Kasay the Wonder Dog

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 16

You may have noticed Kasay’s Harry Potterish scar in the last dog entry and might be a tad curious about its origins. That means it’s flashback time.

When Kasay was pulled off death row by the wonderful folks at Crossroads Animal Rescue, he had what appeared to be some small wounds on his back. His loving foster mom, Julie, took him to the vet for treatment. As the techs shaved Kasay’s fur to treat the wounds, they discovered extensive infection. More and more of the skin fell away, and before long, the majority of his back was one big open wound. The diagnosis wasn’t conclusive, and we’re still not sure if it was a chemical or sun burn, spider bite, or infected bite from another dog. Julie and her family spent two months tirelessly nursing Kasay back to health.

Here he is all shaved and bandaged and coned up.

When we adopted Kasay, the wound was about 90% closed up. He had to sleep wearing his cone for a short time and was always cooperative about letting us disinfect and care for the wound.

Most of his fur grew back, but he still has this distinctive battle scar to remind us that he is a courageous warrior with amazing powers of regeneration.

My grammar bio refuses to die

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15 - We're stuck again! I hope this isn't a technical problem but just a natural lull in submissions.

It was many years before I found myself standing in front of a class again, teaching Freshman Composition. Fortunately for me, Brian has taught various college-level writing classes and helped me tremendously, sharing all his lectures and giving me tons of advice, support, and both figurative and literal hand-holding. This experience forced me to finally take the time to learn the proper usage of commas. Brian shared his NAYFOBS mnemonic with me (the same idea as FANBOYS, but so much better. The sillier the mnemonic device, the easier it is to remember), and I was able to mark student papers and teach them the rules.

Finally getting back to the second part of that advice I mentioned last week...Am I saying that every writer should teach? No, although there’s no better motivation for learning something than teaching it to someone else. What I’m saying is that I think reading will only take you so far. You will pick up a lot of good practices, and reading hones your ear for language, but you will still have your grammar weak spots. (Mine were pretty common: comma splices and faulty parallelism. And I have a tendency to spell led l-e-a-d.)

Try to identify your weaknesses, then commit to fixing those bad habits. You could take a class or get some one-on-one tutoring, or you could buy an up-to-date writer’s handbook and teach yourself to correct your work.

I like the Prentice Hall Handbook. It’s well organized and the grammar lessons are easy to understand. You can get a used copy at Amazon for under a dollar (plus shipping, of course). If you live near a college or university, you might even be able to snag a free one. Our English department routinely puts dozens of instructor’s editions of textbooks out in the hall on their “free books” shelf. Professors get so many free copies from publishers hoping they’ll adopt their books, purging is an ongoing process. As long as you have a trusty reference manual of your own, you don’t have to memorize the rules but can refer back to it as often as needed.

My grammar bio cont.

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

When Brian asked me to work as a typist and copy editor with him and three of his MFA classmates on their collaborative novel Stripmall Bohemia, I was nervous. In addition to the Yoko vibe I felt as the sole girlfriend butting into the four guys’ project, I was not at all confident about my abilities. Not only was my grammar knowledge limited, but I was a self-taught typist as well.

But I muddled through and, all in all, I think I helped the boys out. During that project, my typing and editing skills did improve, but the truth is, Brian is such a stringent reviser and self-editor, proofing his work didn’t force me to address all of my grammar deficiencies. I continued to make mistakes in my writing that he was far beyond making in his.

Teaching is what made me face the grammar dragon head on.

My first teaching experience was a high school course called Teacher Cadets, a sort of pre-education course for seniors to help us decide whether this was a career we wanted to pursue. In the spring, we traveled to another school for an hour a day to do observations, culminating in our teaching one lesson.

I was assigned to a sixth-grade language arts class which, much to my chagrin at the time, consisted entirely of grammar instruction. Reading had been separated into a different class period--one that didn’t align with my class schedule. The lesson I ended up having to teach was ‘who and whom.’ I was so nervous that I overlearned the lesson and, to this day, that is one grammar rule I’ve got down pat. On the other hand, I couldn’t tell you one thing the teacher taught during the 20 or so classes I observed.

This is getting long-winded, so I’m going to split it up to keep your eyes from crossing.

My grammar biography

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

For the sake of providing some background and context to this issue, I have a nerdy confession: I’m a little disappointed that I’ve never been asked to diagram a sentence. My grandfather used to work as the art director for a publisher and sometimes sent us language arts textbooks. I remember as a 3rd grader reading the chapters on diagramming with true awe: a mixture of fascination and horror. This was mysterious, complex, big-kid stuff, like algebra or chemistry.

