More Nonsensical English
There is a sorry tendency of English speakers to say “verbally” when they mean “orally”. It’s standard nomenclature in law school — among people who should know better — to refer to anything pronounced aloud as “verbal”. But anything written in a human language is by definition verbal. Oral, OTOH, means voiced aloud. So people should say “oral” instead of “verbal”.
Similarly, people often write “insure” when they mean “ensure”. These words have quite different meanings. To insure something or someone is to secure an insurance policy or otherwise guarantee the integrity of him or it. Ensure means to support a certain outcome, an entirely different meaning. I often see supposedly educated people say insure when they actually mean ensure.
I also see people say “the XXX” as if to emphasize “the most” or “the only”. English has ample expressions that make it unnecessry to mangle the language by emphasizing the word “THE“.
As long as I’m on the topic of bad expressions: How and when did the contraction “I’d been” and “I’d begun” take the place of “I was”? In narrative prose, it’s better to write out “I had” instead of writing “I’d”. Modern prose seems to suffer from a plague of “I’d”s. Most of the time writers mean to say “I had” but this only introduces the dreaded “had’s” into the text. Almost always it’s better to simply write “I was”. I especially see prose written by engineers littered with “I’d”s. It’s poor writing. Don’t ever write “I’d”. Beware of novels written by engineers. They can’t write. Lawyers too. I had to relearn how to write after I left law school. Engineers should follow my example and learn how to write effective English, discarding what they think they know about language.
And please stop saying “unpacking” as in “Let’s unpack the meaning of this.” Packing and unpacking is for travel cases, not meanings. It’s unfortunately trendy but I don’t give a darn for what’s trendy.
Also, no one should ever say “debunking myths”. Nothing has ever been “debunked” except the notion that the Sun revolves the Earth. Everything else is up for grabs and has not been truly “debunked” and has nothing to do with myths. It’s presumptuous and seeks to push the idea that only the speaker knows anything and the listener nothing. Like unpacking, debunking or debunked is a trite phrase that informs only that the speaker is arrogant and a know-it-all.
This goes hand-in-hand with “conspiracy theory”, which is another phrase that has no meaning except to attempt to communicate that the speaker knows more than God and the listener knows nothing. Everything is a conspiracy, and nothing. When two people decide to buy some illegal marijuana, that’s a conspiracy. So conspiracies are multiple and rampant and found everywhere. The existence of UFOs were dismissed as conspiracy theories for decades until the U.S. military released recordings by U.S. aircraft of actual UFOs. The word conspiracy implies something illegal, yet those who attempt to dismiss political opponents as conspiracy theorists, most of the time there is nothing illegal about the alleged conspiracy, so it by definition cannot be a conspiracy at all.
And no “full stop” or “period”. Putting a period means full stop. There is no need to say “full stop”. It’s redundant and foolish.
Then there is “muh” anything. This is intended to mock the holders of an opinion, but it’s merely bad English.
And “hack” is a technical term that applies to computer hackers doing something illiegal. It has nothing to do with merely improving something. One cannot hack house-cleaning.
No more using “well,…” That too is a trite hackneyed phrase that attempts to lend a non-intellectual ambience to prose. It’s worse than useless, it’s stupid. Just as with “Hmmmm” as if this too imparts some significant meaning to one’s writing. It’s just poor English. Avoid both of these.
Other incredibly stupid phrases: “It’s just who we are!” Oh, please. That’s as stupid and bad and “It is what it is” and “our democracy”. Anyone who uses such phrases is not merely low IQ but presumes that the listener is even more stupid than the person saying such phrases. The U.S. is not a democracy, has never been a democracy, and according to the Constitution is not supposed to be a democracy. And who else can we be except “who we are”? It’s total nonsense and the language of overweening demagogues who hope not to be required to be rational or explain their positions on anything.
Not to mention “supremacy” or “supremacist”. These too are as idiotic as “our democracy”. Supremacy implies denying rights by government authority. No one is doing that, or contemplates doing that, except our current government and its politicians, who are the only people alive who use such terms. All these phrases should be dumped and never used again.
