Looking For Wallets

They’re Looking For Their Wallets Over There.

Here’s another batch of homonyms: they’re, their, and there. With three of them to choose from, it’s easy to grab hold of the wrong one. So first, let’s take a look at what each of them means.

They’re – This is a contraction, and it always means ‘They are’ (or occasionally, ‘They were’). If you have a sentence with ‘they’re’ in it and substituting ‘they are’ makes the sentence into garbage, it isn’t the right word for that sentence.

Their – This word means ‘belongs to them’.

There – This word indicates a location that is not here; an area that is some distance away.

Which of the following sentences is correct?

1.     1. They’re looking for a lost dog.

2.    2.  Their looking for a lost dog.

3.     3. There looking for a lost dog.

Answer: #1 is correct, because they are looking for a lost dog. In #2, if you try to substitute ‘belongs to them’ looking for a lost dog, it doesn’t really make sense. It is possible the lost dog belongs to the searching party, but we don’t know that for sure. And in #3, trying to substitute ‘an area that is some distance away’ looking for a lost dog also doesn’t make any sense. How can an inanimate area look for anything?

Which of the following sentences is correct?

1.    1.  They’re lost dog came home.

2.     2. Their lost dog came home.

3.     3. There lost dog came home.

Answer: #2 is correct, because the lost dog ‘belongs to them’. In #1, ‘they are’ lost dog came home makes no sense. And in #3, ‘an area some distance away’ lost dog came home also makes no sense. How can a distant area describe a lost dog?

Which of the following sentences is correct?

1.    1.  I found my wallet over there.

2.    2.  I found my wallet over their.

3.   3.   I found my wallet over they’re.

Answer: #1 is correct because the wallet was found in a different location. #2 makes no sense, because the wallet doesn’t belong to ‘them’, it belongs to the speaker. #3 also makes no sense, because it is saying, I found my wallet over ‘they are’.

Trying to remember the meanings of these words will help you figure out which one to use where. To me, ‘they’re’ is the easiest one to remember, because it always means ‘they are’.

‘There’ has the word ‘here’ within it, and they are both locations or areas. But while ‘here’ means ‘where I am’, ‘there’ means ‘a spot at some distance’.

Which leaves the word ‘their’, and I don’t have any little tricks for remembering what it means. But if you need to, look it up in a dictionary when you come across it. I don’t think it will take you long to memorize what it means.

 

 

Taking Next Week Off

Rather than just disappear from my blog for a week or two, I thought I should let you know that I will not be here for at least 1 week. Maybe 2. It depends on how things go.

Hubby has surgery scheduled for April 15, and next week’s blog would be due on 4/11. As the date for his surgery approaches, my nerves are getting strung a little tighter and tighter. No need in loading myself down with extra chores at a time when I might be finding it difficult to focus on things like that.

The following week, 4/18, will be just a few days after surgery. He will be in a sling for 5 weeks, is my understanding. I remember when my arm was broken last year, and I was in a sling for several weeks. I started out pretty helpless for the first few weeks, unable to do much of anything for myself. I even needed help cutting up my food at meals. I don’t know how much help he will need throughout the day, and I don’t want to over-commit myself.

Hubby’s surgery involves getting a small defibrillator installed in his chest to keep his heart beating regularly. Kind of like a pacemaker, only different. Sorry, but that’s the way it was explained to us.

Anyway, this looks to be the first step in his getting healthier after 1.5 years of various illnesses. Wish us luck!

New Stuff to Learn

When I was thinking about retirement, I took to heart the adage that one should never give up learning new things. It went hand in hand with the realization that the science I knew was too far out of date for me to attempt to write science fiction. So I started reading science magazines to try to learn Where Science Was At Now, and wrote in other genres in the meantime.

Shortly after I retired, I started publishing, and that required I learn things like editing, formatting a manuscript into a book, and things like that. (And Marketing, which is a never-ending challenge.)

Recently, I signed up for a one-on-one online class. I didn’t think about it at the time, but ideally, this class would require a camera and a microphone attached to my computer. My computer had neither. I tried to make it work by using my cell phone to call in to the classroom, but the url was long and complicated, and my fat little fingers kept hitting the wrong keys. After half an hour of our hour-long time slot, I suggested we reschedule for the following week, and promised I would have a microphone by then. I couldn’t imagine them being very expensive.

