Tiny Reviews

Gonna start putting this out there in the universe, but I am looking for a freelance editor! I want to hire someone on an ongoing contract-basis, and looking to build an editor-writer relationship with over time. Aka this would be paying-per-piece, multiple writing pieces per year, and want to work with you for several years.

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

And!

Medievalist here for triumphant fact-checking: this story is, if not true, at least true according to the history of the Danes (Gesta Danorum) written in the 12th century by Saxo Grammaticus. You can read his account of Alwilda’s story in the original Latin here, or in English translation here. Highlights include:

Two things absolutely changed my life as a writer. You ready?

nobody “writes like ai” as long as they write, then they write. period. there’s no “writing like ai”. because by saying someone “writes like ai”, you’re implying that ai actually writes and that ai is the blueprint. but what ai does is mimic human-made works.

The thing about fanfiction after writing original fiction for so long is that it feels like taking weighted clothes off. If I wanted a cool plot twist or a reveal or a mystery I had to set up all the expectations myself. I had to set up the red herrings, the clues, the boundaries of what was reasonable.

The shared language of a fandom in fanfiction is so amazingly conducive to a type of story telling that we lost when public domain was gutted as a legal concept. And it’s such a thrilling way to make stories and I weep for how rare it is to encounter.

It’s striking me really hard after reading this post–so much of what is considered the ~canon~ of western literature really arises out of this situation where everyone who wrote (i.e. a tiny minority of educated men and the very very rare educated woman) was operating with a common set of referents. There were just so few books, back then, and if you were educated enough to write, those were the books you had read, and that your teachers had read and told you about. Everyone got the same references.