Just put The Holocaust Star on Amazon Kindle

Right now I am waiting for this book, a sequel to The Byzantium Outcast, to publish. I will have to let everyone know when it goes live.

This Vexations novel has been a long time in the waiting. It’s never been quite ready.

Time to re-edit Black Hat Magick vol 1 Dread Vote

I’ve finished vol 2 of Black Hat Magick, which means its time for me to get back to work on vol 1 and make sure that it’s up on Amazon.com as an e-book.

I didn’t really like how I ended vol 1—I’m not going to go into that here because the end of the story is entirely a spoiler. I did what I needed to point the readers (and Elaine) in the right direction, but there’s a long laundry-list of things that were just kruft and not really displayed as much.

When I went to vol 2, I had learned a bit more about how to plot the short of story that a BHM story is.

Now I’m thinking bout vol 3 and that might mean League of Legends players, gold sellers from MMORPGs, and potentially a serial thief stealing virtual items. It’s a good time to bring up Bitcoin again—something I expect Elaine to intersect with often—but I don’t think it’ll be about that technology entirely.

I’ll let everyone know when I finish editing vol 1 and vol 2 and have them on Amazon.com.

I do look forward to starting on vol 3.

Thanks for keeping up and be sure to check out Invincible and Vulnerable on Amazon.

Grammar: Proper dialogue punctuation

When writing fiction we often find ourselves in strange situations while writing dialogue between characters.

Dialogue Tags

When tagging dialogue, the last comma within the dialogue sentence is always within the quotation, and, in the case that it should be a period in a normal sentence, we transform it into a comma:

Correct: “I see you came back from slaying the dragon,” he said.

Incorrect: “I see you came back from slaying the dragon”, he said.

Do not capitalize the next word after the comma as if it begins a sentence as the quotation is really the beginning of the sentence and the tag is just an extension of it.

If the period at the end of the spoken sentence happens to be another form of end punctuation like a question mark or exclamation mark then you leave that inside the quotes, but still do not capitalize the tag:

Correct: “You made it mad!” he said.

Correct: “Why did you make it mad?” he said.

Incorrect: “You made it mad!” He said.

When a dialogue tag breaks a spoken sentence in two, the tag is set aside with commas:

Correct: “I was just minding my own business,” the dragon slayer said, “and from out of nowhere the dragon attacked me!”

If the tag instead breaks between two sentences within the dialogue a period is used:

Correct: “First it bit my shield. I fought it off,” the dragon slayer said. “Next it got my sword.”

Action Tags

Sometimes, instead of using “s/he said” we tag dialogue with action. If the speaker happens to be doing something while speaking. This route is called Action Tagging and works pretty much a lot like standard dialogue tags, except that the reader assumes that the actor is speaking. When doing this, it’s important to make it clear the actor is the speaker.

Correct: “I thrust for its loins with a deft stroke of my blade!” The dragon slayer lunged with his sword at the crowd and they gasped in delight.

In this case, the punctuation inside the quote remains intact and we capitalize the action tag.

Although, there are some cases where an action tag interrupts the flow of a sentence:

Correct: The dragon slayer moved close to one fresh face in the crowd. “The dragon loomed overhead, menace in his eyes and—” He abruptly put fingers to his mouth and coughed, blowing ash from his lips. “—spewed fire down upon my raised shield!”

In this case, the sentence and the action occur at the same time, but the speaker uses an action to punctuate his oratory. As a result, I’ve set it aside with em-dashes, punctuated within the double-quotes. It creates the effect of a significant pause in the speech, but a continuity of dialogue and action.

Multi-paragraph Dialogue

When dialogue passes over several paragraphs, it becomes necessary to split it up. To do so, we simply leave off the end quotes of the previous paragraph to show that the previous speaker has continued to speak (and a new speaker hasn’t taken up.)

“With her massive jaws she hemmed and she hawed at my armor,” the dragon slayer said as he stalked the room. “Try as she might, she could not extract me from my girded metal safety. Although her claws could catch, her jaws could not crush.

“So, knowing my time was short, I took my dagger from my boot and cut into the soft spot between foreclaw and thumb.”