When I mentioned to Hubby that I needed to drive to Best Buy for a microphone (about 15 miles in each direction), he said we had a couple mics he wasn’t using, he’d dig one out for me. Later that evening, I found a giant box on my desk. Inside was a huge Snowball microphone.

Procrastination is a funny bird, but it does tend to light a fire under you when a deadline is looming. My next ‘class’ was scheduled for today. Yesterday morning, I decided I’d better get a move on with getting a microphone set up. I had found a headset with attached mic a few days ago, so I decided to try that one first. But first, I needed software that would record audio files.

Both my youngest son and my hubby suggested I download Audacity because it was ‘fairly easy’ to learn to use it. So I downloaded it AND set it up on my computer, all by myself! Okay, the computer did most of the work, I just hit a button here and there. But I basked in the glory of having done that much.

After much studying of the Quick Guide and a couple of tutorials, I finally figured out how to make a test recording and then listen to it. I was surprised at how tiny the squiggles were on my test recording, and when I listened to it, I could hardly hear anything. So more studying and more testing, and I finally figured out how to up the volume. Success! And a good thing, too, because it was time to make supper.

As we were watching tv after supper, it dawned on me that I had made the volume changes in Audacity, which I would not be using during my class. Obviously, I needed to find some way to adjust the volume on my computer. To make a long story short (I know, too late), I found a couple of places in Settings to test the microphone. If anything, the output may be a little too loud. Maybe I’ll have to whisper during my class.

Anyway, I learned some new stuff. Before this, I had some nebulous thoughts on how I could use audio files. Now that I’ve got a little bit of knowledge on how to make them, those thoughts are already blossoming into full-fledged plans.

Wish me luck!

Advice For Writers

Writers are given lots of advice. Sometimes the advice is good, sometimes it’s not. And sometimes it can only be described as, ‘well-intentioned’.

The first piece of advice I ever got when I was first trying to spread my wings was that I should write every day. I admired my cousin Roy a great deal, and I really thought his writing style was great. But I never could manage to write the thousand words a day that he kept advising me to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have to labor long and hard to get a thousand words written. Most days the words just flowed out of my pen and onto my tablet, and I might get 2 or 3 thousand words written in a day. But then something would happen. A bout of flu kept me down for a few days. I somehow wound up with a multitude of chores to do one weekend, or a big amount of homework to get done. Possibly the family decided to drive up into the mountains on Saturday. I was afraid of heights, so I was allowed to take books to read, but not books to write. Of course, my notebooks never stayed in good shape long enough to finish them, and I certainly didn’t want to lose any pages, so I didn’t think that was a big problem. Except I never seemed to get my thousand words written that day. I had failed!

But in hindsight, I had bigger problems than that. I would start a story and work on it for a few dozens or even hundreds of pages. Then I would lose interest in that story, hide it in a drawer, and start a new one. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I actually finished a few stories. And shortly after that, it occurred to me that SOMEbody needed to go through those stories and edit them. I started working with other authors to get some critical feedback.

Eventually, I arrived at the point where I could retire, and I did, anticipating that I would take the 8 hours a day I had spent working and use them to work on my writing. Somehow, that hasn’t happened. I am at my computer daily, working for at least 8 hours, but I am not necessarily working on a story for 1000 words. I have too many other things to do. I am head of a small press, and I am editor, layout person and publisher for my husband. Ditto with my own writing, and editing is much tougher when it’s your own work.

So if you ever see me at a convention, conference, or transportation hub, and I’m pounding away on a laptop, it’s only me, trying to get 1000 words written that day.

Depressing News

I don’t spend a lot of time on facebook or twitter anymore. I find it too depressing. Every day or two, it seems like a friend has lost a family member or a pet to death. Two other friends are facing a medical diagnosis that means a long haul to get the illness taken care of.

It was bad enough when it happened to my friends. It’s even worse when it happens to my own family. John has been ill since mid-November of 2022. We are waiting impatiently for the date when he can get his first operation, which we hope will make it possible for him to get more surgeries done, and he can finally work his way towards health.

