Down in the dumps/

Despite the good news that my two latest books, Straw in the Wind & Salting the Wound will be produced in audio, I’m having one of those unexplainable “down in the dumps” periods authors get from time to time. As a result I dislike my current work in progress. Keeping going is hard at the moment. It’s not that I doubt my ability to produce a readable book in the end, but to borrow from John Denver’s song, “Some days are diamonds and some days are stones,” I’m definitely living in the stone age at the moment. My characters are no longer talking to me, which is a disaster of major proportions. I’m going to take my own advice to others at such times and I’m going to plod on in the hope that the result won’t turn out to be as flat as I feel, and I’ll be able to polish the stones into diamonds when I edit. Like most advice, it’s easier said than actually done. Example follows.

Yesterday I read a blog about pet peeves. The topic was grammar. What surprised me most was that the blogger didn’t seem to be aware of any difference between grammar and spelling, but lumped them both as one under grammar. Ditto the followers, who threw punctuation into the brew as well. In the free-for-all of unanimous opinions, the conclusion was arrived at that mistakes in a book couldn’t be blamed on the editor, because they are overworked. They were, in fact, the fault of the author, who should have got it right in the first place.

One of the commentators, who stated that she offers advice about such matters on her own blog, managed to include three incorrect spellings of simple words in her short comment (grammer-verbage-distradtion). Most writers know that mistakes happen (putting it politely) but if you're going to dabble in pedantry, it would be wise to make sure that your own contribution is correct.