Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

Yes, painting your cat is more socially acceptable, but shaving and waxing your cat (since it takes longer) is more useful to writers who are trying to put off writing.

If you have a poodle you can do even more astounding things to put off the moment when you start writing.

Oh, and since to be a novelist is to know mankind, here are True Porn Clerk Stories. A young lady takes a temp job while waiting for the freelancing thing to work out.

Insightful and funny. What's not to like?

I did NOT leave my thumbprint on that DVD! She lies! But seriously, that was pretty funny.

Uncle Jim,

Half of me wonders where you find all these things you link to in this tread.

The other half really doesn't care to know.

Hey Uncle Jim, got a question I've asked before, but I'm going to ask again because I am a pain... I'm writing about a fictional town in New Hampshire, approx. 80 miles west of Manchester. You gave me some good points on some town layout a long time ago (and I have that page printed out for reference), but I wanted to know what would be a good site to find physical characteristics of the land. All native fauna and botany as well as good photos to really bring out my descriptions. You are certainly a king of research, so I'm hoping you'll be able to guide me to a good site.
Thanks

Are you unfamiliar with Google? Search for "New Hampshire photos plants animals" and you'll get everything you could possibly want.

caw

Yeah, I am familiar with Google. My reasoning is that there are an endless number of sites, and I thought someone could tell me the best one.

For New Hampshire plants and animals, your first stop should probably be the NH Fish and Game site.


80 miles west of Manchester is somewhere between Walpole and Keene. So, let's see: Walpole has a population of around 3,500, which I think is about what you wanted for your story? Hit Google Images for Walpole, NH, then hit your local library for tourist books on the North East, and for books on plants, birds, flowers, and so on, for the North East.

Tourist books are wonderful for the writer who can't visit the places, as long as you don't have people giving each other as-you-know-Bob descriptions of local places and events.

(If you want a smaller town, Gilsum, NH, has a population of 811. If you want a larger one, Keene is a college town, with a population of 22,500.)

Google images with the town name is a quick shortcut to finding all the pictures you want on one page.

Research one real town, then re-name it. That's how to cheat.

LOL I never missed the post you deleted, and your google experience I see has improved. At the end of the day, only you can decide what is the best site

Perfect, thanks Uncle Jim! Walpole will be a good setting to play around with and tweak to my needs. Yes, the perfect size, etc...

Tonight on CNN:

"Can't we English-speakers just agree upon a gender-neutral pronoun?" attorney Paul Easton recently Twittered. "Tired of PC grammar gymnastics."

Easton isn't alone. There have been at least 18 recent tweets about the fact that English has no grammatically correct substitutes for words like "he," "him," and "his" that do not have a gender implied.

Consider the sentence "Everyone loves his mother." The word "his" may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with "his or her" seems cumbersome, and "their" is grammatically incorrect.

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Nonsense! "Their" is perfectly grammatically correct. The objection to the singular their is another of the botches created by the Latinate prescriptive grammarians of the 18th century. (Along with, more famously, not ending a sentence with a preposition, and not splitting an infinitive (both forms that we all use, perfectly correctly, every day).)
Chaucer used the singular their. The King James Bible uses it. Shakespeare used it. Jane Austin used it. George Orwell used it. F. Scott Fitzgerald used it.

And I use it.

Go, my children, and say "Everyone loves their mother."

It's correct.

Everyone loves their mother, well they should

The Walpole, NH, weather cam.

Walpole images (Google) Everything from the town's tourist board photos to snapshots of people's weddings.

And New England Travel Guides.

You'll probably also want to find a copy of Curious New England.

James D. Macdonald said:

Nonsense! "Their" is perfectly grammatically correct. The objection to the singular their is another of the botches created by the Latinate prescriptive grammarians of the 18th century. (Along with, more famously, not ending a sentence with a preposition, and not splitting an infinitive (both forms that we all use, perfectly correctly, every day).)
Chaucer used the singular their. The King James Bible uses it. Shakespeare used it. Jane Austin used it. George Orwell used it. F. Scott Fitzgerald used it.

