Basic Rules of Good Writing

I so need to remember some of these. I am horrible about using passive voice, especially.

Image Credit: Sally Yates

We <3 Books!

Stories of Punctuation and Typographic Marks: A Reading List

With the Read Harder Challenge including a Microhistory, this looked like an interesting collection!

Longreads

From the now-ubiquitous hashtag (or octothorpe, hash, pound, or whatever you like to call it) to the loved, hated, and misunderstood semicolon, punctuation marks not only help us shape our stories, but also have their own origins and histories and have become part of the narratives of our lives. Here are picks about six punctuation marks, from the comma to the asterisk.

1. “Holy Writ” (Mary Norris, The New Yorker)

“The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas.” Norris describes her early days at The New Yorker, from collating to working on the copydesk — reading greats like John McPhee and Pauline Kael — and her current job, more than thirty years later, as a comma queen.

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Fun Facts — Books!

I love the feel of a real book in my hands. From the weight and feel of the pages to the scent, it’s just better. Add in that the battery never dies and it’s the perfect media.

I’ve only read five of the top ten books ever sold. I find it sad to see some of those on this list when there are so many better books out there.

Always my go to with my kids, Dr. Seuss is amazing. I would love to have a complete library of his books (including his dirty book).

10 Dream Bathroom

It never hurts to dream. I love the more modern tub design, but I’m also fond of the old claw-foot tubs. I have neither, but maybe one day…

My Personal Writing Foes

There are numerous lists of commonly misspelled or misused words out there. Ironically, I don’t have any issues with the majority of those. I’m well versed in there, their and they’re and I don’t have to stop and think to know if it’s its turn or not. This is a list of words I do struggle with and repeatedly have to stop and think or even look up to make sure I’m spelling or using them correctly. I hope that, by listing them out here, I may finally get them stuck in my head.

1. Breathe vs breath
2. Cloth vs clothe
3. Clung vs clinged (Yes, I know the latter is not a word at all, but it jumps into my writing without me realizing it.)
4. Principle vs principal
5. Counsel vs council
6. Taunt vs taut
7. Smooth vs smoothe (Another word that likes me though it doesn’t exist.)
8. Embarrass vs embarass (I was reminded of this as I was typing the next section.)

While thinking of these, some of my more common typos came to mind, as well. In some cases, they make for a moment of hilarity.

1. Beast vs breast – Either way, it comes out comical. Someone is running from the growling “breast” that is trying to attack them or, in a more sensual situation, a man may find himself caressing her “beast”.
2. Lips vs hips – Both body parts, right? Right. However, there is a big difference between a hip bump and a lip bump.
3. Coke vs cock – Need I say more?
4. Thigh vs thing – I can’t imagine how embarrassing it would be for a lady to try to pat her companion’s thigh and find she’s patting his thing instead.

I am sure there are many more that will come to mind (or fingers) as time goes on, but these are the ones I can think of at the moment.

My Musical Mantra

In Misty’s intro-blurb about me, she mentioned my inner peace. It’s something I have worked on and something that I do my best to feed into daily. A big part of that is, as this song is titled, living in the moment. I can’t undo my past, I can’t control the future so I work on what I have, right here, right now in this moment and make sure to do my best. I knew when I heard this song that it was ‘my song’. It’s one I listen to every morning to remind me I have today and this moment.

Writing Prompts

I’ve spent a good bit of the morning scouring the internet for ideas on good blog topics as well as prompts for short stories. I’ve found some really good sites that have given me a list of ideas to get started.

I had to stop and laugh at one of the sites that I found, though. It has a button to click that creates a random starting sentence. I challenge any of my amazing writing friends to come up with a short story based on one of these!

• The boring cook crawled into the scorching desert three days ago to uncover the plan.
• The jolly award winning gardener struck the match in the Pentagon after the snowstorm for the electrician.
• The confused stockbroker carved a statue within the playground at noon for the dentist.
• The somber union leader finished the audit in Fort Knox on Friday to win the contest.
• The studious cowboy wrote a poem in the ship three days ago to complete the coverup.
• The suspicious pastor told a joke in an attic three days ago to discover the dark secret.
• The somber gardener finished the audit in the dilapidated zoo yesterday for the dentist.
• The former finger painting master cut the grass near the hidden room about an hour ago to answer the challenge.
• The glamorous bee keeper caught a fish above the prison after the snowstorm to delay the vote.
• The veteran jockey rode the bicycle into the basement at noon to prevent the bloodshed.