Quotations within dialogue

Sometimes people quote others when they speak. The same rules apply for dialogue quotes as with quoting people in articles and research papers. Transform double-quotes within dialogue into single quotes:

Correct: “The dragon stood over my pinned form and said, ‘Wouldst thou good knight parlay a truce? I grow weary of our tumble and it’s about time for tea.’”

Conclusion

I hope that you found this instructive. I will write a few more articles on dialogue, but this the basics of how to punctuate dialogue. The next article will cover how to mix it up when writing dialogue—although it’s best to stick with what has been working for the reader, sometimes (like the action interrupt tag) it’s necessary to get a little strange in order to portray sequence to the reader.

On being different – Part I: What a distinction difference makes

As a writer, I find myself often asking myself about human nature. It’s the driving force behind every character driven story, and even the plot driven ones, not just because I’m writing about people in motion, but because I’m developing characters that readers need to sympathize with. People sympathize with the similar, but go too similar and the sense of self repels. This seems to be the stake in all relationships between people.

I am different. I grew up “different.” But not different in the fashion that a made-for-TV Disney movie might attempt to portray. I am not Dumbo with my giant ears helping me fly; I am not the kid who had bazillions of navigational data points poured into my brain by an ET; I am just myself, same as millions of others, no strange maverick when placed against the billions of humanity. Yet in my smaller community I am the black swan.

The concept of growing up different or being different is so broad that I am going to have to break it up into parts.

Being different is not about finding a distinction from the mainstream—it’s about being different from your local community. Why? Because anyone sufficiently different from everyone else simply stops being a social human and in those terms anyone can argue that nobody is different: everybody is the same. We all have the same underlying mechanisms driving our motives and needs, but this seems to be a hollow entreaty, especially when it’s an individual arguing this. We are all different and we’re all similar. It is only due to the basic similarities that tie us together that we can even give context to our differences.

As writers we draw upon our experiences to weave believable narratives from nothing. First we must produce a foundation from what makes everyone similar—those social motives and mores I just spoke about—then we have to tweak them slightly to move away from them. The character in question also cannot be so alien from the readers that they cannot relate. This is the problem of aliens.

The problem of aliens could be distilled into a single idea: that readers want to sympathize with characters coping with situations that they themselves can put themselves in. The crux of a great deal of Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction is about things that haven’t happened to anyone, and some of them want to prevent a world quite alien from our own, either alternate in reality or deeply futuristic. Aliens in these stories often become prominent; but they’re not that alien, especially if they’re the character telling the story. Narrator aliens happen to be very human (similar enough) where as non-narrators can be wildly alien; but instead they get lensed through an anthropomorphic camera.

Good example of this is M.C.A. Hogarth’s Spots the Space Marine. The aliens in this context are a type of sentient praying mantis. They’re definitely alien, but they use English to communicate, they’re capable of distinct social reasoning, and their behavior is portrayed to us through human characters. By forcing aliens in SciFi stories to interact with humans close enough to the reader it allows them to sympathize with the aliens through the narrator. This can also be true for actual humans who would otherwise alienate the reader by being crazy—there is nothing more alienating than complete breaks from social reality like schizophrenia.

Another case of careful difference in characters happens to be when portraying deep afflicting traumas. How a person reacts to PTSD, to a rape, assault, having a friend commit suicide—all horrible and sad traumas that must be coped with, but most people don’t experience most of these things directly, even many of our readers. Those that do, of course, have a context that they can draw from but it will different fundamentally from that of the writer (and probably every other reader.) So the writer first builds a world familiar to everyone. The mundane similarities that tie us all together: the desire for company, the need for comfort, the things that go bump in our heads when we feel insecure… And then they introduce the exotic portions of the trauma to show how all the above have been changed or struck by that trauma. And finally how the character copes.

We all cope with stresses day to day. Small ones. Big ones. They differ greatly in type and amplitude; but when writing fiction they all take on the same sort of axis, one that either leads towards resolution or one that doesn’t. People read stories to escape their mundane stresses, so they add our exotic stresses instead. We reflect their coping mechanisms, their defenses, even sometimes their hopes and fears in our literary brush strokes.

My differences make my writing distinctive.

You should let them do the same for yours.