Jade Varden Official Blog

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.

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?

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 ...

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. 

After you publish a book, you've got to start immediately thinking about publishing your next book. You've got to keep publishing, even though you have to worry about promoting and editing and making trailers and maintaining you day job, too. When it comes to being an indie, how important is speed?  How Fast Can You Publish? Some of the most successful self-published authors don't just put books out there. They put a lot of books out there very quickly. They make money by constantly offering something new to their fan bases. They make money with speed. What if you can't keep up? 

If you're not using keywords with your social media, you're missing out on some of your audience. Start expanding your Twitter reach by choosing the right words.  The Right Words Use keywords to find your target audience on Twitter . Social media is a great tool for targeting the right readers, but only if you know how to use it. You can't wait for your readers to come to you, because how do they know you exist? You've got to seek them out. And like any writer, you should use the most powerful tool at your disposal: words. 

When you're  writing, how often do you think about the reader? If you don't  know who you're  writing to, you're  not writing at your best. Playing to the Audience Have you ever been on a stage? If you perform for a crowd, you'll be told to play to the very back of the room. This way, the entire audience will feel included on your performance. Writing is sort of like that, too.

It's January 1, and we all know what that means: I've got to write a New Year's-themed blog post. The year flew by. But weirdly, so many things happened that it also feels like it was much more than just one year. So this year, I'm writing my annual blog post about how I spent the year.  Two Thousand and Fourteen...Million Words The year 2014 started for me much as 2013 did. I'd just published a new book, Hope's Rebellion , and I started blogging all the writing tips I'd learned through the year. Then came July, and a ton of changes.