Medieval French also has fewer people who can call you out on it

Yeah, and the one person out there with a bug up her ass managed to to do that after FFoSM came out - by writing to my editor, not me.

Never mind that of the three people who proofed and double-proofed it for me, two are native French speakers (one from France, one from Switzerland on the Swiss side of the Haute Savoy), and one (my sister) is a PhD in French, with a medieval speciality.

Ha. This is why I can never write anything, ever, because I'm too lazy to do enough research that would satisfy even the most casual Buffista, let alone the wild worlds of pedantic critics. Or I can write only in entirely built worlds.

But Liese, even entirely-built worlds have to have interior, structural and linguistic consistency.

This chick who wrote to Ruth Cavin - she also complained daintily because I hadn't written huge sections of it in authentic Middle English. She was delightfully helpful, including a livelink to "an academic site that will provide you with the grammatical structure you will need in future books."

She signed it with "PhD" in bold. I mentally translated that to "Please-hangyourself-Darling."

Right. Force my readers - most of whom, gasp shock horror, are actually reading the book because they want to see what HAPPENS in the course of the story - to stop in mid-plot, hunt up a Chaucerian English lexicon, and translate every word I've written. Drop a boat anchor in the middle of the story.

Oh, yeah, honey. My editor's allllllll over that. We'll get on it right away.

I had a certain amount of enjoyment in crafting the response my editor talked me out of sending, which finished up with polite surprise that she had voiced her concerns to my editor, rather than to the author, which, last time I looked, was the appropriate and generally accepted procedure in academia.

Dumbass.

Deb, this might help... The Hip Hoptionary.

One of my favorite reference books when I worked at the music library.

Heh. This is true.

But Liese, even entirely-built worlds have to have interior, structural and linguistic consistency.

I was going to pipe up and say that at least current speakers of my entirely-built language wouldn't pop up to complain about it. But then I thought about Klingon and all the Elvish-speaking folks and decided that no, you're right.

What would people think about a "Remainder" drabble challenge? Or maybe I'm the only freak who starts and can't finish? If that's true, maybe those people can write about "remains".

My only contribution to the slang issue is to suggest you sit and watch (or rewatch) Brown Sugar.

Possibly this is not a helpful suggestion, but it's a v. watchable romcom about a HipHop producer and a HipHop-loving journalist who are BFF and who fall in love. As I've only seen it from the middle onwards, I'm not sure how much of their friendship is charted. The film was made around 2002, iirc.

Plus, Taye Diggs is insanely beautiful. So that's good.

Look what ended up in my Gold Box on Amazon today:

The Famous Flower of Serving Men
Books ~ Deborah Grabien

Of course, I already own it.

That's so excellent! (And so do I.)

The publisher I've been working with rejected it. But he is willing to work with me on a re-write and let me resubmit. I think the opportunity to rewrite with some real editorial guidance is too good to pass up.