I would love to do this, but am just too all-consumed at the moment to give this project the attention it should have. So, maybe one or more of you, my lovely readers, would like to beta-read a dystopian science fiction anthology?
My writing partner, James, and I are seeking beta readers for our dystopian anthology. We conducted one beta read back in March, and we have been reediting and revamping it. The anthology will be ready for this second beta read around the middle of September. If you are busy, I can send it in late September.
James and I have created a futuristic world called City-State where the government has total control of its people. However, there are rebels who wish to save City-State from its current political evils.
If you are interested, James and I would like for you to read for content, clarity, coherence, and interest. We want our readers to clearly see the story project as a movie in their minds, and we want readers to emotionally connect with the characters. No grammar editing is needed.
I wake early, without the alarm,
You still slumber between satin sheets.
I slip from the room,
Look out to a still-dark world,
City towers but a shadow;
A hint of light grows beyond.
Purple tones outline distant peaks,
Far pavilions of Kaye’s wonder,
Deep blues fading to star-specked black,
Cold, at peace, not yet disturbed.
The bay fluoresces, brighter than
The sky it reflects, yet darker still.
Captured, rooted to my window,
Helplessly gazing, heart expanding
With slow breaths to take it in.
Burnt orange spreads, a slender line
Whose limits cannot be discerned,
Yet whose end is within my sight.
No division, no visible change,
Yet colors shift before my eyes,
Sea and sky turning bright,
Though above all is dark.
Gulls call out, challenge the day;
I long to join them,
Their raucous company,
But I stay silent,
As you are silent,
Speaking not a word
Of any weight or meaning.
Helios awaits, the day arrives,
Peaks and towers reveal their mystery.
I am greeted, as you never greet me,
By the umber dawn.
Tess Mackenzie writes brilliant confessionals, which may or may not be true (she won’t really say), but are heaps of fun to read. This bit, however, is about having the bravery to write about something the author feels is a bit edgy (specifically, I think, the next post on her blog), which is interesting given just how edgy some of Tess’s writing can be. I love her stuff, and maybe you will, too.
So I’m weird and a freak but even at the risk of putting you all off completely, I just want to say this… any given story here that sounds like its true, and has a tag on it saying its true, and happens to be about me having sex with a girl, please don’t assume anything. Just please.
I know this doesn’t make sense, but it’s really really important to me that I say this and you see it before I say too much with stories like that.
Because this whole thing, all this writing, has been this whole awkward thing of starting getting comfortable with what I’m writing, then panicking and changing my mind about being comfortable. Which I am a bit now. About this. And also, this is also as honest as I’ve ever been about this to anyone, like to a group of strangers I mean, in…
“I got this,” I said, as Travers grabbed the perp’s other arm and started muscling him into the station house.
“You sure, McConnell? He’s kind of a big guy.”
I felt the familiar twinge of annoyance but suppressed it in the interests of professionalism. Why did Travers have to keep proving himself to me? Or was it to the others on the squad? Did he really think I couldn’t handle one tall but scrawny pimp in handcuffs whose probable idea of a workout was standing on the street corner watching his girls work the street?
“Yeah, I’m sure. Now go get the paperwork started, would you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he responded with just a bit of a smirk and dropped his hold on the perp.
I really needed to do something about this attitude. It was bad enough to have my squad mates wonder if I was up to the job of the downtown beat, but I really didn’t need my partner undermining my authority in front of the street punks we dealt with daily. When that happens, someone usually gets hurt, and I can tell you straight up, it wouldn’t be me. If a perp won’t back down because he thinks a female officer can’t handle him or will be intimidated, then things escalate and get dangerous in a hurry, and then it’s up to me to control the situation with whatever means necessary. Yeah, it was time for a little talk with Travers.
I got the perp to the booking desk, where at least Travers had got things started, and before too long we were done and headed to the back of the station for the end of our shift. I knew there wouldn’t likely be any other female officers nearby at this time, so with a quick glance to be sure no one was paying attention, I took a firm grip on Travers’ arm and pulled him into the women’s locker room.
He’s not that small of a guy, and he’s a cop, like me, so this depended on speed and surprise to pull off. That’s one of the benefits of being a woman in a physically demanding job: we know the limits of our strength and use our brains more than our brawn to get things done. The men were always overestimating themselves and getting hurt, straining muscles or their backs. I knew I couldn’t manhandle Travers into the locker room if he dug his heels in, so I had to catch him with his guard down.
