Re: writers rant

On 07/08/2014 19:10, Sibyl Smirl wrote:
> Okay, I guess I'm free from the guideline not to say anything
> negative. I'm feeling negative at the moment.
>
> I'm just finishing (78%) a Kindle Cozy Fantasy (ghosts) Feline (LOTS
> of cats) Mystery, "A Spirited Tail", Leighann Dobbs. It's got _all_
> the factors to make this kind of series book a runaway success! Not
> just the aforementioned, but the detective is a middle-aged female
> bookstore owner, with a misspent youth as a crime reporter, and a cop
> boyfriend who won't tell her anything (or much, anyway) about his
> cases, with whom she's occasionally frolicking in bed, but doesn't
> know him very well, and wonders whether she's "falling for him". Oh,
> and her sister is the Police Chief (who wants her OUT of Police
> Business), and her sidekick experiments with herbal teas, occasionally
> with disastrous results, or opposite results to those she intended,
> but is forever confident about getting the personality alteration she
> wants, and sneaking them into someone's tea without asking them
> whether they want their personality altered. The protagonist also
> occasionally converses with ghosts, and has two, Franklin Pierce and
> Robert Frost, regularly haunting her bookshop. "Lincoln's Doctor's
> Dog" was a piker, with only three sure-fire reader-attractants! (oh,
> there's also a bereaved Golden Retriever)
>
> This detective, and the young cub cop, and an elderly woman who knew
> the "mysterious stranger" (female) character way back when, can none
> of them figure out why, in the course of fifty years, a woman might
> change her surname! (Well, I might be maligning the elderly woman:
> she just says, "A different name? How odd!"). Personally, I don't find
> it either odd or inexplicable. The usual reason why women have
> different surnames than those they had fifty years ago seems fairly
> obvious to me! Of course, one of my cousins changed her surname five
> times in fifty years. I myself wear a different name than I had at
> nineteen.
>

Under Scots law women do not lose their surname on marriage.

> She uses the word "snuck" (which Mark Twain also used, but in his case
> he was humorously pointing out the ignorance of the character speaking).
>

We use "snuck" in Scots English.

> And the capstone of irritations: this detective has not Clue One about
> the use of apostrophes!
>
along with about 80% of people, including professional journalists these
days ;-)




--
Jette Goldie
jette.goldie@gmail.com

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Tamson House" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tamson-house+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.