And now I find myself stumbling over my own health issues. Some of you may know I had surgery on Mar 1. What I didn’t know until today was that they found ‘scar tissue’ when they did that surgery, and so they biopsied it. I was told today that the biopsy came back negative for cancer. Big sigh of relief. But that scar tissue, located where it is, could cause problems in the future, so I’m being referred to another doctor to figure out what can be done with it.

Yesterday, I saw yet another doctor, and she noticed something was abnormally thick for my age. (Normal would be 4 cm, while mine is 6 cm.) She doesn’t think it’s cancer, but she wants to biopsy it ‘to be sure’.

Needless to say, sometimes I find it difficult to focus on what I’m doing. But I keep trying to farble my way through.

To get back to what I was saying at the beginning of this; I don’t need any more depression or anxiety in my life right now. I’m on a full load of anti-depressants and my anti-anxiety meds have recently been upped, too. I’m sorry if you are going through a hard time, for whatever reason, and I don’t comment on your post. Chances are rather slim that I see it, because FB only sends your post to 7% of your friends. I wish everyone good health and a relatively good life. Just like I’m trying to do for myself.

Update: On the day I wrote this blog, I was unaccountably tired, very achy, and just plain cranky. I feel that crankiness came through, and I’m sorry about that. My circumstances are not anybody’s fault; they are just the hand I’ve been dealt by fate. Some days are better than others, and I will check in on social media when I can.

Indenting Paragraphs

When one starts to publish books, and wants them to look ‘professional’, there are many things one must think about that you probably haven’t stopped to think about before. I think the first thing I ran across that surprised me was the rule, “Thou shalt not indent the first line of the first paragraph of each chapter.”

Huh? Why not? I thought it was a rule that all paragraphs should be indented, unless you are going for a block format, in which case no paragraphs get indented, but you do put a line between the paragraphs, so they don’t become a run-on mess (like this sentence).

But the only explanation was that it was to ‘look professional’. They even went further than that and said that it would be even better to make the first letter of the first paragraph of each chapter oversized and ornate.

For some reason, I found that suggestion silly and downright medieval. What are we, monks calligraphing our way through these books?

I’ve read a lot of books during my lifetime. I tried to think back, remember if any of those books had indented or not indented the first paragraph of each chapter. I didn’t know. I apparently never noticed.

Oh, I did remember occasionally reading a book that had oversized and ornate first letters for each chapter, and I vaguely remembered that those paragraphs were not usually indented. But it didn’t seem to be the norm in the books I read. Sometimes, I struggled to figure out what letter it was, it was so ornate and seemed to have nothing to do with the word it started. I probably thought, “How weird,” and then promptly forgot it as I plowed my way through the rest of the story.

Now I am faced with the question of whether or not I will indent the first paragraph of each chapter in the books that I publish. To be truthful, I want to. It is much simpler to indent all the paragraphs and be done with it. To indent all the paragraphs and then go back and un-indent the first paragraphs, all while trying not to make it a global command, making ALL your paragraphs un-indented… It seems like a tedious and unnecessary endeavor. Too easy to make a mistake. And I have made mistakes during formatting. It’s no fun having to rip out ALL the formatting and then go back and put all the formatting back in again.

But I’m taking a very unscientific survey. What is your opinion of not indenting first paragraphs of each chapter? Do you expect it? Have you ever noticed it being done in the books you have read? Drop me a comment and let me know your opinion.

Ebook Coupon

Have you ever wondered what MoonPhaze books are like? I’ve got a coupon for you. Let’s try a little short fantasy. The title is “Woman on the Dock”, which can be found at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/108681. The coupon is to get it for free, and the coupon code is BH45S, which is good through Dec 31, 2024. Check it out, and I hope you enjoy it!

Woman on the Dock

“Woman on the Dock” takes place in my Atlan Universe, where tribes of women have certain powers that others don’t have, and are thus called Witches. When their island home was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, their evacuation boats got separated, and pockets (usually just 4 or 5 survivors, from old crones to infants) of these women set up new homes wherever they could hide. Those women who are called Blackbirds—one of the Atlans’ best warriors—are sent out periodically by their village disguised as traders, to search for rumors of other Atlan villages. But as generations go by, it is hard to believe that other Atlan settlements exist.