Then there is saying “stormed” when one merely means “protested”. Storming something came from the First World War when German soldiers set up “storm units”. These were equipped with flame throwers, submachine guns, and grenades. If a group of people don’t have flame throwers, submachine guns, and grenades, then they cannot “storm” anything. They are merely engaging in a protest, peaceful or not so peaceful. This word is yet another word whose meaning has been distorted by power-mad irremovable demagogues seeking to ensure their perpetual remaining in power by exciting the populace to believe that some horrendous crisis has occurred, when nothing of the sort has happened.
Finally — tho there truly is no end to the nonsense that is today written or expostulated — there is the phrase “That’s sad”. This phrase is intended to impose individuality on the listener, implying that the listener’s problem is merely that of an individual when perhaps the listener’s issue is also a social issue, or perhaps entirely a social issue. It’s a way of distancing oneself and isolating the listener. And at the same time implying “It’s not my problem or anyone else’s — only yours. Try harder next time.” This phrase denies the reality of social issues and only spreads the American disease of hyper-individuality. There are many possible appropriate responses when someone describes his/her problem. Replying “I feel your pain”, however, is not one of them. Junk this phrase too.
I could keep going, but enough for now.
Nonsensical grammar
“The is a car of George’s.” Though grammatically correct, this makes no sense, We say “The car belongs to George” and we say “Give this car to George”, and “This car was from George”, and we even say “The house of George”, so why don’t we say “This is a car of George”? We don’t say “The house of the Rising Sun’s”, we say “The house of the rising sun.” We can also say “This is one of the cars of George.” So why not say “This is a car of George”?
This ties in with the issue of “It’s” versus “its”. This is another grammatical conundrum. If we say “Ralph’s house”, that makes perfect sense, meaning only “the house of Ralph” (or “the house of Ralph’s” which as I mentioned should be avoided). But if we say “It’s” then this can only be a contraction of “It + is”. The word “its” is employed instead to mean possession as in “its house”, which confuses endless numbers of people, even native speakers who constantly write “it’s” for possessive when no such word exists in the English language in that sense. In theory one can even say “the house of its”, meaning “its house”, but one can never say “the house of it’s” as if one is saying “the house of Ralph’s.” Why not just abandon “its” altogether and simply write “it’s” in all circumstances when possession is intended?
OTOH, why not just abandon ” ‘s ” entirely when referring to possession? And just say “This is the house of George” or “the car of Ralph”. Saying “Ralph’s house” confuses the statement with “Ralph is house”. Or “it’s house” or “the house of it” rather than saying the confusing “its house”. We should reserve ‘s when intending to say “is” (or when speaking poetically making a contraction out of any other word that ends in -s).
But if this is too much, then why not simply throw away the word “its” and starting writing “it’s” whenever possession is intended? If I live long enough I hope to write a book “English for a New American Century” which will propose many such innovations to make English more rational and effective in expression, including writing “n” for “and”, and Greek “theta” for “the”. But it’s not on the front burner.
New York publishers & the PC Cult
The latest news from the mega-corporate monopoly publishing houses in New York City is that they are now requiring a litmus test to be applied to all books they publish. This litmus test is straight from the PC Cult, demanding diversity, equity, and inclusion, which as all independent analysts realize means the exact opposite of what these terms denote, i.e., few whites, legal privileges for special ethnic interest groups, and exclusion of white males. These are applied to the characters of every novel and story. Villains — as has long been the case in Hollywood shows and movies — must almost always be white males, and on occasion white females. This is what NY publishers call “diversity”.
Random House is owned by Advance Publications, a giant publishing conglomerate owned by Donald and Samuel Newhouse. Simon & Schuster is owned by the conglomerate National Amusements which is in turn owned by the even larger media conglomerate Viacom, until recently owned by one man: the late Sumner Redstone. The huge conglomerate Disney owns controlling interests in several other publishers of comic books and science-fiction novels, even if formally not headquartered in NYC. The vast media conglomerate Time-Warner owns DC Comics and movie adaptations of their comics such as Batman.
The six media empires work hand in hand as a virtual monopoly controlling what most of the large publishers — especially those headquartered in NYC — publish. Therefore one should beware of any book published in New York City. When you read a book published in NY, or by any of the many branches of the 6-headed media monopoly, ask yourself: Why did this publishing house publish this story instead of something else? With so many books being written, amounting to well over a million books annually and growing fast, why did a particular publisher publish this book and not one of the many manuscripts that are submitted to them, manuscripts that may vary from the agenda that they push? Their litmus test amounts to the ideology of “progressivism”.
