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Words … but what do they mean?

The following extract is from a manuscript I was recently asked to assess for publication: ‘All right, I’ll see to changing that, might take a while.’ Eleanor continued with her agenda. ‘Now, what about Security? Personnel? Industrial Relations? Safety?’ ‘Hey, we need those.’ Arthur made a note. ‘Security and Safety have been the contractor’s problem…

About time

Wonder of wonders: the Brits have decided to test all 11-year-olds on the proper use of verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs as well as prepositions and conjunctions. They are also to be taught to use punctuation marks correctly with a focus on full stops, question marks, commas, inverted commas and the dreaded apostrophe. One would…

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Rebus returns

Thanks goodness the Scots have decided to raise the retirement age for their police force. It means Ian Rankin can bring irascible old Rebus back to the mean streets of Edinburgh. Standing in Another Man’s Grave is already completed and due for release in November. It not only resurrects Rebus 25 years after he first…

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Oh dear pussy

You’ve gotta laugh. No really, you do. You can’t help yourself. The show now running at the Hall for Cornwall is ridiculous, self-indulgent, nonsensical, lacking any point or reason and totally inane – but it provides as good an evening’s entertainment as we’ve had for quite some time. Four members of the notoriously idiotic Spymonkey…

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One-stop editing

Love the story from publisher/writer Anthony Horowitz who records the editor of his 205,000-word Oblivion suggesting he change the voice from third person to first person. Her “simple” idea was that this could be achieved by using the find/replace dropdown in Word. But, as Horowitz rightly comments, the reality was “it would mean totally rewriting…