Writing 101: Forums, What Are They Good For?

Reading writer forums was one of my New Year's resolutions, and for a few months I tried to stick with it. I added four new groups to my reader, and promptly hated my decision. After I started reading the forums, I fell even further behind on my review commitments and spent far too much time swearing at authors who will never know I scorned them. But the other day, I finally figured out a reason to really like reading the forums. I now know why this isn't the biggest possible waste of my time, or yours.

What I've Learned

I've made no secret of my forums frustration. I think would-be authors ask too many questions when they ought to be researching. I see the same questions over and over again. I groan and complain and roll my eyes, but I also know (now) that forums do serve a purpose. 

Writing 101 Redux: Single or Double Spaces?

Do you type two spaces after a period, or just one? It's a subject of some debate among the writing community and editors of all kinds. If you want to know where I stand on the issue (and maybe you can already tell), you have to journey with me back to 2012 and the beginnings of the blog. 

For Throwback Thursday, we're going to re-visit double-spacing in books...and why I have such a strong opinion about it.

Lust and Love with 'Song of the Sea'

 "The YA fantasy genre needs more books of this kind."

"The story of Brenna‘s search for her mother is inspiring and relatable.The writing is fresh and crisp. As a reader, I just fell in love with the female protagonist."

My newest book, "Song of the Sea," has been reviewed at Booklust. Go take a look at it before you buy the book at Amazon!

Writing 101: The FANBOYS Grammar Hack

I'd like to tell you about a grammar hack, For all writers can benefit from using tricks, And I like to talk about grammar. I'm not an expert, Nor am I a teacher, But I don't want to make mistakes. It's either make them, Or learn how to use grammar. Anyone can learn this, Yet many still get it wrong. Don't be one of them. It's time for you to learn how to use the FANBOYS, So you can always get it right.

Let's Hear it for the Boys

FANBOYS are a group of coordinating conjunctions. They're special because they all follow the same grammar rule. Do you know what it is? Read the first paragraph again to see if you can figure it out. 

Writing 101: Adjectives and Commas

One of the first lessons you learn in school is to put a comma between your adjectives, just like I'm doing when I say I'm truly, madly, deeply in love with commas. I'm lying, but at least I'm grammatically correct. But here's the problem: that lesson is wrong. You don't always put a comma between your adjectives. You only put them between coordinate adjectives. With cumulitive adjectives, you don't. Yes, I'm about to explain what that means. 

Little Brown Ball

You should always put commas between coordinate adjectives, which are descriptive words that are similar to each other. For example, if the painting is black, brown, blue and green, those adjectives coordinate because they're all colors. They all go together and fit in the same group. There is a simple way to test if adjectives are coordinating or not.

Writing 101: Decades Can't Be Possessive (Or, Why 1960's Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong)

In all but the rarest of circumstances, the rules of grammar don't change. They stay the same all the time, for every word. This is why its so very confusing when people make decades possessive. If you write 1970's or 60's anywhere, for any reason, you are wrong. And I'm here today to tell you how to be right.

Apostrophe S

I cant seem to stress it enough: apostrophe s is there to show possession. This is Jade's blog. I'm using Blogspot's software.

Because the blog belongs to Jade, it's Jade's. The apostrophe s shows possession. And a decade can't possess something, can it?

Song of the Sea: Look Inside

I always knew my mother was unhappy. I just didn’t know why.

I don’t really know when I realized she wasn’t happy. When I look back at my childhood, all I can remember of her is long, black hair blowing in the wind as she stood on the deck of our house. She spent most of her time staring at the ocean with a sad expression on her face. The ocean was all around us, and it was the center of our world. It surrounded the tiny island where we lived (Matinicus, Maine. Population: 54), forcing us to contend with the water if we wanted to visit the mainland. It was the source of all our income, and it has always felt like my best friend. It just didn’t occur to me, back then, that my mother was looking at it differently.

Our house sat on a high, rocky bluff that overlooked the narrow strip of beach where our boathouse stood. Every day, my dad took the boat out on the water. He was a fisherman, and that’s actually how he and my mother met. She was in a terrible boating accident and very nearly drowned. My father came bouncing along the waves in his Boston Whaler and scooped her right out of a blow-up life raft.

It was such a romantic story, but the drama of almost drowning severely affected my mother. Since that day, she never went on a boat or in the water again. I often wondered if she was remembering her accident, those times I caught her staring at the gray waves of the North Atlantic Ocean.

I, too, was fascinated by the ocean, always had been. I think I could swim before I could walk. My dad once told me more than seventy percent of the Earth is the oceans. They connect everything to everything else. They link the continents, rivers, all the other oceans. And here’s the interesting part: most of the ocean floor is still undiscovered, unmapped. Unexplored. Scientists guess at all the different life forms which might exist in the ocean—but they don’t really know.

It is a liquid land filled with secrets and mysteries, and I wanted to discover them all. Looking back, maybe I was always interested in the water because I wanted to know why my mother found it so fascinating. Maybe I should have stayed on that small strip of beach.

But I didn’t. I went on a journey to find my mother…and somewhere along the way, I found myself instead. 

Get it at Amazon, Smashwords or Kobo.

Writing 101: Of Course, Comma

Commas are so confusing, I and just about every author who blogs about writing has tried to sort them out. I've written multiple posts about how to use commas, and when, and why not. But sometimes, you have to forget about all those rules. Some phrases are so special, they come with their own personal comma rules. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it... 

Of Course You Need a Comma There

I get hung up on little punctuation rules all the time. Of course, there's a lot of them to remember. But I found myself asking, several times, whether or not I was required to use a comma every time I use the phrase of course. It's confusing, because the phrase can be used in a multitude of ways.