Progressives often call themselves liberals. But there is a profound difference between a progressive and a liberal. A progressive is someone to whom causes are more important than truth, science, or human life. Progressives have no use for written constitutions, the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, private property, or elections. Liberals support all these things. Progressives believe there are no facts, that feelings create facts. Liberals believe in truth and science and the inalienable rights of every human. Progressives are members of a violent fanatical religion which they call Wokeness, which is better understood as a cult, the PC Cult, and require everyone to cave to its false catechism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which as mentioned are in reality the exact opposite of what they say. Liberals allow people to choose their own religion and treat people equally.
Equus Publishing is devoted to publishing creative individuals who are actual liberals, and conservatives too. We have no litmus test and reject the conformity pushed by New York publishers and their PC Cult.
Negative people
Avoid negative people, the time-wasters, the doubters, those who want to drag you down to their level so they no longer feel inferior. This is what such people say when they learn you are starting an enterprise of your own:
1) it can’t be done
2) you can’t do it
3) it was beginner’s luck
4) you will fail next year
5) (to others) I helped him succeed
6) I taught him everything he knows
7) we grew up together, we’re old friends!
The Gender Divide
If women run an organization, they hasten to fill it with their female friends just as they rush to join any organization where women are in control. But if men run it, they swiftly put up blocks to keep other men out while admitting women because they may be potential mates. Women look for reasons to include others, they lower entry standards in every organization they dominate, admitting marginally qualified people, and erasing barriers and borders. Women look for reasons to include others. Men look for reasons to exclude others, especially other males. The male hierarchy always want to raise the standards of admission and establish firm borders. That’s masculine nature.
This is why the Establishment and PC Cult seeks to erase national borders. The Cult is dominated by women, as evident in their worship of Mother Earth. And this is why men have no political power in the U.S. or the entire West today.
Every society ever found creates male-only organizations. If they are banned, as male-only orgs are in the US today, then men will set up underground even illicit orgs that emphasize physical stamina, like hunting clubs, or clandestine militias, or they will form street gangs that establish boundaries to keep out the competition. Or they join sports teams that engage in simulated combat against other male sports teams. This is masculine nature.
Men spontaneously form hierarchical organizations, which used to include academia. No longer. Since women came to dominate academia, standards have dropped, borders have become porous, and academic departments are now run by a consensus of superficial conformity. Women thus are allowed to achieve their full potential in modern America. But men will never be able to fulfill their nature until they finally decide to set up male-only political organizations that are of, by, and predominantly for men.
Nonsensical phrases
Here are a few nonsensical phrases that I hope never to see again:
“It’s just the right thing to do.” Or “That’s just who we are.” These phrases are a sanctuary for small minds, a refuge from having to think about things rather than just react. A favorite of certain power-mad professional politicians like Pelosi and Biden, these are actually nothing more than virtue-signaling, reducing complex sociological topics to cheap empty slogans, an expression of anti-intellectualism. Don’t use them. It’s like putting your own “Kick me I’m stupid” sign on your backside.
“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” I don’t know where this came from and I don’t care, though probably ancient Hellas. That’s “Greece” to hoi polloi. That’s “the common people” to those who never studied Greek or Greece, “hoi” being a translation of “the”. So if you ever see the phrase “the hoi polloi”, you know at once that the writer knows no Greek. Let’s add “the hoi polloi” to the list of phrases I want to eradicate. Back to the gods. They — assuming they actually exist — don’t inspire madness. This is an ancient misconception that illness is due to divine punishment or an evil spirit. Madness is a medical condition, not a divine punishment, so forget that. And forget the phrase.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same over and over and expecting a different result.” That is not the definition of insanity, but the definition of democracy. Insanity comes in many different costumes and flavors with many different causes and cures. But if there is any truth hiding in those words, it must apply to the elections that are routinely held in so-called democratic countries. First, let’s acknowledge just for the record that there is no such thing as a democracy. All political entities known to researchers are run by elites, as were all political entities recorded in history. So there is not, and never has been, a democratic election in the U.S. or anywhere else. You don’t get different results through elections, you get deflated hopes.