It actually went easier than I expected. His mouth opened in surprise and he didn’t resist at all. Then he got that cocky grin on his face, and it didn’t take a degree in criminal psychology to predict what was coming next.
“McConnell, and here I thought you were the Ice Queen, yet all this time you’ve been wanting a piece of a real man.”
Oh, please. Yeah, he was easy on the eyes, but if he really thought I’d fall just for a trim physique with strong muscles and good grooming, he was deluding himself. Though, I had to admit, he really did take good care of himself, and it showed, even if the bulky vests we wore hid most of it. It had been a while…
Snap out of it, Eileen! Task at hand, girl! I pushed those unwelcome thoughts back down where they belonged, and then I pushed Travers against the lockers with a metallic clang, slamming against him, bullet-proof vest to bullet-proof vest. For just a moment I saw shock in his eyes, and a hint of uncertainty, and it emboldened me.
“Listen up, Travers, and listen up good. If I want a real man, I’ll find one. I don’t need that crap here at the station or on the beat. What I do need from you is a little more respect. I’ve been on the force long enough to know my way around, and we’ve been partners long enough for you to know that I carry my own weight. I don’t need you or any other man here to do my job for me, do you understand?”
“Whoa, McConnell, lighten up, I was just being friendly. I thought…”
“Do you understand? It’s a simple question.”
“Hey, babe, why’d you drag me in here, then? If you wanna get rough…”
I’d had enough. Before he could get another word out, I had a leg behind his and levered him around and down to the ground, pulling his arm behind his back as I followed him with a knee against his back. Before he finished gasping out the breath knocked out of him, I had drawn my cuffs and snapped one to his wrist, then I grabbed his other wrist and that was that. He was down and cuffed on the floor. I pushed up on his forearms, forcing his elbows wide, and leaned down close to his ear.
“Don’t you ever ‘hey babe’ me again, Travers, is that clear?”
He was either in shock or winded, because he had a funny look on his face and he only nodded.
“I think it’s time you understood the way things are going to be from now on. I’m not your ‘woman partner,’ I’m not a little girl who needs your help, and I’m not your Ice Queen either. I’m an officer of the law, and a damn good one, and as long as you are working with me… I’m going to call the shots. Is that clear?”
I felt a trickle of perspiration sliding down my skin under the bulky vest, and I was breathing a little more heavily than I should have been for such a quick takedown. I felt something coming off Travers that I couldn’t quite define. Not shock, not anger, but something else. Acquiescence. He wasn’t fighting me. A sense of power surged through me, and for the first time I couldn’t quite believe that I had just done this, taken down and cuffed a fellow officer, my partner. I stayed like that, laying across his back with my lips close to his ear, longer than really necessary to get my message across.
“Is that clear?” I asked again in a low voice directly into his ear. He took a long, deep breath.
“Yes,” he whispered.
This was almost too easy. I should’ve done this a long time before. That quickly, the man had become putty in my hands.
A tear fell from her eye and slid ever so slowly across the curve of her cheek, pooling in the downturned corner of her mouth. He pulled her into his embrace and kissed the tear away.
“Are you so very disappointed in me?” she asked, gazing up into his eyes, trying to discern his thoughts there.
“Do I seem disappointed?”
She thought about everything that had just happened, turning it over in her mind. She had been so absorbed in her own experience of events, so focused on her own feelings, that she hadn’t really paid attention to how he seemed during it all, what he might be getting from it. She was mostly aware of what he was doing, of how it impacted her — and how those impacts felt — and not so much of how he might be feeling. Now she recalled the intense concentration on his face, the firm yet gentle touch of his other hand, and she realized he had been fully present in the moment, completely focused upon her, while she had selfishly spared thoughts only for herself. A fresh sense of unworthiness and selfishness washed over her, and once again she could not understand his interest in her, despite the evidence of his caring embrace, his soothing touch, his loving kiss. She sniffled softly before replying.
