But it’s nice to know that my latest blog posts are winging their way through the blogosphere and through twitter. Whether via praise or critique – for the latter, don’t tell me!

Ah well. My skin may be getting slightly wrinklier, so there’s hope yet that it is thickening also.

Huh! This post wasn’t actually about me afterall. It was an excuse to put up an Inkygirl Cartoon. For those who don’t know her, Inkygirl (Debbie Ridpath Ohi) has for some time now made her cartoons open for publication elsewhere under a certain creative commons license.

I’ve met Inkygirl on several occasions in-world of Second Life. She attends the same writing meet that I do sometimes, and I also hang around her excellent community writing center she has set up. Inkygirls blog is also one I subscribe to, as a must read for writers. And then, of course, there’s her cartoons.

LinkMe : Cartoons by Inkygirl. Read her blog here.

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On re-reading these, I stand guilty of constantly breaking many of them.

1. Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
2. Don’t use no double negatives.
3. Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn’t.
4. Reserve the apostrophe for it’s proper use and omit it when its not needed.
5. Do not put statements in the negative form.
6. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
7. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
8. No sentence fragments.
9. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
10. Avoid commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
11. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
12. A writer must not shift your point of view.
13. Eschew dialect, irregardless.
14. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
15. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!!
16. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
17. Hyphenate between sy-llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.
18. Write all adverbial forms correct.
19. Don’t use contractions in formal writing as they aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used.
20. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
21. It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.
22. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
23. Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
24. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.
25. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
26. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
27. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
28. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
29. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
30. Don’t string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
31. Always pick on the correct idiom.
32. “Avoid overuse of ‘quotation “marks.”‘”
33. The adverb always follows the verb.
34. Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague; seek viable alternatives as they are old hat anyway.
35. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
36. Be More or Less Specific
37. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
38. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
39. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
40. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
41. The passive voice is to be ignored.
42. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
43. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
44. Understatement is absolutely the best way to put forward earth-shaking ideas.
45. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary, it’s highly superflous.
46. One should NEVER generalize.
47. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
48. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
49. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
50. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
51. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
52. DO NOT use all caps or underlines to emphasize.
53. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations, tell me what you know.”
54. Who needs rhetorical questions?
55. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
56. Be careful to use the rite homonym.
57. Break the rules (added for sanity).

Note: the above rules are suggested as grammatical fun for writers, and many have been republished all over the web, although I haven’t seen all 56 together like this before. And I added the last.

At least eighteen of these have been contributed to William Safire, who wrote a Sunday column, “On Language” for the New York Times, and in November of 1979 published ‘The Fumblerules of Grammar’ in this column. This full column and its history has been discussed on Donna Richoux’s 2002 article on alt-usage-english.org.

Want Some More Rules for Writers?

LinkMe:

• The above grammar rules should not be confused with the ten rules nominated by Elmore Leonard, famously called “The Rules” which remain published on the New York Times website.
• Erica Jong has published 20 Rules for Writers – which includes “No. 15 – Let Sex (The Body, the physical world) in!”
• Heinlein’s Rules, augmented by one more – Robert A. Heinlein famously created five rules for speculative fiction writers, documented here, including a sixth one by Robert J. Sawyer.
• Anne Wayman’s The Top Ten Rules for Writers
• Gene Wolfe’s five rules for writers.
• George Orwell’s six rules for writers, with a film interpretation of these by Norman Hollyn.

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I blame this upbringing in its entirety for the predicament I now face. As an ecological warrior, I’ve  drawn  a line on printing out my 300 page manuscript. Such a line that I’ve now not done it for a week.

This would be funny if it weren’t such a necessity. Everyone I read or consult with tells me that you must revise your first draft in a printed format, a proper printout. NOT on the computer.

But I sit here, looking at my little inkjet printer (£35 each for a new set of consumerable inks) and my A4 ream of off-white paper (£5.95) and contemplate the hours of feeding through one blank page by one blank page (4 hours conservatively = £2 in power) and I can’t do it.

I’m the person who was recycling all her bottles, plastics, paper, newsprint, magazines, and cardboard packaging into council-supplied bins at the age of fifteen. I’m the person who has supported Greenpeace and other environmental charities, donated to save African and Indian children from environmental plagues, and I’m the person who has sponsored goats and camels and trees to populate rainforests (not the goats, the trees).

