he he ... have you seen Kerfuffle Bunny on that?
The Great Write Way, Act Three: Where's the gun?
A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.
Here are two drabbles:
I’ve always been torn. Torn between the world of office respectability and the loopy gaiety of the hippies cavorting in Golden Gate Park I watched on TV when I was a kid. Even in my most grade-grubbing days< I knew that the other woman was there, the that wanted to paint her face, love people, and watch the pretty world go by. Even as I wanted to be a famous writer by twenty-five in some gleaming office negotiating film rights.(I don’t know how I thought I could do both.) II’m not sure what I’ve really done, since I am neither.
- **
AAAAAAAYYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!
A new full chapter!!
3K+ words!
And best of all?
Proposal is DONE!
(Well, after reading and revising and making sure it doesn't suck big hairy donkey balls.)
I have a PROPOSAL!!
AAAAAYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!
Woo hoo, Barb!
Barb's unstuck! Pass it on!
(Also? YAY!)
Woohoo, Barb!
Yay, Barb!! That's got to feel pretty darn good!
Thank you, thank you, thank you, guys and sail, I'll let you know after I go back and read it. Probably tomorrow. I'm too a'skeered to, right now. *g*
The play challenge is now closed.
The new challenge is shelf space.
One of my CPs keeps rapping my wrists over a pronoun issue that I don't think is a real issue. (She's one of the most grammatically precise people I've ever met.)
According to the CP, a pronoun must ALWAYS refer to the last person of that gender named in the text. E.g., I had the following snippet of dialogue in the excerpt I sent for critique this week:
Wilcox snorted. “Better you than me, sir.”
“Corporal,” he chided mildly, “you must show respect for him as an officer.”
Leaving aside whether this is well-written or not (it's rough draft, and one of the things I always do on rewrite is make my dialogue attribution a bit more subtle and artful), in my mind it's sufficiently clear that the speaker in the second paragraph is not Wilcox, but someone who's having a conversation with him. And since there are only two people in the scene, I think the pronoun stands alone. But my CP disagrees and says I really need the second character's name. I can see her point, technically, but stylistically something seems awkward about naming characters over and over again. In a scene with two men or two women interacting, I feel like I have to use their names so much just for clarity. So when I can use a pronoun without confusing the reader, I feel like I should do so even when it's technically incorrect.
Thoughts? This is an ongoing issue, and I'm starting to get snarly when I open her critiques and see all those pronouns replaced with names.