“No. No, you don’t, but I don’t understand why you put up with me. I’m so selfish! You are so good to me, and I don’t do anything for you, and, and… and no wonder I needed this, deserved this, what you just did, when you… I didn’t pay any attention to you! I should have been thinking about you, but all I could think about was what was happening to me, and when your hand… when it would…”
“Hush.” He put a finger to her lips, quieting her, cradling her on his lap. He kissed her brow and slowly her breathing calmed. “You were perfect. You gave me everything I could possibly desire. You lost yourself in the experience, gave yourself over to me completely, and that, my darling, is more beautiful to me than you could imagine.”
Again she found herself lost in his eyes, looking for what he wasn’t saying but finding only honesty there. With a start she realized that she trusted him completely, knew with every fiber of her being that he would always take care of her. She wanted to wrap her arms about him and hold on tight, never let go, but of course that wasn’t possible yet. She lay her head against his chest, curling herself in his lap, and he held her more tightly. She could feel his heart beating strongly beneath her cheek, and she marveled at the power he wielded over her. With a single word he could calm her fears. With a single touch he could inflame her passions. With a single glance he could hold her soul.
She wriggled against him, settling in comfortably, and she felt his heart race within his ribcage. Experimentally, she wiggled again, and again his pulse rate shot up. She smiled to herself, marveling at the power she apparently held over him, too, her doubts evaporating like summer rain steaming under the hot southern sun.
“Careful, pet, or you’re liable to get me started all over again,” he said with a soft chuckle, and that thought only made her want to wriggle more. She turned her face up toward his, and he leaned down to kiss her lips, long, languorous, and slow. Now she really wished she could wrap her fingers in his hair, twining them in its silky black length, caressing the touch of grey just beginning to show at his temples, but she contented herself with inhaling his breath, tasting his mouth, parting her lips to tease the tip of his tongue with her own.
She felt just a twinge of discomfort from her sore bottom, but that reminder only served to ignite further flames within her. The twinge and her reaction didn’t escape his notice, and he responded by taking her mouth even more fiercely, crushing her lips with his kiss, taking her lower lip between his teeth and biting to just the edge of pain. Briefly she wondered if afterwards her lips would also be bruised, sore, and red, but then she ceased all thought as he renewed his advance, crushing her thin body against his with the ferocity of his embrace.
After an eternity that flashed by in an instant, he withdrew and they both caught their breaths, panting from aroused passions. He kept her gaze locked on his eyes, lifting a hand to push back a strand of hair falling across her face.
“Do you still wonder if I’m disappointed with you, my pet?”
She smiled, all fears laid to rest. “No. No, I don’t.”
“And are you disappointed with me?”
“No, I am not.”
“Good, because I plan to keep you for a very long time.”
She squirmed again in his lap, happiness settling over her, suffusing her through and through.
“Ok, I don’t think we need these any longer,” he said, reaching around behind her. “But first, pet, what are you?”
She knew this game. She liked this game, and now she knew it wasn’t actually a game.
“I am yours.”
“That’s right,” he said, as he unlocked the cuffs from her wrists.
By now you’ve all seen one or another of these posts, which seem to be going viral even though they are actually a few years old. The question raised seems to engender strong reactions and strong opinions, and, being a writerly and grammarly crowd, I’d expect it to be no different with any of you.
Should you use two spaces after a period ending a sentence, or not?
From what I can glean, the question first came up (on the web) in 2009 and was addressed by Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, in her podcast How Many Spaces After a Period? By the way, if you aren’t already familiar with the Grammar Girl series, you should be, as the posts are delightful, informative, and well-presented.
Two years later Farhad Manjoo jumped into the fray with an article in Slate entitled Space Invaders: Why You Should Never, Ever Use Two Spaces After a Period. This is the piece that apparently went viral, having to date been shared on Facebook 673,000 times, another nearly 11,000 times on Twitter, and receiving almost 600 comments on the original publication. It is still receiving comments and being shared today, although the article is approaching four years in age.
Both Fogarty and Manjoo assert that a single space after ending a sentence is correct, and the habit of using two spaces is a short-lived quirk of history that came in with the typewriter and its monospaced fonts. Now that we all use computers, they assert, we should relegate this archaic practice to the dustbin of history, alongside the Olivettis and IBM Selectrics that ushered it in.
I read these articles with a distinct sense of unease, as their assertions about how this all came about and what is actually correct did not gibe at all with how I was taught or my recollection of the whys and wherefores of both practices. Could it be that I’ve been wrong all these years?
Suddenly, all was right with the world again. The horizon was once more level. My memory was not suspect, and I was not slowly (or rapidly) losing my mind.