Inna, coming to a fishing village disguised as a merchant, was shocked to find a woman tied to the dock, battered and near death. She didn’t know the beaten woman, but she was clearly Atlan! And Inna wasn’t going to let one of her kind be treated like that!

 

Our Adventures at Syfy Bartow

We knew getting to Bartow would be tiring. Neither of us have been at our best the last few weeks, so we started the weekend tired and a little overwhelmed. For one thing, we were both still working on ‘Bartow Projects’ right up until we started packing the car. Scratch that, my hubby was still working on projects even as we started packing the car on Thursday.

One of our neighbors saw us trying to get a folding table and a gazebo in the car and came over to see if he could help. Those were the big, awkward things we were trying to pack first. Most everything else was smaller and lighter, and we could manage them. But it’s nice to know we have nice neighbors.

We got most things in the car on Thursday, and decided we had room to take a fellow Klingon who otherwise did not have a way to get to Bartow. He showed up on Friday about 11am and helped get the rest of the stuff in the car. Then we got on the road about 2:18 pm.

I’m a little bit of a nervous driver these days, especially when I’m driving roads I don’t really know well, so it was tough for me to keep my speed up near the speed limit. It should have taken us an hour to get to our hotel in Bartow, but it actually took 1.5 hours. We found our stuff we would need for the night and settled into our room. About 7, we walked over to Mike’s Grill for supper.

We got up about 7 on Saturday, and went to Mike’s Grill for breakfast, because we knew it was going to be a long and hard day. People who come to the street festival can go home when they get tired, but vendors have to unload their vehicle, pitch their gazebo, set up their table and get their wares displayed by 11AM, when the festival starts. Then they are expected to man their table until 6PM, when the festival ends, when they tear down their display, strike their tents, retrieve their vehicle and pack everything up.

We had to do this twice, once for MoonPhaze and once for the Klingons. Happily, my booth space was right next to some friends, so I had help setting up the gazebo and taking it down. And there were many Klingons there for this event, so it looked like a mild case of bedlam when I dropped off my two Klingons and all the Klingon stuff we had brought, but I knew they would soon have things up and running.

I assume the Klingons had fun. I had a great day for MoonPhaze. I had 50% more book sales than I did at the previous best event, which was a 3-day sf convention. I was very happy.

About 3:30, the organizers told us that rain was expected in about an hour, so if we wanted to tear down and bug out, that was acceptable. Around 4, it started misting, and people started packing things away. By 4:30, it was raining, and the organizers called an end to the event. By then, most of the visitors had left. I packed all my stuff up and stored it temporarily under a store’s overhang while I walked over to the Klingon area to get my car and load up the Klingon stuff. Then we went back to my booth area, where our passenger repacked the car to get everything in, and we helped our friends in the next booth take down gazebos and load their van.

We were all cold, wet and worn out when we got in our car and headed back to the hotel. We got there about 7 and stopped at Mike’s Grill for supper, which included some wonderful beef noodle soup.

Tired as we were, we count this event as a success!

Should it be it, its, or it’s?

I don’t know what this collection of words is called, I don’t think they fit the definition of homonyms. But there certainly is a bunch of confusion about them, so why don’t we try to figure them out? The truth is, I even catch myself trying to use the wrong one from time to time.

It

It is a pronoun used to refer to an inanimate object or animal that has previously been mentioned or is about to be mentioned whose gender is either unknown or disregarded. I think we all have a pretty good idea of how to use it, but the other versions leave us confused.

It’s

Let’s look at the contraction next, it’s. This is not the possessive of it. As a contraction, it always stands for it is or it was. If you have a sentence with it’s in it, and substituting in it is or it was turns the sentence to nonsense, it’s is not the correct word to use.

“It’s décor was unusual” is wrong because “It is décor was unusual” doesn’t make sense.

“It’s a shame she did so poorly on her test” is correct because “It is a shame she did so poorly on her test” does make sense.

Its

I’ve had people tell me that its is the plural of it. But if you have more than one it, you usually switch pronouns to they or them, so its is not the correct plural to use for it.

Despite its not having an apostrophe, its is the possessive form of it. “The dog wagged its tail” is correct. “Its a beautiful day” is not correct because it doesn’t possess the day. In fact, if you substitute ‘it is’ for its, you’ll find the beautiful day sentence makes sense, so the correct word to use is it’s.