I believed that one day I’d know all the fancy words for parts of speech and learn how and where to draw those lines and symbols, dissecting sentences with a full understanding of exactly what made them tick. Somehow, things didn’t work out that way.

The Chomskian idea of innate linguistic knowledge I referred to in my last entry has been so much in vogue the last few decades that formal grammar instruction has virtually been done away with. [We don’t need to teach grammar—the kids pick it up naturally from reading!] My last grammar lesson was in 7th grade—from then on, English classes consisted solely of reading and analyzing fiction, poetry, and drama. We had to write essays and papers, but we were pretty much on our own as far as figuring out language mechanics. I’m sure I made the same small errors over and over, but I never had the kind of teacher who took points off for minor errors, so I was never motivated to correct myself.

In college, there was a grammar/history of the language course offered, but I’d heard rumors of how difficult it was from the secondary education-track English majors who were required to take it. I studied my catalog and discovered that, since I wasn’t seeking teacher certification, I could substitute a literature class on 20th century American poetry for the grammar course. I told all my fellow English majors about this loophole and single-handedly caused a spike in registration for that poetry class, which consisted of meeting at our professor’s house one night a week to eat soup and gossip about the lives of well-known poets. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed the poetry course, but it wasn’t long before I was regretting my cowardly registration choice.

There I was in the mid-1990s, an English degree in hand but no real grammar know-how beyond the ‘this sounds correct’ basics I’d intuitively picked up along the way. I was occasionally asked to proofread something for a job and felt like a fraud but muddled my way through, marking egregious errors and ignoring whatever I wasn’t sure about. Then one day, my boyfriend (yep, he’s the one) enlisted my help with editing his novel, and suddenly the stakes were higher than they’d ever been.

What to do if you need help with grammar: Part 1

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

The good news is that many contemporary linguists agree that we learn grammar through usage, not instruction. My prescription for you, if you have problems in this area, is twofold.

First, read. Read a wide array of books, including those biggies you pretended to read in high school but never did. Reread your favorites. You will begin to subconsciously develop an ear for proper usage.

I caution you to make your reading broad so that you don’t inadvertently start to mimic any one writer’s voice. That sort of mimicry is not necessarily a bad thing and, in fact, is probably inevitable for writers just starting out. But if you’ve been at this enterprise for a decade or more, it’s time to develop your own unique voice and avoid the derivative.

I’ll hold off on the bad news for the time being, except to say that I’ve come to believe you can’t become completely proficient with language just by reading. Some instruction is in order.

Things the dogs learned this summer: Part 2

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 14

The dogs are on a bit of a different learning curve, so each will have to give his final lesson separately.

Lesson #4 from Kasay: Ice eating is a delicious way to stay hydrated.

Lesson #4A: But be sure to save some of your ice for later. It will make a lovely midnight snack.

Lesson #4B: Doh! Where’d my ice go?! Oooohhh yeah…I mean, DON'T try to save it for later. I don’t know why I can’t keep that one straight. Must develop a mnemonic device…Chew it fast, for it won’t last? ICE = It Can Expire? Eat it when it’s dealt or it will melt?

Lesson #5 from Brodsky (see above three pics): Hamming for the camera is a sign of immaturity. Keep your face turned away from the paparazzi at all times.

Oh no! They caught me! How embarrassing. [Or maybe he is humiliated by his owner's socks-with-sandals fashion faux pas. Hey, I was just trying to keep the skeeters off my ankles.]

Lesson #5A: Best to have a good sense of humor when cornered. Punching out the paparazzi only leads to trouble, or so my parole officer tells me.

DD: Things the dogs learned this summer: Part 1

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 10

We got the tiniest sheen of drizzle last night—the first time it’s rained in weeks—and it knocked the edge off the heat. Today it’s not supposed to reach the 80s, and it hasn’t been that pleasant in months. So this is a good time to look at the summer of '07 in the rearview and see what lessons it held. For the dachshunds, of course. I am beyond learning much about summer except it seems to be getting longer and hotter.

Here we go. You might want to take some notes on this.

Lesson #1: Weeds grow even in a drought. Help your owner with the pruning chores.

Lesson #2: Eat plenty of green leafy vegetables for hydration and antioxidants.

Lesson #3: In the summer, it's best to stay on top of the blanket.

The grammar wars con't.

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 7

So which side do we represent in this war? Are we judging entries with the eagle eyes of the rules keepers or the freewheeling nonchalance of the grammar bohemians?

Brian and I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between those two extremes but admittedly closer to the former camp than the latter. If the grammar and mechanics errors in a piece are rampant, we do lower the presentation score. Someone who wants to be a writer but has no understanding of the fundamentals is conveying laziness and a lack of respect for the medium.

