Done and done!

Formal proposal including marketing ideas that make me sound like a one-woman professional firm are all off to agent.

Gah.

And thanks for the beta, deb. Good catches.

Hell, I suck at marketing. I just beg my rowdy friends and well-connected daughter for help.

Although, once the Kinkaid Chronicles go to press, I'm going to have to swallow very hard and ping a few people I've been hiding from for thirty years.

Gah.

Allyson, they were pretty minor - mostly structure tweaks.

Having been a dutiful woman and worked on the "the cheque's in the post and you have a deadline, bitch!" book all afternoon, I've been writing the long-form synopsis for the second Kinkaid book all evening. That's While My Guitar Gently Weeps. I forget how spoiled I've been by having an editor who knows what I can do, so she doesn't want or need the standard stuff. The Kinkaid books are not going to be allowed near Minotaur, and that means I have to do the standard longer form synopses.

Luckily, I actually like doing the damned things. But I'm cross and cranky because I'm not used to being expected to do them.

Ah, crap. The discussion drifted away from the issues related to drafting dialog that might match up with reader's expectations, right when I was hoping for a solution.

I'd try to rely on things like "go get me a couple cans of tuna from down cellar" or "don't touch them boxes neither" to get across the local flavor

blinks

Wow. Looks just like generic Northern UK English.

Bloody loved that, Erika. Gorgeous.

Looks just like generic Northern UK English.

It's funny how things like that line up. I've seen examples of Northern Irish dialect that look like Pittsburghese to me. There are probably similar parallels elsewhere as well.

Weird synchronicity: so I'm still working on this original novel (albeit with much less speed than most of your good selves) and one of my main characters is about to go into a bar. The bar doesn't exist, but I've located it on Frith Street, in Soho, a few shops along from Jimmy's Greek Taverna; it's one of those places, inasmuchas people won't notice it unless they know it's there. (My book being all magical, and stuff, and this bar having, over the course of the past 24 hours, gradually become a sort of Callahan's Crazy Crosstime Salloon/Willy's Bar/Caritas kind of place, in my head.)

On a whim, and remembering that there was a site that did this, I went to check out what's really there.

As you'll discover, Bar Humbug, ladies and gentlemen, is located between the Offices of the Chinese chambers of commerce, and Little Italy.

Unfortunately it doesn't show up in photographs, and if you go to Soho you'll probably walk right past it without noticing it consciously, because of the nature of the glamour that's been cast on it. But it's there.

nods.

(...I think I may have to work in a visit to Garlic and Shots too. It being a vampire novel.)

Thanks, Fay, I imagine you know whereof I speak, and in that instance I'm sorry about that...I hope I've not been all "The guy I love likes yuppiefied Danish Modern carrots from somebody else's garden"...although losing out to somebody with less of a "jobbette" might have helped my ego a bit, if not my heart. I'm working it out, but it's on my mind a lot.

"Down cellar" is something I've heard out of my French-Maine stepmother. That, and "close the light" instead of "turn off the light". I think the use of "neither" as a reinforcing word is not particularly northeasterly, because it shows up in hill-country southern literature from way back.

I've recently discovered that the representation of dialect in American fiction is really, really old (i.e., colonial times), and that its creativity sometimes beggars readability. Actually, one of my favorite examples is a southernism, so apologies in advance to Susan.

I read several books (including To Kill a Mockingbird) about the South, in which characters said this strange word, "oncet." From context, I eventually figured out that it meant "once", and that the T was appended as a dialect sound, but, like, you read O-N-C-E-T and think "onset". Or, I do.

Then I read Huckleberry Finn, in which Twain spells the same word "wunst".

THAT I can wrap my brain around! The spelling represents the sound accurately. Unfortunately, if you don't already know about the tradition of adding a final T to "once", "wunst" gives no clues as to what it actually means.

Although history bears out generations of the excessive use of apostrophes in dialect spelling, I can faithfully report that it is unbelieveably annoying no matter when you use it.

I eventually figured out that it meant "once", and that the T was appended as a dialect sound, but, like, you read O-N-C-E-T and think "onset". Or, I do.

Yup. For the longest time as a kid, I just thought it was "onset" misspelled. Even though that didn't make sense in context.

I've seen examples of Northern Irish dialect that look like Pittsburghese to me.

I'm a Southwestern Pennsylvania native, and when I left that region I was often asked if I was from England. Most of my ancestors are from Devon and southern England, so I don't know if many Northern Englanders ended up in Western Pennsylvania.

I'm very familiar with "neither" as a reinforcer, especially when reinforcing something negative.