I hope I’ve cleared up any confusion you might have had about these words. Usually, if I run across its or it’s in a sentence, I simply substitute it is to see if the sentence makes sense. If it does, then it’s is the correct word to use. If not, then I look to see what it possesses in the sentence. And if that doesn’t work, then I will probably rewrite the sentence.

 

SyFy Bartow!

MoonPhaze will have a booth next Saturday (Feb 17) at the Syfy Bartow street festival. This is a festival we try to attend every year, but sometimes, life intrudes, and we don’t get there. For instance, last year, my husband was sick in February, and we didn’t make it.

This year, we will be located in the next to last block on the east end of Main Street in downtown Bartow (FL), between Florida and Hendry Avenues. This will be a new area for us; we have mostly been located on the western end of the festival. Booths will be lined up along Main Street and several side streets.

We are planning to take books and some small cosplay prosthetics (ie, wounds, cyborg pieces, and so on) to sell. But our vehicle also needs to carry displays and stuff for the KAG (Klingon Assault Group) area, so I am limited in how much I can take. I also have to take a table, at least 2 chairs, a gazebo to provide shade, a cooler of cold drinks and some snacks to get us through the day.

The festival runs from 11 AM to 6 PM. Hundreds of vendors, cosplay, a costume contest, food trucks, a car show, music and other entertainment… what more could you ask for? Attendance is free. Cosplay is encouraged. Hope to see you there! 

Our Adventures at the Book Festival

We spent last weekend at the Sunshine State Book Festival in Gainesville, FL. This was the second time I was there, and the first time for my hubby.

We drove up Friday afternoon, arriving just around supper time. We unloaded our car (except for the books we’d brought) to our hotel room, and then went to the hotel bar to have supper. The hotel also had a restaurant, but after seeing the prices at the bar, the restaurant was probably too pricey for our budget. At about 7 pm, we went down to the conference center for the meet & greet reception. We talked with several other authors, and ran into Joe Haldeman and his wife, Gay, which made hubby happy. But before too long, hubby either got uncomfortable or tired, so we went back to our room, watched a little tv, and went to bed.

Check in for the festival started at 8 AM on Saturday. Our tables were supposed to be set up and ready to go by 10 AM. I wasn’t worried about getting there right at 8, because I knew it wouldn’t take very long to set up our table. Hubby must have been tired, because he didn’t get up until 8, and he was worried about missing out on the breakfast that the festival was providing for the authors. So we went down and found our table, then I sent him off to have breakfast while I unloaded the books from our car. I wasn’t worried about breakfast, because I’d had a couple pop tarts with my morning pills.

After I brought in our books, I unloaded the 3 boxes and began to set up the table. Hubby arrived in the middle of that, so we were all done by 9:30, ready for the crowds of customers to come in.

At noon, I sent hubby to the buffet being supplied by the festival. When he got back, he sat at the table and I went to get some lunch. Lunch consisted of build-your-own tacos, churros and key lime pie. When I got back to the table, I could tell Hubby was tired, so I sent him to our room to rest. He came back a couple hours later, feeling a little better.

Throughout the day, we talked to various people. One children’s author told me where he got his books printed for a lot less than anyplace I had found. Of course, getting them printed is only half the battle; then you need a distributor to get them into the book stores. He was negotiating with a distributor.

Another author told me how to indicate the reader was going into a flashback. One of our books has multiple flashbacks, which at least one reader found confusing. Now I can fix that problem.

Another author gave me information on two cover artists he’s worked with and recommended. He also gave me some information on potentially getting our books in his wife’s bookstore.

And then a potential customer stopped by, and we started talking about book covers. I always thought the book cover should be an indication of what you would find inside the book, which should make it fairly unique. She agreed but had gone to a publishing seminar a few months ago where everybody was saying, “No, you want the book cover to look like every other book in your genre.” In any case, she had nice things to say about our book covers.

And then, at the very end, the President of the organization that hosted the festival came to us and said, “I sold 2 books, how did you do?” We told her we hadn’t actually sold any books, but we did hand out lots of coupons to get our eBooks at a discount. At least one person came by and picked up one of each coupon, while her mother picked up one. We ran the gamut of coupon dispersal; some took several while others took only one.

