dear Past Me, please stop using such weird punctuation

[edenfalling]

Chapter 6 of "The Guardian in Spite of Herself" (revised version) is now up on AO3. :D

Chapter 16 is inching along. I yanked Yukiko and Seichi back from a conversational dead end (and un-contradicted myself in the process, which was a nice side benefit) and they are now set up to actually talk about what I WANT them to talk about. So, you know, things progress. *wry*

Comments

[branchandroot]

Oh wow, yes, old story punctuation is like some kind of orthographic time capsule.

[edenfalling]

I think a significant part of the problem is that I didn't really have an established style of my own before I started writing fanfic, my first fandom was Harry Potter, and my second fic there was a retelling of canon so I needed my narrative and dialogue to mesh smoothly with Rowling's narrative and dialogue. I wound up kind of imprinting on dashes. *headdesk*

[heliopausa]

This link from twistedchick (and before that from the New Yorker) is a fun read about punctuation from a copy-editor's POV.

[edenfalling]

A very interesting article! I am a firm believer in the serial (or Oxford) comma, but aside from that I lean more toward punctuation by ear -- at least in fiction. I make a special editing pass through every story I write specifically to weed out extraneous commas, since they seem to sprout like particularly pernicious weeds when I'm not paying attention and I hate the way they interrupt the flow of the narrative. (I sometimes punctuate the living daylights out of nonfiction, though, because dammit I want to be clear.)