Even in ancient Athens, where democracy was allegedly first conceived and practiced, the majority of the population were slaves who were not allowed any significant input into the political process. Even in Athens, every “democratic” experiment eventually failed and was succeeded by a tyrant who restored law and order to the chaos left behind by the supporters of democracy.
In the modern world, the Founders of the U.S. Constitution recognized clearly that democracy would only lead to chaos and this became apparent to everyone when the French Revolution broke out, which was followed by the Jacobin-inspired black slave revolt in Haiti when the formerly enslaved blacks massacred thousands of French whites, and many freed blacks. Today’s electorate who flock to the polls time after time expecting things to change in their respective American or European capitals are somehow always surprised when nothing changes. That’s because entrenched elites make policy, not temporary figureheads sent in on occasion by the public. For example, the American public has voted consistently since 1916 not to enter into any foreign war for any reason whatsoever. Yet the U.S. has plunged into at least 5 major wars since then, with it seems a sixth on the way as Biden sends American troops secretly into Ukraine. Just as FDR waged a secret undeclared naval war against Germany, and JFK waged a secret American war against North Vietnam by sending U.S. troops into South Vietnam and Laos and lying about it.
Every President since 1916 was elected on a “no foreign intervention” peace pledge. Woodrow Wilson declared he would never send a single soldier to Europe to fight in World War I. Yet within 18 months he entered the war. FDR swore he would not intervene in Europe, yet he did all he could to provoke an Axis attack on American ships and finally with Pearl Harbor got the pretext he wanted to jump in. President Truman was a middle-of-the-road candidate in 1948. Yet Truman leaped into South Korea to fight the Korean War in 1950. President Johnson was the peace candidate in 1964, beating the “war” candidate Major General Goldwater by a landslide. Yet in 1965 Johnson leaped into Vietnam with both feet after the false flag Tonkin Gulf incident and waged a vicious war for 4 long years. Today we are seeing a repeat of this. Trump was elected in 2016 as the peace candidate who pledged to close overseas bases and withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq. Yet none of this occurred as the elites simply ignored his instructions. Now the militant Biden is in office and is sending U.S. troops secretly into Ukraine as an intervention in that border war, and his satrap Pelosi is stirring up a military confrontation with China. That is what’s insane.
Just as it is insane to spend trillions of dollars in special education programs trying to boost the test scores of blacks and hispanics when fifty years of “no child left behind” and similar programs have shown conclusively that test differences are rooted in genetic differences and such differences will always persist. Continuing such expensive programs year after year with the same starry-eyed hopefulness is what’s insane. Ditch the phrase. It’s nonsensical.
”China is run by engineers, the U.S. by lawyers.” This phrase is a favorite of so-called conservatives, who are trying to imply that China is better-run than the U.S. because their economy is not strangled by useless lawsuits. This is wrong on so many levels. First, the Soviet Union was also run by engineers, there being no lawyers anywhere in that political entity. The Soviet Union had no lawyers because its legal system did not acknowledge individual rights. There were no individuals, only collective organizations, and only those organizations had power. Its Constitution was merely a fig-leaf, only for show.
No lawyers means no laws. No laws means no Constitution for courts to enforce, which means capriciousness and arbitrary decisions decided on the basis of influence and power. No lawyers means no one is safe with their lives or their property. In the Soviet system private property was prohibited. The state owned everything and all economic activity was the result of organizations inside the state competing to acquire ever greater shares of limited and dwindling resources. The individual meant nothing, indeed one can say that in the Soviet system individuals were invisible and did not exist. Any attempt to secure even the most basic food and shelter was met with “Who are you with?”, meaning what group did the individual belong to, only groups having any claim even to food and shelter.
China is a different situation. Having emerged from a Communist system that was different from the Soviet Union, it managed to avoid the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet state. Today China has laws and lawyers to enforce them. But their role is limited and lawyers there can go to jail if they defend a political dissident. In China today it is the Communist Party that runs the state, not engineers. The Soviet system was also run by the Communist Party, but it had a cult of engineers who were free to impose their vision on the country. The results were the drying up of the Aral Sea, the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, and the outmoded oil industry which virtually collapsed during the Soviet era with tremendous waste of resources. In the movie “Things To Come”, adapted from the Fabian socialist H.G. Wells’s book of the same name, an engineer named Cabal at the end sets up a dictatorship of engineers. But in the end, the society collapses just as the Soviet Union did. This is what a society looks like when engineers are put in control.