In the days before the festival, I had repacked our books, trying to get it down from 5 boxes to 4. I actually got them down to 3. But, when it came time to pack them all up again, I didn’t have room for the two coupon holders. I had to put them in with my laptop and hope they didn’t get squashed and broken. (They didn’t.)

We took the books back to the car, had supper in the bar, and went back to our room for the night. Hubby doesn’t seem to think that selling our books face to face is the way to sell our books, but he doesn’t want me to ‘waste’ my time studying marketing, either. But I’m not ready to give up.

Believe it or not, I had fun. I also had a disadvantage. We were located near one of the entrances, which was good. But sitting right next to me, even closer to the entrance, was a very out-going author who greeted every potential customer with, “What do you like to read?” Which is what I usually say. And then, depending on what they said, he would regale them with some variation of his elevator pitch for his series of 5 books. I felt a little silly asking the same question as him, and so I fumbled several times, looking for something to engage their interest. Also, he had dragon stickers he was giving away, and I only had boring coupons.

I’m still processing what I can learn from this experience. I’ve often thought of having things to give away, but I’ve never gotten around to doing it. Maybe it’s time I do that. Among other things. Then if the person next to me is asking, “What do you like to read?”, I can fall back to “Would you like a free sticker/trading card/temporary tattoo?”

Personal Appearances

I am writing this ahead of time, because I am packing up and getting ready to go out of town on Jan 27, 2024.

I will be attending the Sunshine State Book Festival in Gainsville, FL. For 7 hours (10 am to 5 pm), I and another of MoonPhazes’ authors, John Lars Shoberg, will be talking to potential customers, other authors, and other entrepreneurs about potentially working together in some way. It is free to attend this event. This will be my 2^nd year at this festival, and I have big hopes for it. But it is a little daunting to handle such an appearance on my own, that’s why this time, I’m taking John to help out. We will be at booths 163 and 164.

On February 17^th, 2024, we will have a booth at Syfy Bartow in downtown Bartow, FL. This free-to-attend street festival starts at 11 am and ends at 6 pm. I’m not sure where our booth will be located, but if you go there, keep your eyes open for us. I will be selling books and possibly some cosplay prosthetics. John is planning to go, but he may spend the day with the Klingons. Or possibly he’ll split the time between them and my booth.

We are also planning to be at Necronomicon in Tampa, FL, this fall. It was held in September in 2023, but I can’t find an updated website to get the dates for this’ year’s con. It’s also too early for me to start pestering them for an author’s table yet. I’ll try to keep you informed as the convention gets closer. John is thinking of having some Klingon activities there, and he’s looking for other Klingons to help out.

Right now, that’s all we’ve got scheduled for this year. We did hear that Bartow con was a hit last fall and is planning to do it again in 2024. If they do, I hope I can get a table to sell stuff. They were pretty crowded last year!

We go to conventions and book festivals to meet and talk to people who have read our books, and hopefully sell them more books. If you would like to check out our books, the (trade) paperbacks are available at MoonPhaze.com, and the ebooks are available at MoonPhazeBooks.com

Do You Hear it or Here it?

It’s surprising to me how often I receive a letter or advertisement in the mail with grammar or punctuation mistakes. I sometimes get a manuscript for editing with the same mistakes, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Not everybody who finds themselves writing some sort of missive managed to test out of Freshman English in college.

Having already tackled the subject of passive verbs, I decided to continue the trend by explaining a pair of homonyms. Homonyms are words that sound the same but have different meanings.

The two words I’m going to pick on today are here and hear. They sound the same, but they aren’t spelled the same and they can’t be used interchangeably.

Here means ‘this spot where I am,’ or ‘the area where I am’. It designates a location.

Hear is the act of perceiving sound by way of the ear. Sometimes a bass instrument or a really loud sound can be felt vibrating through your body, but that’s not hearing. If you truly can’t remember which is which, then notice and remember that the word that relies on ears has the word ‘ear’ in it.

I once received a manuscript that had the town crier shouting, “Here ye, here ye!” I tied my brain in knots trying to figure out if he was really instructing the townspeople to gather around him. It didn’t seem right to me, but maybe I was wrong. So I googled it, and found out that it was supposed to be “Hear ye, hear ye!” Which translates from Medieval English to “Listen you, listen you.” And of course, you can’t listen if you don’t have an ear, so the correct word to use is hear.

