a few of my witches in this article. I can’t show them all because that would make this blog as big as a movie to download. I bought Hazel (though not her red chair) at Nordstrom. I bought the Halloween pumpkin at the gift shop of the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. I have a witch riding a spider that I bought at the St. Mary Hospital gift shop. I have five Barbies dressed in witchy clothing, four of them, including Barbie as Samantha from Bewitched, in their original Mattell boxes. The fifth I bought at the Long Beach WomanSpirit solstice fair several years ago. “Does Mattell know you dressed Barbie up like this?” I asked the artist. He refused to answer. I have Elphaba and Galinda in a Time Dragon Clock snow globe that I bought at the Ozdust Boutique. I have Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat, and Tiffany Aching from Discworld. They’re tiny pewter game pieces, but I have no idea what the game might be. I have two small Madame Alexander Oz witches that came (I think) with Happy Meals. I have a gorgeous witch teapot that I bought in an extremely expensive gift store. I have witches riding owls and one riding a goose, two riding in vegetable-cars, and one as the top of a nutcracker, plus several on their customary broomsticks. I have witches that cost under $10 and witches that cost well over $100. There are forty-odd witches on shelves above my bed. These are all stuffed cloth dolls because if the Big One strikes, I don’t want witches made of wood, resin, metal, wire, ceramic, bone, and any combination thereof raining down on me in the middle of the night. When I look up from my pillow, I see witchy feet.

For twenty-five years, as surely as September comes ’round, I go shopping for witches. I used to go to malls. I once found a large, expensive witch in a large, expensive garden store in a mall. I also go to Michaels and Pic ’n’ Sav (now called Big Lots). At a marketplace here in Long Beach, I used to start at a mailbox place that also sold gifts. Then I walked around the corner to a shop called Rainbows that sold flowers, candles, and toys, including witches. Next, to Home Economics, a store that sold mostly kitchenware, plus witches in October. Then to the Hallmark store and a huge fabric store, then to a store that sold high-priced crystal and tableware, and finally to a children’s store. There were witches in all these stores. But many of the stores are gone now, thanks to the Republican recession, and the ones that are still in business are mostly witchless. Why is that? Intolerance and intimidation.

I had a long chat with my friend Gregory the other day. Gregory owns a shop called Babcock & Cooke, and I’ve been buying witches from him every single year since at least 1988. He and Mike, who works there, joke that they always know it’s fall when they see me come in the door. Over the years, Gregory has told me about the buying trips he used to make across the country looking for witches and other items to sell in the store. About ten years ago, he started telling me how he was having trouble finding witches. Intolerant people were forcing artists and stores to abandon witches because, they said, Halloween and witches and anything pagan came straight from the depths of hell, and if you’re gonna celebrate anything at the end of October, it has to be a tame little harvest festival. Gregory has told me many stories about the intimidation of artists whose work he used to buy. Just last week, he told me about another company that is being forced to shut down.

You can still go on line and buy witches (which I did about five minutes ago), but it’s harder and harder to find witches in stores. Try it yourself. Go out and look. If you find a good-looking witch, buy her. Support artists. Support witches. I’m persistent. I hope I can keep finding witches. Happy Hallows Eve.

Need to practice writing? Write a blog or two.

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 21:28:03 GMT

If you want to write, blogging can be a good way to practice. I’m pretty sure that nearly everyone I know—both in person and via the Net—reads blogs, and a lot of those people write blogs, too. ComputerHope, a nifty website that I went to for help when I was writing about Herta’s new (in 1990) computer for the reader’s guide for Secret Lives gives this definition for blog, a word that was apparently first used in 1998: A weblog or blog, is a listing of text, images, or other objects that are arranged in a chronological order that first started appearing in 1998. Blogs are often maintained and run by a single individual, updated daily, or contain random personal remarks about a topic, a personal ramble, an update on the person's life or their current feelings. In many ways, many weblogs are like a personal journal, diary or a look into another individual's life and can be a great way to learn about people, events, places, and much more from millions of people around the world.

I write two so-called regular blogs, this one and a monthly blog for Feminism and Religion. For FAR, I’ve worked ahead so that Xochitl Alviso, who posts my blogs for me because I’m a technological nincompoop, has me scheduled for the next two or three months. Later today I plan send her my Christmas blog, which is about gods (including Jesus) who were said to be born around the time of the winter solstice. (We don’t know exactly when Jesus was born, probably in the fall or the spring between 7 and 4 BCE. What we do know is that in 354, Bishop Liberius of Rome moved the birth date of Jesus to match the birth date of Roman god Mithra. For more about the solar gods, check back with FAR around Christmastime or read December 25 in Pagan Every Day .) (But—good grief—don’t spent over $100 for a copy on Amazon! I can sell you one, and I'll even sign it, for $18.) I’m one of two pagans who are regular contributors to FAR (my friend Carol Christ is the other, and she’s the one who invited me). FAR presents a new blog every single day. I read the FAR blogs every morning and invite you to read them, too. I’ve also just sent a fairy tale about Egyptian goddesses to Xochitl to see if it might be a good blog. (“Blog” is sometimes pretty loosely defined; a British scholar named Daniel Cohen, who has been active in the Goddess movement in Britain for many years, has posted some terrific stories.)

