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.
I am always acting, though I never have. Sometimes I feel that I’m waiting in the wings for lines, so I know what a polite woman says, or a college graduate who has learned a few things, a good respectful daughter. The right script doesn’t always come, although I talk a lot, so improve is beginning to feel natural. Sometimes I wish a writer would give me a silver tongue and some brilliant monologues where I understand everything. For right now, I’m backstage, smelling excited sweat and waiting for a cue.
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!!!!!!!!!!
Barb's unstuck! Pass it on!
(Also? YAY!)
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.
Since dialogue breaks a line every time there's a new speaker, to me it seems pretty obvious that it's the second speaker.