Memorize the meanings of these two words, and then substitute that meaning when you use one of them, to see if you used the correct one.

I will build a house here. = I will build a house in this spot. That makes sense.

I will build a house hear. = I will build a house by listening. That doesn’t make sense.

Did you here the doorbell? = Did you in this location the doorbell? No, that doesn’t make sense.

Did you hear the doorbell? = Did you perceive the doorbell? That does make sense.

I hope you enjoyed this mini-lesson. What was the worst use of either here or hear that you’ve noticed? 

Passive Verb? I Think Not

A while past, I asked a fellow author to swap ads in our newsletters for one of each other’s books. She suggested we read each other’s books to see if we were ‘compatible’ with each other’s audience.

So I read her book of short stories and although I didn’t find a lot of grammar or punctuation mistakes, I wasn’t impressed. Most of them seemed to be ‘slices of life’, not actual stories. She was writing a single scene that had no problem to solve, and therefore, had no resolution. I was carefully crafting a soft critique when she emailed me with the news that she didn’t feel my book was fitting for her audience.

Her reason? It had too many ‘passive verbs’ like ‘seemed’.

Years ago, I was told to avoid ‘seemed’ in one of my short stories because it was a passive verb. At that time, I decided to research exactly what was a passive verb so that I could avoid them. (Authors are always being told to ‘avoid passive verbs!’ without any explanation of what a passive verb is.)

A passive verb is when something is acted upon by someone or something.

Found artifacts are studied by archeologists. – Passive

Archeologists study artifacts that have been found. – Not Passive

 

Beach rocks are pounded into sand by recurring waves. - Passive

Recurring waves pound beach rocks into sand. – Not Passive

 

Those holsters were crafted by a novice leathersmith. – Passive

A novice leathersmith crafted those holsters. – Not Passive

 

Mary was kissed by Steve. – Passive

Steve kissed Mary. - Not Passive

 

Another way to think of it is that with an active verb, the subject does something. With a passive verb, the subject is acted upon. When searching for passive verbs, look for a ‘be’ verb (be, am, are, is, been, being, was, were) as part of the verb. In the above examples, we have are studied, are pounded, were crafted, and was kissed. A ‘be’ verb often (but not always) signals a passive verb. Does it have a ‘by’ phrase behind the verb?

Some writers attempt to ‘correct’ passive verbs by eliminating the ‘by’ phrase. It doesn’t work. “Mary was kissed.” is still a passive verb even if you don’t know who kissed her.

‘Seemed’ is not, by itself, a passive verb. “Everything seemed normal” is not a passive verb. How about “Mother seemed distraught by the news”? It’s got a ‘by’ phrase. But it doesn’t have a be verb, so frankly, I’m in a quandary, and would probably rewrite the sentence, possibly the entire scene.

Let’s take a closer look. ‘Mother’ is the subject, ‘seemed’ is the verb, ‘distraught’ is an adjective describing the subject, and ‘by the news’ is a phrase answering the question of why. The news made mother distraught, so the subject has been acted upon, making this a passive verb. That’s how my thinking goes. Does your thinking agree with mine?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject, as well as where you get your information on passive verbs.

Our Train Trip to KC - Part 3

 

In and Out of Chicago – Tuesday, Nov 14

I don’t think I got any sleep sitting in that chair. It wasn’t comfortable; it didn’t recline or rotate. The arm of the chair was so far from the window and wall that if you tried to prop a pillow on the armrest, the pillow would slowly slide down in the gap. Hubby didn’t have much better luck; he thought the rocking of the train was too unpredictable and jolting.

We got up about 5:40 AM and were soon off to the café car for breakfast. We were a little early and had to wait for the server to get there. While we were eating, we were the only ones there. Then Hubby remembered Chicago was in Central time zone, so he set his watch back. Now it said we were eating at 5:20 and had plenty of time before we got to Chicago at 8:45.

Back in our room, we watched daylight progress. I thought I saw frost on yards and cornfields but wasn’t sure. Mostly I saw naked trees, something you don’t see in Florida unless the tree is dead.