I’m not the person to print off 300 draft pages, only to scribble all over them, then dump them into a bin, only to repeat the process all over again. I do have recycling bins, mind you. And all our papers go into one of them – but should my novel be treated like that? Even in draft revision form? Or even if I got to that point of having mustered up the environmental courage to print out all those wasteful pages, would I then need to turn to powering up a shredder and shredding my hard-won papers? And the council around these parts doesn’t ‘do’ shredded paper, so it would have to go into the general dustbin, to go off and create more landfill.

No, my little voice tells me I’m not that kind of person, better to not do it at all. (It’s wrong, of course, but…)

I used to be that kind of person. Back in my corporate days, I used to spend a little private time, printing off personal documents – ebooks, articles, coursework, research – spitting it out onto the department’s laser printer, then rushing to pick up my copies and add more paper into the trays before anyone found me using the corporate stationery for personal use.

Then, it didn’t worry me. Because everyone was doing it, and because it was just much easier to read things in real-life, rather than on the computer monitor which, let’s face it – we all sat in front of for eight solid hours in our working day. Getting up and going to the printer was as much an excuse to stretch as anything. Plus it was good for our ergonomical health – the posture police told us so. All these reasonings (and many other excuses) counter-acted against the environmental implications of using the corporate laser printers like that.

Now, when faced with the evidence of my own environmental impact – and the cost, let’s be honest – and I find myself unable to do it any longer. I can’t sit there, and print off 300 plus pages of my novel. It’s making me hurt to think of that necessity, a similar hurt to that found when contemplating the task of burning 500 gigabytes of data to a box full of writable DVDs or CD-Roms – one by one, slowly…painfully…

Backing up, and printing out – both seem ecologically wasteful, incredibly time-consuming,  but necessary tasks. And ones this eco warrior is finding difficult to accomplish. Who would have known that the planet’s ecology would have seen me find a new way to procrastinate my way out of doing a writing task?

Do you have any inhibitions about printing out your own manuscripts, as I do? Please feel free to share any tips on how I should be revising that novel draft.

Addendum [Later]: I just realised there’s something else here that’s making me reserved about printing that manuscript out – and it’s not to do with the true problem that I don’t have enough ink as yet – it’s to do with making the whole thing real. Whilst that novel sits on my laptop, it’s still virtual. Printed out, well – I have proper evidence of either a writing success or possible failure – but either way, it becomes much tangible. With that understanding of the background fear, I can work through it a little easier.

Still need that ink, though.

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‘You don’t do tap dancing,’ I pointed out hopefully.

‘YOU DON’T DO TAP DANCING!’ I shouted again, to be heard over the din.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Mummy’s writing now…’ I said, ‘Look, I’ve got my writing face on…’

‘Oh,’ daughter said, ‘I thought that you were just angry at something’

Sigh.

‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘Being creative does make me look angry sometimes, doesn’t it? It’s hard work creating something.’

‘Yes,’ daughter said, ‘That’s why you need to tap dance, I think.’

She started again, then in the middle of a tricky manouvre paused and turned, ‘Plus it keeps the dog awake, too.’

She’s right, of course. In the middle of my NaNoWriMo effort, I could do well to remember to tap dance occasionally.

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The post on a blog was picked up by a lovely woman who runs a writing group. She’d taken the final paragraph of my post and wanted to use it in her writing group. I said, “Of course” but was a little worried that it might be used as an example of how-not-to-write because I admit to myself that I am a long-winded blogger normally.

Well, perhaps my own writing hasn’t caught on, but the concept I played around with has. Fat Free Writing – there’s a Fort Smith course being put on called Fat Free Writing, led by Micki Voelkel.

This is all pure coincidence, unfortunately, and not linked in any way – it’s a noticable example of wordly coincidences, and similar thinking. Although the Fort Smith course deals with fat free meaning cut down writing for busy people, my own interpretation was more towards the lack of expense in simply writing. Both are extremely important in this era of commuter societies, longer working hour expectations, and the economic recession which is hitting us all.

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