Second, engineers are used to working with absolute quantities and things that are predictable and measurable. When it comes to a society and dealing with human beings, engineers miss the boat entirely and tend to imagine that a few grandiose infrastructure projects, or medical interventions with the latest vaccine-like genetic experiment, will satisfy everyone and guarantee progress. We call this “social engineering”. When engineers do social engineering it always fails. But when politicians do it, it often succeeds. It succeeds because social engineering is not engineering at all but propaganda and media conditioning.
The U.S. is run by lawyers for the simple reason that the U.S. has laws. China has just one jurisdiction for its centralized regime. The Soviet Union also had just one jurisdiction for its centralized regime. The U.S. has 50 jurisdictions with a unique set of laws in each one. Plus federal plus foreign relations. That’s 50 different jurisdictions that lawyers must master, plus those specializing in federal legal practice, plus those specializing in foreign or international practice, not to mention foreign laws which international lawyers must know. Not to mention immigration law which is another specialized field.
Yes, I fully agree that there are too many laws in the U.S. and too many lawyers. But the reason is because the U.S. is not centralized like other nations, but has something called “checks and balances” in its Constitution to prevent exactly the kind of centralization that Communists, and sometimes engineers, long for. Laws and lawyers are the guarantee of a republic that has done away with arbitrary oppressive commandments from a centralized elite. In theory at least. A few lawyers obviously are necessary and probably 90 % of lawyers could go into another line of work with society not suffering in the least.
Of course, 80% of lawyers don’t practice law anyway so it’s not like that would be a huge change from today. But to use the phrase “we’re run by lawyers” is to admit ignorance on how the U.S. is actually run. Government is a sausage factory for laws. Engineers and doctors are mechanics without the know-how for participating in law-making or governance. When doctors were bleeding patients with leeches and engineers were building ships out of sails and wood, lawyers were writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Constitution and lawyers are all that stand between the common citizen and anarchy or concentration camps. Without lawyers, doctors and engineers would never get paid and their professions would disappear.
Of course, if they truly wanted to know how things actually work in the U.S., other professions could get a law degree and many people of all backgrounds do obtain a law degree today because that has become the new high school diploma, and is a prerequisite to be an effective participant in government. Then they understand how the government works and no longer embrace such silly phrases. Most people, however, will never attend law school, partly because it is too intellectually demanding for most people, but more importantly because the U.S. populace is married to science and engineering and mistakenly believe that the solutions to society’s issues can be found in technology, therefore will always misunderstand how government and society work, and therefore the U.S. will always suffer from attempts at “social engineering” by people used to dealing with quantities and will suffer its consequent upheavals.
Fixing Blame
Thank you Biden and Pelosi for helping us fix blame for Russia’s dispute with Ukraine: it’s all Trump’s fault! No, wait, it’s all Bush’s fault. No, wait, it’s all Reagan’s fault. No, wait, it’s all Nixon’s fault. . .
Mercedes Lackey’s
A Teaching Moment.
Far from the madding crowd dost today’s Social Justice Warrior write, embraced by global conglomerates and their cellophane orcs. I recently encountered a novel-writing thread on Quora hosted by a “flaming liberal” by name of Mercedes Lackey. I had only the vaguest notion of who this person might be, since I do my best to avoid any writer endorsed by mainstream publishing, not only to preserve my sanity but to retain my ability to compose a coherent sentence, something that seems increasingly to escape the capacity of corporate publishers fed as they are by today’s ‘progressive’ high schools.
Stumbling upon a comment by Mercedes Lackey that ” ‘cancel culture’ is an imaginary thing”, I posted a polite reply citing a few facts that she had apparently overlooked. The following was her reply to me — after ensuring that no one but me could read it, and after which she hastily deleted my comment and hers.
Stay classy, Mercedes… From the above it seems she was lying when she wrote ” ‘cancel culture’ is an imaginary thing”, for she clearly — and eagerly — endorses canceling others.