Hubby wanted to lay back down, but the bed had been put away. He stacked the boxes between the sofa and the sink, I moved back to the uncomfortable seat with the cpaps, and he lay down on the couch and dozed for another couple of hours. During that, the attendant took those stacked boxes downstairs and put them by the door so they were ready to go.

We arrived at the Chicago station on time. A Red Cap loaded our luggage in a cart and took us and another lady to the lounge. The lounge people notified us what train we were on and what time 2 be ready to board (2:20). We put our luggage into temporary storage and looked to see what they had to eat. Again, it was snacks, and not a lot of variety.

Hubby settled in to work on his novel, and I worked with pen and notebook. About noon, he decided he was too tired to work anymore, so he wandered off. I jumped onto that computer to work on the short I’d just started the day before we started this trip. Finally got the word count over 1K! It’s been slow going, but until that, I didn’t know where I was going with it. Should move much faster, now.

At 2, I started shutting down and packing things up. Hubby and I went to the temporary luggage storage and put away all the things we had gotten out, then started collecting our luggage just as they called over the PA for our group to go.

Another Red Cap took us to the train where our attendant greeted us. He had us leave our boxes on luggage storage shelves downstairs. When we got to our roomette, we found this one was even smaller than our first one! At least we wouldn’t have to sleep in it, because the train was due to arrive in KC at 10 PM.

Still, we hadn’t been sleeping well, and KC was still hours away. At first, Hub pulled out the laptop and tried to write, but the train was swaying and jolting so much it kept messing up his file, so he gave up and put that away. Then he went walk about for a while, and I made our dinner reservation for 5 o’clock, because we’d never really gotten anything for lunch.

Eventually, it was time to go for supper. We differed on what appetizers we got, but we both had steak (very good) and the cheesecake (also very good).

After dinner, Hubby tried to get some sleeping done. We had 3-4 hours before we had to get off. We turned off all the lights in our roomette and closed the curtains to the hallway, to make it as dark as possible. Hubby took a pillow and leaned into the corner of his seat, but he just could not doze off while sitting up.

The train was moving slowly. They announced we were behind a congestion of freight trains and could only move slowly until the tracks ahead cleared up. Sometime later, we began to move faster and they announced that due to the delay, we would get to KC about 10:42. About 9:45, we got too nervous for Hubby to try to sleep. This was not a major stop where everybody would get off, like DC or Chicago. This was a scheduled 42-minute stop that they were trying to cut down to 10 minutes. Finally, we headed to the door on the lower level so we’d ready to get off.

The train stopped, the attendant help us off with our luggage and flagged down a red cap for us. The red cap was picking up the checked luggage, too, and one of the suitcases he picked up was Hubby’s carry-on. We couldn’t claim it yet, but as least we knew it was there. Then the Red Cap got stopped to help an older man who could barely walk. After several minutes of looking, the train attendant decided the older man had lost his black piece of luggage, that it possibly got left in Chicago. I don’t know how they decided to handle that.

Then we were off to the Central Terminal. We helped the Red Caps unload their cart, claimed our piece of checked luggage and asked questions like, “Do you have the number for a taxi service?” and “Where should we wait for the taxi?”

Now having more luggage than hands to carry it, we made our way through the lobby and out the front door to a bench, where I tried to call Ztrip at 10:50. The line was no longer in service. I went back inside, asked the same guy, and he corrected the number he’d given me. Then he scrolled through his contacts and also gave me a number Yellow Cab.

I went outside and call Ztrip again. I got through and made arrangements. They never showed. The night was chilly. I called Yellow Cab about 11:10. The night guard let us into the vestibule to wait because it was cold. Nobody showed up to get us!

About midnight, we tried to open a door to get out and couldn’t. Hubby went inside to try to find somebody to let us out. What he found was a door that would let us out, so we carried everything over there and went back outside. I called Yellow Cab again. A Ztrip van showed up about 12:30 and asked if we were headed for Independence. Yes, but where was Yellow Cab? We decided to take this guy. As he drove us to our hotel, he told us that Ztrip and Yellow Cab were the same company. Who knew?

He drove us to our hotel. I registered, we got everything up to our room, set up our cpaps and fell into bed somewhere around 2.

Thus our trip by train was a mixed bag of adventures, not all of them due to Amtrak. I probably should have looked up taxi services in KC before we left Florida, so that's something to keep in mind.