PEGASUS Monday
AKA Dead person walking. Well, comatose person sitting in a chair. The hour and a half I spent staring at one paragraph yesterday is still a personal worst, but there’s always tomorrow.*
Meanwhile. It’s February**, it’s cold, dark, nasty, I have another frellingest of frelling deadlines*** in two days, and I want roses. 
And then I’m going to bed again, which is a standard recourse for tired and late at night, although this works better for some people than others. Lately the effort hasn’t been really great for deriving any sleep out of, but it’ll make a change from this chair.
* * *
* And the day after. And then . . . And then it’s Thursday, and the whole show goes back to my publisher, lions, tigers, bears, elephants, bareback riders, bearded ladies and highwire acts^ . . . petrified paragraphs, chryselephantine commas, scintillant semicolons^^, the lot. And then . . . and then there’s PEG II. Oh gods. You know, lots of people write series. Real series. One book after another after another after another after another. Meep. I think I missed that gene. Meep.
^ No clowns. We don’t do clowns.
^^ I tweeted yesterday+ about the fact that I punctuate by ear++ which regularly brings me into collision with well-bred copyeditors: every frelling book it brings me into collision, to be precise. There was an outburst of solidarity in response to this tweet—as it happens at about the same time as Melissa Marr tweeted a new blog post: http://melissa-writing.livejournal.com/393726.html
I knew she had been a teacher, but that’s all I knew. I did not know that she used to teach grammar, and liked it. Wowzah. Meanwhile, if you want a good, crisp, funny+++ basic breakdown of sentence types, here it is. But the bit that pastes my ears back is that she says: ‘I know that my familiarity with grammar & mech[anics] has been as much (more?) of an asset to me than anything else so far. . . . It’s not as fun as conferences, and honestly, it’s not as QUICK as some people want. . . . I firmly believe that it’s a necessity. I KNOW that you don’t need to network (I certainly didn’t) or go to “what[‘s] hot in the market” panels. You can do that stuff, but it’s not required. What IS required is knowing how to play with words. I think this stuff is essential.’ Emphasis mine.
I entirely agree that knowing how to play with words is essential, and I agree that writing—good writing anyway—is hard work. I also agree that networking and panel-attending is mostly fluff. It can be interesting, it can boost energy and morale, and yes, you may learn something. But mostly writing is about sitting at home and staring at the screen/piece of paper.
But the idea that any storyteller gets there in any manner fundamentally by her knowledge of grammar just blows me away. What little I know about grammar and structure as grammar and structure is strictly after the fact. I can, for example, tell you something about how I put my stories together because they’re there on the page in this shape rather than that one and therefore it is possible to say things like that I have an unhealthy love of semicolons and of starting sentences with conjunctions. I can’t begin to imagine thinking about this before the words have gone down on paper.
Ultimately however . . . whatever works. So all you secret sentence-parsers out there . . . it’s okay. It’s okay (ahem) to know what you’re doing. And your copyeditor will love you.
+ I also tweeted yesterday asking what the computer equivalent of sharpening pencils is and got way more suggestions than is good for me. (I especially liked the one about lining up your desktop icons with a protractor.) One of the most frequently mentioned is cruising the internet in one form or another. The bottomless abyss I find is the work-related stuff—I know that reading back issues of http://xkcd.com/ and http://wondermark.com/ counts as goofing around, but shouldn’t I want to know about stuff like the ever grinding-on of the Google mess: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/01/authors-google-rights-grab-books?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Or the details of how an old-fashioned print publisher managed to twist Amazon’s tail (anything that twists Amazon’s tail is a good thing): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/01/amazon-macmillan-ebooks-apple?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Well. Yes. But there were advantages to being sad, clueless and retro. More spare [sic] hours, for example. I also sort of miss the shock of what? when Peter reads something out of the newspaper or the New Scientist that I got off Twitter an hour or several days ago.
++The tweet in its entirety reads: I PUNCTUATE BY *EAR*, OKAY? GET USED TO IT. ::Clutches semicolons to chest::
+++ ‘I . . . made up my own examples for class [because] weird sticks better’
My favourite (now, read this, and tell me if you’ll ever have any trouble remembering sentence types again):
‘QUICK CHART
SIMPLE: He ran.
COMPLEX: When the zombies chased his girlfriend, he ran.
COMPOUND-COMPLEX: When the zombies chased his girlfriend, he ran, but they caught him too.
COMPOUND: He ran, but the zombies caught him.’
** http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic15617.html although that should be right off your feet
*** I swear I’ve had nothing but frellingest deadlines since about . . . August. 
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