Now, it’s obvious that they inserted lists of words to fit each part of the sentence structure and then set it on a random generator, but the results had me cracking up!

See more at The Story Starter.

Funny Bathroom Signs

I have always loved signs that make me laugh. It’s even better when they aren’t intentional, like the time I was driving to Florida and the sign flashed a warning at me to “Caution, Zorkers Ahead!” I wasn’t sure what a Zorker was, but I kept a watch for them, just in case!

I suppose “Men and Women” or even “Chics and Chaps” was too boring for these establishments:

Schindler’s List

I have seen this movie countless times and loved it every time. This was the first time I sat down to read the book and I’m very glad I did. As expected, it included much more detail than could be pressed into the movie, even with as long as it is. While there were variances, characters that were two in the book yet merged into one for the movie, scenes that were split in the book but condensed in the movie, the movie followed very closely the overall outline of the book.

I loved the author’s adherence to facts. Through records and interviews, he was able to rebuild this with more accuracy than I would have ever expected. That he even included notations when he didn’t have an exact record but was going on supposition of what the result of some private conversation was drew me in all the more. Though I, of course, don’t have the ability to go through and verify everything in the book, his admittance when something was a guess brings me to believe that it was written as factually as possible.

I was a bit disappointed that Itzhak Stern was not shown as prominently in the book as he was in the movie. Instead, he seems to have been melded with the man Goldberg who was the actual typist of the List. I was happy to see, though, that Stern along with several other families from the factory were a permanent part of Schindler’s life during the years after the war.

As much as I knew of what was done during the war, the atrocities inflicted on the Jews (and others) by the Germans, one part of this book stood out to me above the rest. It wasn’t surprising to learn that the synagogues were destroyed by the Germans. Not a fact I knew, but it was in keeping with what I was aware of. The graves, though. The graves of the long dead were desecrated as well. That it wasn’t enough to kill the Jews who still lived, that they felt it necessary to go beyond that, is unfathomable to me.

“When level with the Administration Building, the Adler moved onto a prison road paved with Jewish gravestones. The campsite had been till two years before a Jewish cemetery. Commandant Goeth, who claimed to be a poet, had used in the construction of his camp whatever metaphors were to hand. This metaphor of shattered gravestones ran the length of the camp, splitting it in two…”

This was made even more profound to me in a later passage in the book. Stern was giving a tour of the camp to two of Schindler’s “brother industrialists” who were there to record what they were seeing. One held a small camera to collect evidence. They told Stern to pause and tie his shoe whenever there was something in the area he wanted to make sure they saw.

“Yet he took his time with the tying so that they could look down and read the monumental fragments. Here were the gravestones of Bluma Gemeinerowa (1859–1927); of Matylde Liebeskind, deceased at the age of 90 in 1912; of Helena Wachsberg, who died in childbirth in 1911; of Rozia Groder, a thirteen-year-old who had passed on in 1931; of Sofia Rosner and Adolf Gottlieb, who had died in the reign of Franz Josef. Stern wanted them to see that the names of the honorable dead had been made into paving stones.”

One detail about Schindler that was left out of the movie shows again how different he was from the other Germans. While some were busy doing as much damage as they could, he was the exact opposite. He not only saved all those he could, but he established a Jewish cemetery on consecrated ground for those who arrived dead from the Goleszow camp along with any who passed away in his factory from old age or illness. Why these things stood out for me so much even with all the rest, I can only guess. Repeated exposure to the stories of the death chambers, the cruelty, maybe that has desensitized me a bit. I would hope not and they can still bring a tear, but these two new details tugged at my heart more than anything else in the books but one.

In the movie, the only spot of color is the little girl in red. She is seen walking along in one scene, then very shortly presented as a corpse atop a wheelbarrow of other dead bodies. In the book, however, that little girl seems to have survived, somehow mingling and hiding in plain sight until later taken in by a family and hidden. I don’t know the little girl’s eventual fate, but it was a relief to me not to read about her as another death among many.