Since ability to spell must be characteristic of all cellophane orcs and not to be questioned, I also point out that there is no such word as ‘facist’, but only ‘fascist’, or more accurately ‘Fascist’. This was the political system erected by Benito Mussolini when he was Prime Minister in Italy between 1920 and 1944 when he was finally dismissed by the King, the word referring to the bundle of sticks representing the different parts of society that the ancient Romans, and the Fascist Party, united into a single nation, in defiance of Marxism, which splits society into fragments and uses the media (including large publishers) to incite them to do violence against each other. Fascist is not a pejorative, but an historical term that is of zero relevance today. There is Fascism and there is Marxism. There can be no more ‘fascist’ than there can be ‘marxist’. SJWs, who are generally poorly educated and tend to have difficulty spelling, composing coherent sentences, or knowing history, would not know any of this, and in my experience can be relied upon to shut down any conversation where they may be required to learn something.
Also, an authentic definition of “liberal” endorses a constitutional regime with free speech and free assembly and the integrity of elections. Social Justice Warriors like our SJW of the Day, Mercedes Lackey, and her lackeys, apparently do not endorse these things, which is why I assert that such are not liberals, but are lying when they claim to be liberals, and instead are members of the totalitarian PC Cult.
Bad Habits of Beginning Writers
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(RE: latest on the Bubba saga, see below)
In my years hosting a writers’ critique group, I found that beginning writers frequently made the same writing mistakes, over and over. These were not necessarily due to inability or illiteracy, but simply to bad habits, habits that could be fixed. Here’s a brief summary of what I encountered.
Sentences all the same length. Readers are not machines, they need variety in input and, like many endeavors, writing is not a science, but an art. A writer must develop a feel for implementing variety in his/her writing. Make some sentences long. And some short. Like this. I have written long paragraphs consisting of a single sentence, followed by a single word in its own paragraph.
Here.
It relieves the eye.
Overusing conjunctions and similar “helping” words. Beginners love to sprinkle their writing with “began, but, and, so, still, also, then, finally, suddenly, even, that”, etc. These are as bad as a “case of the hads”, i.e., when beginners include a flashback to a previous incident and use “had” repeatedly throughout the flashback. This is unnecessary and overwhelms the reader with a pox of hads. The “hads” are a disease, cure your writing of these. Typically only the first sentence or two require “had”. The reader understands that s/he is in a flashback scene and doesn’t need to be inundated after that.
Conjunctions work the same way. Use “began” once or twice in a chapter, but no more than that. Obviously, “and” must be used often, but try to break up sentences to get rid of as many as possible.
Incomprehensible names for important characters. One attendee at my group was an Indian who used lengthy, complex names for his main characters. I understand that he wanted to remain authentic to Indian culture, but he was writing for an American audience. American readers will not bother with a name in a foreign language that is 20 letters long with multiple syllables. Strive for simplicity and names that are instantly memorable to your targeted audience.
Using a Prologue. A prologue is used when a writer wants to portray dramatic action before developing his characters. In general, prologues should be avoided, especially because writers tend to expand them until they become as long as a complete chapter. This puts the cart before the horse. If you must have a prologue, restrict it to one or two paragraphs, then get on with the story.
Flooding the story with adjectives and adverbs. Beginners often get carried away with emotion when writing and they want to impart their emotion and involvement in the scene by including many adjectives and adverbs. These don’t help. They hinder. They are stumbling blocks for the reader. A writer should take them out, line them up, and mercilessly shoot them. And shoot “mercilessly” which I just wrote.
An obsession with dialogue tags. In general, a dialogue tag is a bad idea because it distracts the reader from the content of the dialogue. “I’m sorry, I wish I had better news,” Ralph said, dropping his gaze to the ground before eyeing the door and combing his hair in anticipation of anyone entering. The reader doesn’t need this tag. The most that should be written is “I’m sorry, I wish I had better news,” Ralph said, dropping his gaze. Better: “I’m sorry, I wish I had better news.” Ralph dropped his gaze. Or even better: “I’m sorry, I wish I had better news.” Period. Assuming we know who is speaking, “Ralph said” is unnecessary. Try to eliminate “he said, he replied, he asked, etc.”
Get rid of Exclamation Points. Or at least keep them to a minimum, or they lose their efficacy. Use them sparingly. For shouting!
And don’t write “period”, as I did above. A period terminate a sentence but if you write “Period.” as I did above, then you are doing the reverse, essentially a run-on. Same with “Full stop”. Writing this reverses the meaning of what you intend to communicate. But as with most rules, an exception can be made provided it is occasional. Very occasional. As in almost never.