It’s like a painter who doesn’t know how to mix colors. You can’t cut corners and skip ahead from basic skills to advanced execution. You have to put in the effort and learn how to use your artistic tools, and your tools are words. Expecting someone else to fix it all for you later is not only arrogant but naïve. No one else is going to care about your work as much as you do.

Improper use of language is a burden on your reader. You know what you’re trying to say, but if you completely ignore the rules of language, your reader will likely become frustrated and have to read each sentence multiple times, mentally inserting the proper punctuation and filling in the gaps in order to make sense of your work. If that is the case, you have failed in your attempt to express yourself. And don’t tell me you had to reread Shakespeare or Faulkner’s sentences in order to understand them. There is a difference between writing that is difficult to read because it is complex and writing that is incomprehensible because it follows no known conventions of language.

Now that I’ve ticked off the grammar bohos, let me add that we understand that grammar is ever-changing, and we don’t cling stubbornly to outdated rules or feel the need to enforce rules just for the principle of the matter. Too, we know that formatting and punctuation errors beyond the author’s control sometimes happen in cyberspace, so we are not taking five points off for every misused comma or anything like that. We don’t penalize for minor errors that don’t interfere with readability (or, of course, that seem intentional and effectively serve a function in the entry). Grammar mistakes tend to fade into the background and be forgotten in the presence of a well-crafted, original plot, fascinating characters, and sparkling dialogue, and those higher-order concerns are what jump out at us most of all.

But when we read an entry that excels in those other categories but also doesn’t have any glaring errors, it shows us that the piece has been carefully edited, that the writer is probably well read and knowledgeable about his craft, and that he has put as much time and passion into the revision as he put into the writing, and we find that impressive. Those are the entries that get an immediate ticket to the ‘yes’ stack.

The grammar wars

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 5

Grammar: such an oddly touchy subject among writers. There are two warring camps on this subject.

There are the rules keepers—those writers who feel they know the rules and become agitated at others’ errors. Some extremists are frozen in time, insisting people adhere to outdated rules. These old-school purists do not approve of splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, despite what the latest edition of the Holt Handbook permits. They take care to avoid any such manual published within the last few decades, so they neither know which former grammar no-no’s have become acceptable, nor do they want to know.

Ironically, rules keepers are plagued with a curse. Anyone who writes about grammar or rails against some usage pet peeve in print will have, embedded in her diatribe, at least one grammatical error. I remember when Brian first pointed out this phenomenon to me years ago, and I have yet to see it disproven. It is some kind of inevitability, perhaps a joke the universe plays on us to remind us that perfection is unattainable.

The copyeditors (professional rules keepers, no less) of a nearby major metropolitan newspaper have a contest each year to see who can locate the first typo or grammatical error in the latest edition of the AP Stylebook (you know, journalists’ grammar bible). It never takes them more than 30 minutes to find one. C’mon, I bet you can locate one in this very blog entry, though I promise I haven’t intentionally put any in.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the grammar bohemians who play free and loose with language. They don’t worry about grammar, either believing it’s a waste of time and something for lowly proofreaders and editors--not true artistes--to fret over, or thinking their intentional disregard of grammatical conventions is essential to their unique writing style and conveys some deeper meaning. They see themselves as iconoclastic rebels, and they view the rules keepers as dull pedants.

The winning ingredients: presentation

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 3

Now here’s a mysterious category from the scorecard. Are we judging entries based on the quality of the paper they’re printed on or the fanciness of the packaging in which they arrive? No—it’s all online, remember.

So are we referring to submissions that come in with the formatting intact versus those that somehow get garbled in transmission and end up with triangles and accent marks where all the normal punctuation marks should be? No, we don’t hold mysterious formatting glitches against you.

‘Presentation’ simply means the entry’s language—its diction, syntax, tone. Entries that are well written receive high marks in this category. Keep in mind that ‘well written’ can mean rich and poetic writing or it can mean sparse, invisible writing, depending on what seems appropriate for a particular piece of fiction. As always, there are no black-and-white, one-size-fits-all rules where fiction is concerned.

Also falling under this category are


grammar and mechanics.

//cue the blood-curdling screams and horror movie music//

But we’ll talk more about that later.

Ding dong!

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 1

This wicked summer is now officially dead (good riddance to triple-digit temperatures), and that means it’s changeover time for the writing contests. Final tally on entries for the Best Short-Short Story Contest: 197. We just barely beat last year’s number, but at least we did exceed it!

Here they are--our reading materials for the next few weeks:


Oh, and I apologize if I sounded harsh about early Best First Chapter entries last week. I didn’t mean you or your entry were disqualified forever and ever as part of some weird grudge against earlybirds, I just mean if you submitted before September 1, you need to resubmit during the submission period in order to qualify (9/1/07-3/1/08).