Well, I might still be losing my mind, so perhaps that is a different question for a different day.
You see, without wishing to date myself too much, I learned to type in high school on a typewriter. In those days the class was actually called Typing (nowadays I believe it’s referred to as Keyboarding). At least it was an electric typewriter; I’m not that ancient! I was indeed, like perhaps many of you, very specifically taught to use two spaces after a period, exclamation point, or question mark at the end of a sentence. Furthermore, I was also taught to use two spaces after a colon, and then to capitalize the first letter of the first word after the colon. Nobody said anything about monospaced fonts. Unless you were a typographer, there really was only one font: Courier. Proportional fonts, like right-margin justification, was something typesetters worried about.
So, I guess I did just date myself. Sigh.
My understanding of the history of the two spaces was that before the age of electric typewriters, periods were chancy things. They might print nice and neat and bold, they might come out small and faint and nearly impossible to see, or they might actually punch right through the page and into the platen, or roller, behind the paper. Thus we were told not to strike the period key too hard on a manual typewriter, which meant they would tend to faintness.
(Electric typewriters were expensive, and heavy, beasts. We may have used them in class, and later in the office, but the device I first owned for myself was decidedly unpowered.)
The point (see what I did there?) was that you couldn’t be too sure that the period would be easily visible and obvious to someone reading quickly, so by adding extra space after the period you provided a definitive visual cue that the sentence had indeed ended and another one, wholly separate, was about to begin. You were aiding the cause of speed reading.
At some point someone would inevitably point out that in newspapers only a single space appeared after a period and before the next sentence. Why would these bastions of language — and typography — commit this cardinal sin?
Because space in newsprint is expensive, my dear, the teacher would reply, and therefore a convention has arisen that it is acceptable in journalism to eliminate the second space. So, now we have one rule for journalism, and another rule for all other writing.
In the early days of my career when I worked as an executive secretary (using a word processor, thank you very much, but I still had to take a typing test on a Selectric to get the job), no one, not once, ever said I was doing it wrong by using two spaces. Business grammar and journalism grammar apparently really were two different things.
Well, that part about the cheapness of news editors may or may not have been true (probably not), but nevertheless Heraclitus had restored order to the world by setting the record straight. Two spaces is correct, and furthermore it has been correct for long ages of history. We could all breathe easy.
Or not. You see, I had noticed some time ago that when I typed my posts in WordPress, sometimes the left margin would not justify properly. I was mystified as to why this was happening, and it gave my posts a decidedly unprofessional look, all sort of raggedy and uneven.
Then it dawned on me. Every time a line was out of alignment with the left margin, it was a new sentence beginning at that margin. Something was up with the way WordPress was inserting line breaks between sentences, and of course what was up was that WordPress was assuming there would be only one space after the period. Therefore, the second space was apparently assumed to be part of the new sentence, and thus the line should begin with that space.
Not at all what I intended.
Some of you old-time bloggers may have a trick up your sleeve to trick WordPress into treating the two spaces correctly (Heraclitus manages to do it on his non-WordPress blog), but otherwise it seems that WordPress indeed forces us to use a single space.
It’s not just WordPress, either. HTML, the “language” upon which much of the World Wide Web depends, eliminates extra spaces between words by design. There are ways to trick HTML code to retain spaces, but the upshot is that a space has a specific purpose in HTML, and having more than one in a row is… wasted space.
It would seem that we double-spacers are losing this battle, or at least we must go to much more extreme efforts if we wish to hold onto our ways. Is it worth it? Indeed, you will of course notice that I am not double-spacing in this post, nor (intentionally) in any of my posts on this blog. I like my left margins to line up, after all. I am even starting to train myself in the habit of using a single space elsewhere, but I admit it is hard. Long decades of habit are working against me on this one. I must very deliberately think about not double-tapping the space bar.
So, what do you do? What are your thoughts on this essential, and burning, question? Do you think a single space is better, or two spaces? Or do you not care?
I’m a hiker. I pretty much always have been, beginning as a small child being taken on hiking and camping trips by my mother (at 81 she has just begun to slow down in the past couple years). For a while, about ten years ago, I even got into climbing, but had to let that drop as the time commitment was more than I had capacity for. I still harbor dreams of ascending some of the larger local peaks from time to time, and to that end I decided that this summer I would climb Mt Adams.