And so today, I’m sitting here doing what the authors whose books I edit do: I’m pulling words out of my head and pushing them out through my fingers to my keyboard. I type awhile, then I stop and read what I just typed. Then I go, Oh.My.God, that doesn’t make sense at all. I immediately start editing. When I wrote a sort of blog for a friend a few months ago, the subject was writer’s block. In it I said (cross my heart) that I don’t believe in writer’s block. That’s true. I don’t get blocked. Well, sometimes I procrastinate. Sometimes I have other important things to do. Like wash dishes. Go to the bathroom. Comb the cats. Eat lunch. Take out the trash. (I think I’ll do that right now. Back in a minute.) I used to know people who sharpened pencils and rearranged their bookshelves while they were procrastinating. If you’re really good at, the list of things you can do that are not writing is endless.

Okay, I’m back. Yes, I really believe that there’s no need to be blocked. What do I tell people who ask me about writer’s block? Just sit down and write! Write anything. Just get something on your screen (or on paper). Anything. Even if it’s awful. Just get something written. You can, and probably should, delete those “priming the pump” paragraphs, but at least you’re getting yourself started. At the same time, I think the famous quote by sports writer Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith is spot on: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. If you’ve read or seen I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, you remember that Cassandra gets her father, the famous novelist who’s been blocked for a dozen years, to start again by typing “the cat sat on the mat.” It works. If you’re feeling blocked, it’ll work for you, too,. Don’t give up. Foul Matter by Martha Grimes is another novel about, among other things, a blocked writer.

If you want to write, you have to practice writing. With eight published books, a couple that may never get published (because I wrote them on a typewriter and don’t feel like retyping and rewriting them), and a whole lot of stories and blogs and poems, plus my Ph.D. dissertation and a stack of term papers from graduate school that is as tall as I am, I’ve had a lot of practice at writing. It’s never easy to write well, but if you get enough practice, it becomes easier to get a good first or rough draft going. Then you can edit. And edit. And edit. And hire me to do some more editing for you. As I tell many of the authors I work with, they’ve got terrific rough drafts (which are seldom first drafts). Here’s the metaphor I commonly use. The rough draft is like a garden. You broadcast the seeds or stick little plants in the ground. You wait to see what grows. Your major task is now to weed the garden. Pull out little plants whose seeds the wind blew in. Pull out little plants that aren’t what you thought you planted. Pull out little plants that are likely to grow so vigorously they’ll take over the whole garden if you leave them there. None of these little plants are necessarily bad little plants. They’re just out of place. They might do perfectly well in some other garden, that is, in some other story or book, in some other context. You also have to pinch back growing tips to make a plant of which you’re fond healthier and bushier. And of course it’s useful to add water and fertilizer to help your garden grow. So far, the authors with whom I’ve shared this metaphor get it. They understand that what they sent me is an unweeded garden. We’re weeding and pinching and pruning together.

Writing rough drafts and blogs—aha! Back to my original point!—is practice writing. Adults keep feeding us that old cliche, practice makes perfect. I disagree with that. What practice makes is familiarity. Practice touch typing and you learn how to do it without staring at the keyboard. Practice dicing onions and you learn how to do it without too many tears. Practice driving your car and you learn how to do it safely. Practice using your new smart device and you learn what those weird little finger motions and apps do. If you practice wrong, though, then wrong will become familiar, and you’re not likely to learn to do it right and become familiar with right, unless you start all over again at the bottom of the learning curve. And so it goes with writing.

That’s why blogs are useful. A blog is a short form. You can write multiple versions of the same blog and compare them. You can fact-check them. As you create a blog, you get to practice writing. Practice putting a coherent sentence together. A coherent paragraph. (That’s a lesson I’ve yet to learn.) (Sigh.) Practice concision (a lesson I received from my major professor in graduate school. But that's another story). Learn, say, the difference between “imply” and “infer.” Learn that “allergic foods” is not what you mean when you’re writing about food allergies. Learn that you need to heed Strunk & White’s Rule 11 (“A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.”) or what you wrote won’t be what you meant. Is it true that a journey begins with a single step? It may be equally true that good writing begins with a single blog. If you write a whole series of good blogs, you can even collect them and turn the collection into a book. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it sure is nice to have arrived at the end of this blog!

