Just Another Writer's Journal

I was telling a friend that I was almost finished with my book, and after expressing interest in reading it, he said: it better have a good synopsis or whatever you call the overview of the book My response was, "Yeah, of course," though what I wanted to say was: no, I'm going to go with a bad synopsis, I think that will sell more books. Of course, the real problem is; how do you know you have a good synopsis? I wrote the book, and have read it about a dozen times at least, and I'm still not sure what to include in the synopsis, and what angle to take. I guess the problem is that each reader will probably find something different appealing. I did find this article on writing a book synopsis , and I think I followed the five points...okay, I didn't exactly follow point 5 "Tell us the ending," but I heavily hint at it. So this is the synopsis I have written: Struggling musician Ed Fisher doesn’t care for fellow musician Aleck Sorenson. Sorenson ...

I've been using Grammarly for about a week, and they just sent me an email congratulating me on how well I am doing. Turns out, if you proof a book in a week using Grammarly, you can end up with impressive stats compared to other users. For example, with 394,783 words checked, I was more Productive than 99% of Grammarly users (Don't tell them that the text is the result of about a year of work.) Also, some chapters went through a couple of times. My Vocabulary is pretty impressive too; better than 99% of users. I probably shouldn't get too excited because those 5,292 words are nothing compared to the 31,534 different words Shakespeare used. Where I fell down is in Mastery . I'm only more accurate than 75% of users. I blame commas. My english teachers always took issue with my enthusiasm for the comma.

As I wrote in my previous post ( Grammarly - I think I like it ), I've been using Grammarly to proof my book. I'm still happy with it, but I did discover a problem it has with certain punctuation imported in a Word .docx file. One of Grammarly's features is a fix for 'Inconsistent punctuation.' It was upset that my files (which were .docx files exported from Adobe InDesign ) contained a mix of straight and curly apostrophe and quotation marks. I think the problem is that internally  InDesign fixes these issues in your original text on the fly, but if you export the text it sends out the original formatting rather than changing the punctuation. I figured that making this change in Grammarly was a good idea, but what I discovered is that after doing this, there were instances where single apostrophes and quotation marks were moved, particularly around a 'word' or if I had a single apostrophe next to quotation marks: "And then he shouted 'Fire!...

I’d seen the ads for Grammarly, a tool that promised to help me “ Compose bold, clear*, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant, ” but I was skeptical. Maybe I didn’t want to spend the $139.95 a year it costs (there is also a $29.95 a month option.) [* that sentence came from Grammarly’s website, and Grammarly suggested changing the word clear.] This week I finally tried the free version, just out of curiosity, and after using it I was intrigued enough to get the paid version, a nd though it’s only been a few days, I like it. I’ve been running my book through it, and while we have a lot of disagreements (primarily over Unclear Antecedents), it has found enough spelling errors I had missed, and grammar and punctuation mistakes, to make me feel that it's worth the price. Pros • It finds spelling mistakes and grammar issues that I missed using other tools, and with multiple proof-readings. • It’s easy to use, though performance c...