I say climb, but I suppose what I really mean is scramble, as the South Spur route that I intended to take is “non-technical,” which is a polite way of saying that if you fall, there is no rope with which your companions might save you, and you may therefore tumble two-thousand feet down an ice chute all by yourself, rather than dragging the others with you. You still need crampons and ice axe, so it’s a little more than going off-trail. But I digress.
Regardless of the technicality of it all, it had been a few years since I had ascended something like that, and I wasn’t quite in the shape I thought I should be for the attempt. So, over last winter and spring I set out to train, getting much more intense at the gym, going running, outdoor stair climbing (my personal favorite is Golden Gardens — see this delightful description (with photos!) of the experience), and, as the winter turned to spring, replacing the stairs with conditioning hikes in the lower-elevation Cascade foothills.
On a side note, I’m not much of a runner, because running tends to make my knee hurt, which probably just means I’m doing it wrong and have bad shoes. So, this time I purchased new shoes and deliberately set out on a very gradual and easy program. Fat lot of good it did me, as you’ll see.
The training paid off. I received compliments on my shrinking waistline, the scale also had nice things to say, and the improvements in time going up and down those stairs was measurable, not to mention I got to the point where I could actually talk while going up those stairs, and not just huff and puff and sweat and wonder Dear God, will it ever end? Make it stop!
Then came the Cable Line. You know how trails will make switchbacks to get up steep hills, and sometimes you can see where people have cut the corners of the switchback, saving themselves perhaps a few extra steps but enduring a brief moment of steep ruggedness? (Don’t ever do that, by the way. Very bad form). Well, the Cable Line is the ultimate cutting of a switchback, in that while it starts and ends at nearly the same place as a real trail, it bypasses all the switchbacks of that trail and goes straight up, gaining 2,000′ in just 1.5 miles. This is pretty much the definition of a vertical slope, at least as far as hikers are concerned.
So, I made it to the top of the Cable Line ok. I wasn’t especially impressed with my performance, but I didn’t die on the way up. At the top one is rewarded with really quite a nice view of the Puget Sound communities laid out below, and once I had learned how to breathe normally again I was able to appreciate this.
Then it was time to go back down. That’s when my troubles began.
Downhill is where creaky knees make themselves known. I didn’t even attempt to go back down the way I had come up. I consciously tried to save my knees by taking the longer, but less steep, winding West Tiger 3 trail. That would be the one whose switchbacks the Cable Line so directly cuts. However, I was thinking about dinner and moving pretty fast and after all this wasn’t the rough and steep Cable Line but rather a normal trail, and… my knee popped.
Hobbling down the rest of the way, practically hopping on one leg, I knew this was not a good sign. Once I made it back to civilization (there was some doubt), I gave myself a week off from all things stressful to knees, then tried a city park walk, and… no go.
Climbing was out for this summer.
However, maybe not all was lost, and I’d still be able to get in some really good hikes, just not the steep, snowy, “semi-technical” high-angle bits with heavy packs. I had already made plans for some weekend getaways in late summer (after the climb was to be finished) to cabins and lodges in beautiful, mountainous parts of the state, with the intent of spending two or three days hiking classic trails in each spot. With an eye to salvaging what I could of the summer I set out to restore my knee, going to physical therapy, and so on, and it is getting better.
Just not very quickly. Walks of more than a few blocks have a tendency to bring back that “pop,” especially if there’s any downhill to it, so those classic trails have been beyond me this summer. My fitness level has returned to a pre-training state, and I’m afraid the scale is no longer as friendly as it was a few months ago.
I elected to still go on the getaways, however, even though I could not hike. “Perfect writing time!” I thought to myself. “I’ll get so much done!” And it’s true, I have managed to get in some decent writing time while hanging around the coffee shop in Glacier, and in the beautiful lodge at Paradise and picnic area at Sunrise, and, this weekend, the inn and country store at Mazama.
Alas, my summer weekend getaways are now done, but I’m certain I’ll manage to continue to find inspiration around me. My stories tend to take place mostly in the city, after all.
I’m off to another getaway weekend in the mountains, laptop and a good book in tow. There might be wifi where I’m staying, but there just as likely might not be, and I’m all right with that. Fewer distractions (though you are all wonderful distractions) means more actual writing gets done. See you in a few days!
Lace Winter 