For action scenes…
Break them up.
Knock them down.
Write the action…
One.
By.
One.
The reader will focus. And remember what s/he read.
Also, look out for “lead” versus “led”, and “lie” versus “lay”, and “its” verses “it’s”. Avoid using ‘s for plurals—a simple “s” or “es” is almost always correct. Avoid the modern obsession with ‘d as in “he’d” for “he had” or “he would”, and “she’d” for “she had” or “she would”. Most conjunctions are only appropriate when spoken in dialogue, and then only if consistent with the personality of the one speaking. And avoid Elizabethan gibberish like “thou”, “thy”, “thine”, etc. They are a worse tangle than a Congolese rainforest. Who needs them?
Remember “Less is more.” Meaning strive to write with brevity, eliminating as many superfluous words as possible. You are not Nathaniel Hawthorne. And your readers don’t have the spare time for reading that readers did in the 19th century. Modern readers want their stories short and to the point.
More. On. All. This. Later.
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What makes a best-seller?
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As a Chinese philosopher once said, may you not live in interesting times. This was meant as empathy, since “interesting” signified social chaos and a decline of objective standards. Well, we live in an age of declining standards, just look at how many colleges are abandoning the SAT as a qualifying entrance exam.
Part of this wider social decline is any standards for what constitute quality writing. Today’s writing mirrors today’s Hollywood movie-making, which is to say that popular fiction has become puerile, obsessed with sex and violence, formulaic, populated by off-the-shelf stock characters, and utterly boring and predictable.
I just read a brief article which proclaimed that 99.999% of every book written today (meaning every novel), will sell no more than 100 copies in the author’s lifetime, and zero afterwards when sales to friends and family dry up, while only 5,000 sold would make it a “best-seller”. This is certainly true. Forty years ago, when this writer was an editor for a fiction publishing house, no more than 50,000 books were being published annually. Today, that number has hit 1,100,000. And is still expanding. It seems everyone who can type a word today is putting out a novel, expecting publication to follow. But it is harder than ever to get published, and is almost as likely as winning a lottery.
Yet some people do get published. After years of writing breath-taking prose and wonderfully inventive plots, with enough rejection letters to plaster a wall from publishers who never glanced at my manuscripts, this writer is now published by three publishers. I have not produced a “best-seller” (at least not yet), but here are my modest observations on how this works:
First, ask yourself which you would rather do: sell a lot of trash in the style of what the Beatles’ disdainfully labeled “paperback writers”, or write something enduring that will make your life worthwhile and potentially attract a modicum of attention after you are gone. In this writer’s humble opinion, you cannot do both. Let’s face it: trash is what sells. In regards to sci-fi, this is no longer 1960 when a generation obsessed with science and the race to the moon produced an explosion of first-rate science fiction. Books like that no longer sell and can rarely find a publisher. Today’s average reader is more concerned with social issues than with hard science, with political correctness on Earth than with alien life. And books now must compete with video games and YouTube.
The publisher I worked for forty years ago even then had formulas for what they wanted to publish. If none of the avalanche of unsolicited manuscripts that arrived daily fit the bill for what the publisher wanted, and none ever did, then the publisher simply assigned the task to an in-house editor. For example, “Police stories are hot this year. Go write me a book about how what it’s like to be a policeman.” And that’s what the publisher published, with the editor using a pseudonym, all the unsolicited manuscripts going into the trash for a nice little bonfire in the parking lot, most of it unread.
Large publishers do the same thing today, except their criteria are much more stringent than 50 years ago. And if you expect them to put any money into advertising your book, their criteria will be precise down to the last period and what art is on the cover, and what message you are subliminally delivering. Best of all, if a movie is a blockbuster, then the publisher, which often will be owned by the same media corporation that produced the movie, will then write a book about the movie, on order from corporate HQ on-high. This is the best way to write a best-seller—fulfilling an order from a billionaire movie producer as part of their merch campaign.
