Punctuation matters. We’re not being snobs; we’re not being pedantic. You’re not throwing money away by getting yourself a copy editor to help you out.
With that in mind, here’s another our series of punctuation snafus:
If you glance over to the sidebar – that’s it; near the top, just after the recent posts section – you’ll notice that something has changed (aside from finally updating the icons for Apple Books).
Yes, it’s finally here: book number four. A novella (only 40,000 words or thereabouts).
I took a writing break after The Quisling Orchid and just focussed on short stories and reviews. Book 3 was an expensive effort in terms of time, brain space and money, so I thought I’d dial it back a bit.
Fortune started out as a collection of short stories about life in Soweto, something I could read to my mum while she was in hospital. Unfortunately, my mum didn’t recover away, so I didn’t want to carry on with the book.
A few people who’d read the unfinished version said they’d like to see how it ended, and hoped that I’d pick it up again, eventually. ‘Time’s a great healer, Dom.’
Well, they say that, but it doesn’t apply to everyone, so the book stayed in the drawer (metaphorically speaking; it actually stayed halfway down the tree in Ulysses) for a couple more years.
I think it was a combination of things that finally got me to dust it off (metaphorically speaking; I actually just opened the folder in Ulysses and started typing):
Last July (2019) there was an incident in which a body fell from the undercarriage of a plane approaching Heathrow, so I sort of thought it was a story that needed to be told.
I’d like to think my mother didn’t raise a son who didn’t finish something he’d started.
Besides, good writing is supposed to hurt, isn’t it?
Very sad to hear that Sue Townsend, author of the immensely popular Adrian Mole series, passed away yesterday. She was 68, and it sounds as if she’d been ill for quite some time.
I read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ when I was a kid, and years later, I still think that it’s a wonderful mixture of teen fiction, dark comedy and social commentary. Sue Townsend was one of the few authors who has produced novels that I will read over and over.