And I use it.

Go, my children, and say "Everyone loves their mother."

It's correct.

Click to expand...

THANK YOU Uncle Jim! I've been trying to tell people this, but I always get corrected when I do so. Usually I just wind up using "he" in order to avoid an argument about the subject. I agree 100%. Can we please stop this awkward silliness already? *Sigh*

Can someone please explain what does splitting infinitives mean?

Splitting infinitives:

Okay.

In English, an infinitive is a verb in the form "to [verb]." E.g: to love, to warn, to rule, to hear.

In Latin (and other inflected languages), you can't split infinitives because the infinitive form is one word. E.g: amare, monere, regere, audire.

But in English, since the infinitive is two words, you can put other words between the "to" and the verb. Famously, from Star Trek, "to boldly go where no man has gone before."

English has always split infinitives. But when the Latinate Prescriptive Grammarians came along in the 18th century, to impose the grammatical rules from Latin onto English in order to make English respectable (since Latin was the perfect language) they decided that it was therefore wrong to split infinitives in English.

Everyone should go forth from this thread to passionatly love their...nevermind.

/Oedipus complex

There are two kinds of grammarians in the world: Descriptive and Prescriptive. The Descriptive Grammarians find the way that the language works based on the way native speakers use it. The Prescriptive Grammarians figure out how they want the language to work, and try to get native speakers to go along with it.

Descriptive Grammarians win.

Oooh, thanks, Uncle Jim. Splitting infinitives never made sense to me because I speak a language in which infinitives consist of only one word. I've always had that doubt.

But really, trying to apply Latin rules to English? Ha! It doesn't even quite work with Spanish, even though Spanish is more akin to Latin than English (not that people haven't tried; the first Spanish grammar in the XV century had that exact purpose).

James D. Macdonald said:

The Walpole, NH, weather cam.

Walpole images (Google) Everything from the town's tourist board photos to snapshots of people's weddings.

And New England Travel Guides.

You'll probably also want to find a copy of Curious New England.

Click to expand...

Thanks UJ, I'll be sure to remember to thank you again in the front of the book when it gets published. (Notice I say "when," not "if." Confidence, Baby!)

There are two kinds of grammarians in the world: Descriptive and Prescriptive.

Click to expand...

What about militant grammarians?

That may be a whole other animal altogether.

I don't know if it's a great help for designing fictional towns, but www.city-data.com is a phenomenal collection of public data for almost any town in the US. So it's 14 miles from Walpole to the nearest hospital. 18 Miles to the nearest airport. Lower than usual unemployment. Graphs of temperature, humidity, wind, snow by month. Older population, not much black or Hispanic population. And a hundred more.

James D. Macdonald said:

There are two kinds of grammarians in the world: Descriptive and Prescriptive. The Descriptive Grammarians find the way that the language works based on the way native speakers use it. The Prescriptive Grammarians figure out how they want the language to work, and try to get native speakers to go along with it.

Descriptive Grammarians win.

Click to expand...

Yet we must be ever vigilant, for Prescriptive Grammarians teach. A textbook on grammar that boasts "10% more rules than leading brands" is going to get bought by school boards. You wouldn't want your kids to learn some kind of slackjawed slang in school, would you? So, even to this day, children have "Thou shalt not split infinitives" driven into their heads by rote. To this day, I get "corrected" by people who can't use an apostrophe.

English is not Latin.

Besides, to use the Star Trek example, splitting the infinitive gives English a lot of descriptive power. "To boldly go" is the key phrase, and if you look at it, "go" is in a position of power. Star Trek's emphasis is not on boldness, but on going.

Got it!

James D. Macdonald said:

The Young Visiters; or, Mr. Salteena's Plan by Daisy Ashford. A novel, from 1919. It went into multiple printings in its first year.

Ms. Ashford was nine years old when she wrote it.

The novel was turned into a stage play, which ran in New York and London in 1920.

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I have it. An illustrated version dated 1949. Brilliant! It's full of little gems. How on Earth did they make a play out of it, though? It's so small (50 pages) and nothing much happens.