But for mere mortals who are not writing on contract like a short-order cook, even if you are willing to share your minuscule portion of the profits with an agent, an editor, a proofreader, and even paying your own way to book-signings, your mss will still be rejected unless it checks off every box on the big media publisher’s list of prerequisites: no hard science; no strong male characters; a “rainbow” cast of good-gals (with one or two good-guys for “balance”); a dystopian collapse of civilization, zombies or vampires (preferably both, either separately or merged); the usual cast of evil white male villains who collapsed civilization, with either English or German or Southern White Trash accents; a horse-chase or a car-chase, or at least a rocket-in-space chase a la Star Wars; blue or green matriarchal peace-loving AmerIndian types who are “one with Nature” a la Avatar; and of course last but most important: a strong female lead who never holds a door open for anyone, most especially men, and never smiles, and who must be pictured on the cover holding a huge sword or futuristic gun (preferably both) and would never in a million parsecs be seen in the vicinity of babies or kids.
And if you actually do have aliens in your book, they had better be Just Like Us. Because today’s average reader doesn’t want her/his/xir’s moral Weltanschauung challenged by aliens who are actually alien any more than his/her/xir’s knowledge of science, since 2 + 2 = 4 is now a microaggression to the average reader of popular fiction. So hard science better not be in your manuscript. Oh, and the writer had better be something other than “a cis-gender male”, i.e., a normal man.
And for you who think that for popular selling it really makes a big difference what you put on that blank screen that will go between the covers, provided you can check off the laundry list of PC prerequisites… As case in point: a male member of a local writers’ club recently wrote a detective story. The fellow is a lawyer by profession, which means he can’t write a coherent sentence if his life depends on it and this was his first book—not to insult him, he’s a great guy and a friend and deserves everything good. But following the “algorithm” approach to writing, which begins with the principle “If you write for men, you’ll go broke,” he decided to self-publish. Rejecting putting anything on paper, and not wanting to waste his time with traditional publishers, he went straight for Kindle. He wrote his book in about a week (okay, maybe two) and it took another week to get his book on Kindle, giving particular attention to the cover. The cover had to have a picture of an adolescent girl, with angel-like wings, and a hint of down-and-dirt, in short, a cover aimed at sixteen year old female readers of .99c Kindles on cellphones. He then hired a team of middle-aged women who specialize in talking up Kindles on Facebook. Three months later he had made $53,000 in sales. My book, The Selk King, took me four years to write. It’s aimed at highly educated men who know both Conan and Plato. It has not made $53,000. My top-seller, OTOH, a sci-fi pot-boiler titled “Frenzy”, took me only three weeks. It was great fun writing, but there’s no philosophy in Frenzy, just fun characters and lots of action.
Well, that about says it all. Physical book publishing today is big business, and large publishers are almost always owned by one of the big six Hollywood media monopolies, actually one single monopoly for all practical purposes, and therefore push the Hollywood PC agenda, usually in conjunction with their other big media venues, which includes large teams that talk up their bad books on social media. If you are not part of the PC crowd, and write true books of quality that you hope will outlive you, and not crappy Kindles that will vanish with yesterday’s news, then my advice is to avoid the cellophane corporate media publishers, or any other publisher infected with the PC virus. The age of novel-writing as a gentleman’s occupation with books published by small, part-time, non-profits run by retired gentlemen who just want good literature to see the light of day, is long gone, while the age of self-published junk is rising exponentially. But thankfully there are still a few publishers around who are not contributing, by marketing their trash, to making the present age more “interesting”.
My upcoming titles:
Arktos has bought the rights to two of my unpublished manuscripts. One is JIHAD BUBBA, the funniest sci-fi novel you will ever read about life in a “Woke” near-future. The other is SJWS & THE PC CULT, a sociological and historical analysis of “Wokeness”. Click here to keep up with the latest updates on both titles Arktos Publishing – Upcoming Titles. (scroll down)
Terror House Press has bought the rights to several other books. One is THE GLOW, a Stephen King type horrornovel, previously unpublished. The others are the entire 3-book series the ADVENTURES OF MAGGIE, THE RADIATED LESBIAN NUN. This is a semi-political, sociological, sci-fi satire. Click here: Terror House Press – Coming Soon then scroll down to “To Be Announced” where you will see all four of these novels listed.
Don’t forget my third publisher, TWB Press. QUANTUM MARLOWE is already available on their site, a novel about a quirky detective who gets caught up in multiple quantum universes as he investigates a murder. Click here to buy QUANTUM MARLOWE now: http://www.twbpress.com/ In many ways, I consider Quantum Marlowe the best book I have ever written.
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