State of the Collaboration: New Book, Same Punctuation

~ Jenny

Bob and I are about 30,000 words into the new book. New setting, new characters, new conflicts, same punctuation errors. (Not mine.)


36 thoughts on “State of the Collaboration: New Book, Same Punctuation”

  1. I’ve been being assaulted by misplaced apostrophes in Christmas cards of all places. “Greetings from the Smith’s” just makes me shudder! The Smith’s what? their dog? If that was it, just say so!

      1. Yep. Plural of Banks (as a name) is The Bankses. Just like the plural of Jones is The Joneses. Ergo, why I know the answer!

        1. Or just rewrite it, if it makes you feel uncomfortable –

          “Greetings from Jane, Jack and Joseph Banks!”

  2. I can’t be the only one who finds Bob’s deadpan humor hysterically funny. Responding to some Mom Talk from Jenny, he writes ‘I’m just misunderstood’ and I crack up every time. Reminds me of the zombie thing. 🙂

    3. You are not the only one. I LOVE Bob’s sense of humor… and his zombies… and my use of the ellipses.

  4. One of my oldest friends works for her parents’ newspaper and one of her jobs is proofreading ad copy. The county was hosting a symposium for rural counties. The ad copy they sent in was “county’s.” She corrected it and sent it back only to have it returned with a snippy note. She called to explain the difference between plural and possessive and was told that they had looked at other counties’ ads and wanted it left as “county’s” do the advertising all matched

    It took all her strength not to go all Mom on them and ask if all the other counties jumped off a bridge would they do that too?

    1. After 4 years of having Donald Trump as president, there is no longer any stigma in looking stupid.

    2. I’m so horrified by that response I can’t begin to articulate what I’m thinking. But I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to resist and I wouldn’t have limited my response to going “all mom” on them. She is clearly made of tougher stuff than I am!

  6. I’m impressed by the quick response timeline by the both of them. Never in a million years could I ever come up with any kind of comeback in such a short time.

  9. This is why I hang out here. To be around other people who know the difference between plural and possessive. Apparently there’s some kind of rule now, that if you’re in charge of making signs for a business, you are not permitted that arcane knowledge.

  11. The attitude’s here! The sillines’s. The riff’s. Really, you two could make a living doing standup! I live for these update’s. 😏 LOL

    “I’ll just be over here looking for my phone. You go beat up something.” Hilarious!

  12. There are a lot of things you’re no longer permitted anymore
    For instance it used to be the sun shone down. Shone is a dead word. I love your back-and-forth and I’m so incredibly impressed that you’ve got 30,000 words.

    1. I mourn the death of “sink, sank, sunk.” Nothing ever sank anymore; it sunk. Ditto for drink, drank, drunk; now it’s “so-and-so drunk too much.”

      I also mourn the re-definition of “beg the question.” It had a valid use, different from “raise the question,” but now they’re used interchangeably. So when you have an actual “beg the question” situation, you have to say something like, “the answer failed to address the actual question and instead focused on irrelevant material.”

      1. My ex-sister-in-law taught English in France. When I saw the signs advertising her classes using learnt as the past tense of learn, I was horrified. She had to explain that her school used English usage rather than American, but I still didn’t think it would inspire people to sing up for classes.

        1. Probably the other way round. My country uses British English. I’m used to reading American English, but when I read your comment something in me relaxed because your ex-SIL was getting it right.

    2. Well, there are two of us writing, so that does speed things up.
      Plus we have to talk about what we’re doing a lot, and that clarifies things.

    1. As they used to sing on “The Electric Company”,
      “Punctuation!
      “They are the little marks that use their influence
      “To help your sentence make more sense!”

  14. You horrible Americans have gifted NZ the word “surgeries” and I hate it. We used to have a perfectly good word for that: “operations”. Now we go into surgery for surgeries and it makes no sense at all!

  15. I was unfortunately not taught good grammar, however due to a lot of reading I can spot bad grammar and typos a mile away and having them turn up in books is painful. My English Lit degree friend however would happily correct the world with a big red marker given the chance

    1. I did a digital collage for the three Liz books. Haven’t started one for this book. I think this is going to be a trilogy again, but we won’t know until we finish the first one. If it’s a trilogy, I’ll do another one for all three books.

      Probably. We’re writing these at such breakneck speed that I haven’t slowed down enough to do one.

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