Writing Advice

Qualifications: 20+ years writing experience, both in various fandoms and professionally. Published out of an actual publishing house that is not a self-publishing site. So what's that mean? Absolutely jack shit, in my opinion. You don't need to be a writer, a published author or have a degree in English to know good grammar, or lack of it, or to give good advice. But there's always someone out there who wants to take offense and break Ebert's Law. I just like to head off the wankers at the pass.

General writing advice:

There is no excuse for bad grammar. Seriously. In this day and age of the internet, there's no excuse for posting something that commits massive crimes against the English language (or any other language, for that matter).

• You don't have a spell check program? Well, you obviously have access to the internet since you're posting; do a Google search for online spell check programs.
• You're not a native English speaker (or native speaker of other languages)? It's a big, wide internet and there are people willing to help you out with that. There's even a community on LiveJournal specifically for that.
• You're all excited about your story and you're in a hurry to share it? Good for you. Now take a deep breath, relax, and realize that the continuation of the universe doesn't depend on you posting your story this very second. Go spell check it and give it a good read through; let it sit for a couple days and do another read through, then consider handing it over to a beta/proofreader for an unbiased read through.
• You know you have problems with homonyms/punctuation/etc.? Then don't post the story until you've had someone else look it over for you.

The bottom line is, if you don't care enough to present your story in as polished a manner as possible, then why should anyone else care enough to read it?

Grammar Advice

The Apostrophe: This is used to

1. make a word into a contraction ("should not" becomes "shouldn't"),
2. form a possessive with a noun ("The book is Mary's." "Those are the building's steps."),
3. to form internal quotation marks, quotes within quotes ("He told me to 'hang on to her and stay close,' but I didn't.").

Apostrophes are never ever used to form plurals. Ever! To make a plural, you rarely need to do anything but slap an "S" on the end of a word. There are exceptions to that, of course (usually borrowed French words), but none of those will ever require an apostrophe.

"Yeah" vs. "Yea": Yes, there is a difference between the two. "Yea" rhymes with "nay" and "way" and is an archaic way of verbalizing formal agreement, now only used, for the most part, when taking verbal votes in a formal (mostly govermental) setting. Unless your characters are casting a vote or something else official like that, "Yeah" is likely the word you're looking for.

Know your female anatomy! Many stories have Sesshoumaru being Kagome's first sexual partner; if there's one thing that pisses me off, it's when the author doesn't know anatomy. Especially when the author is female and doesn't know female anatomy.

This will probably come as a shock to those who rely on romance novels as anatomy guides but the hymen/maidenhead/whatever you want to call it, is not located three inches up inside a woman; it's right there at the very front. In fact, if she's an active person she might not have one at all. Make that pretty darn likely if she uses tampons and/or likes to "get in touch with herself" on occasion. Some women are even born without them, and some still have them even after sex; it's no guarantee of virginity. Check this article for more details: Article.

More to come as they occur to me.