Congrats, Dana and Sox! Our list of published Buffistas is growing apace.

Amazon is rife with fake authors selling e-books ripped word-for-word from stories posted on sites like Literotica, plus any number of published sources [link]

Writing a book is hard. All those torturous hours an author has to spend creating, crafting, culling until nonsensical words are transformed into engaging prose. It's a whole lot easier to copy and paste someone else's work, slap your name on top, and wait for the money to roll in. This creates a strong economic incentive, with fake authors--Sharazade thinks it's possible they are organized gangs based in Asia--earning 70% royalty rates on every sale, earning far more than a spammer could with click fraud.

(The author doesn't seem to understand that SOPA can block legitimate sites for the thinnest of reasons, but is unlikely to affect organized plagiarism gangs in Asia.)

Grammar question.

I have a sentence like so.

“I think,” the deep-voiced man paused as if considering, “that one will do nicely”

My overriding thought is that this is a parenthetical expression offset by commas. However, my dialog punctuating thought is that you can't pause speech so I should have full stops. My third thought is that I should use ("I think..." the deep-voiced etc.) but in that case maybe it should be ("I think... that one will do nicely.") since the pause is there in punctuation.

Any opinions?

The way it's structured, the action would be set off from the speech with em dashes. Or you could indicate the pause with the ellipses, like you said.

Em dashes are fine if you want to use them; it's in the Chicago Manual of Style and everything. Like so:

“I think”--the deep-voiced man paused as if considering--“that one will do nicely.”

I like your original method, Gud. I know I've used it. I used to go with the dashes, but they're visually very abrupt, and I think it interferes with the musing quality of the statement.

You can always punctuate anything however you'd like. But a copy editor will change it.

Thanks, all.

My story is on the Daily Science Fiction website today.

Yay DANA!

It's awesome! And creepy! And great!

Ooh, that is creepy.