Grammar Fussbudgetry

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:45:07 GMT

The sun has entered Virgo. When I was writing Pagan Every Day, I asked my friend Lilith the astrologer to give me capsule descriptions of the sun signs. We know Virgos, I wrote. They’re the obsessive folks to whom every detail has to be correct. Lilith the astrologer says that Virgos even quantify their every emotion.

For the past decade or so, I’ve been telling the authors whose books I edit that “obsessive” isn’t a strong enough word for me when I’m in edit mode. It’s my job to pay attention to details, and that’s down to the comma level. When I’m editing, I read for spelling, punctuation, grammar, syntax, and transitions between sentences, paragraphs, and ideas. I do a lot of fact checking, too. For a book about the author’s travels in Bolivia, for example, I’ve been fact-checking every Spanish proper noun, especially the names of cities. This is partly because this author doesn’t add the accent marks. I also did a lot of fact checking for an author whose protagonist was active during the French Revolution; he had the years of the Terror wrong (it was 1793–94). I pointed out to another author of a children’s book about the birth of Jesus that the inn in Bethlehem which there was no room could not have been owned and operated by a nice, gemütlich German family. There were no members of any Germanic tribe in the Roman colony of Judea. And I changed the spelling of the word “levy” in another book to “levee” because the author was writing about a waterway, not a tax. I have even fact-checked product names and the titles of songs and movies and the spellings of singers’ and actors’ names.I’ve been writing book reviews for 20+ years, and I seldom review a book that hasn’t been properly edited. I’ve declined to edit books with a “forward” instead of a foreword, and I also set aside a book with an “afterwards.” Loving puns, however, when I was writing Finding New Goddesses and the publisher had “forward” instead of “foreword” on the author questionnaire, I asked one friend to write a “foreword” and another to write a “forward.” They did.

I’ve recently read a mystery novel by an author who spoke to a writers club I belong to. She spun a good story, but if I were reviewing her book, I’d pan it. This author is the victim, I assume, of lousy editing. There’s a difference between “past” and “passed.” “Grit” is not a past tense form; that’s “gritted.” A “puss-yellow” sky is the color not of leaking white cells but a presumably ugly cat. “Fist” is a noun, not a verb. And there’s a sentence in the book that ends “…raising his face to her’s.” (That “her’s” is in the book twice.) The book was published by a major New York publisher. Who on earth do those publishers hire to be their editors?

A few months ago, I was called a “grammar nazi.” Ya gotta love it. A young woman had been posting on my Facebook page that she was writing a book. Every one of her posts was filled with grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. After two or three posts, I commented that if she wanted to be a published writer, she needed to pay more attention to correct English (which I jokingly refer to as "gooder English"). After all, if you can’t get through a Facebook post without errors, then it’s unlikely you’ll get through a whole book. I’m pretty sure I wrote this as politely as I could. When her book was published, she announced it to me. In my reply, I asked if she’d gone to a print-on-demand or a vanity press. That’s when she called me a grammar nazi.

I’m of two minds about the idea that anything connected with the Nazi Party can be used humorously. (I suppose the phrase started with Seinfeld on TV.) On the one hand, I’m old enough to remember the real Nazis. My uncles fought in World War II, and I’ve known survivors of the concentration camps and the children of survivors. In high school, I had an English teacher from England who had survived the Blitz. On the other hand, though, I’m with Mel Brooks, who said in an interview about The Producers--remember "Springtime for Hitler"?--that the “only way to get even with anybody is to ridicule them. So the only real way I could get even with Hitler and company was to bring them down with laughter.” He’s right. Make fun of your enemies and you diminish their power. (When I saw The Producers at the Hollywood Bowl last month, I got to see Gary Beach and Roger Bart as Roger De Bris and Carmen Ghia, the roles they originated on Broadway in 2001. They were fantastic.)

But the young writer wasn’t being humorous. What she and I and all of us need to understand is that our language is a great, growing, verbal organism. It has rules for grammar, spelling, and punctuation that need to be obeyed not just for the sake of obedience but because most of those rules make our language work. They help us create sentences and paragraphs that make sense. That’s because if we speak and write correctly and generally follow the rules (do we all have our copies of Strunk and White?), what we say and write will be better understood by other people. Gooder English counts. That’s why even though I’m not a Virgo, I’m as picky as one. Grammar Nazi? No. Grammar fussbudget? Hell, yes. When what you write is full of grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors—and probably logical errors, too—then, unless you are writing for willfully ignorant people, your credibility goes way down. If you state your argument or develop your plot with gooder English, then your credibility goes up. I guess I’ll just spend my life as a kind of Editor of La Mancha tilting at the windmill monsters of badder English. I’m dreaming an impossible dream of good writing. P.S.—More obsessiveness. The bakery in my local Ralphs grocery now has a sign that says FRENCH CRUELLER DONUTS. I love French crullers, but I gotta wonder if Cruella de Vil buys those cruellers and feeds them to the Dalmatians.