Which is why I said "I think", whereas you have been writing in absolutes -- it "needs more than a comma to fix it" and so on, rather than "I think it needs more than a comma to fix it". There's no absolute law on things like this, and I worry when people try to lay one down. Different people liking different things is fine and is the reason we don't all read the same books. Trying to make everybody write the way just one of us likes is trying to make the world a blander place, which I don't see as the function of creative writing. I think you mean higher plane, by the way.
Higher plane - I stand corrected. I often write maybe, could try, I think, I once heard, someone told me, I am not sure etc. but in this instance I feel positive. You wrote 'that is your view' it obviously is my view, so why say it?
Melzaar you and I are not hear to be loved but to learn. And talking of love, after having your sentence ripped apart word by word do you still love it?
I never really loved it in the first place - but this is a novel that's going to be a million words long so I'm not going to stress over every sentence, or I'd never get it done. This is still the first draft I'm hammering out. I'm happy with it because it expresses what I want it to express in the least words without just being stupid, or breaking the natural flow of the narrator's voice. I made a couple of changes - no one's commented on them so I'm assuming no one read my post. But I'm not stressing over the content and I never was. Merely making a query about punctuating which this novel has thrown up several times - I could have picked one of a dozen instances where Sael thought of one thing to say and said another... It was just that was the latest one I'd written, so the sentence itself had nothing to do with it. I could post ANY sentence from the novel, even one I liked best, say there was a problem with it, and have 40 different solutions offered my way. In the end it comes down to what I want to write, not what anyone else thinks I should be. All I wanted was to learn about commas, and I did. The rest of this debate is amusing but not helpin' me.
Because you state it as if it were indisputable fact. In this instance you feel positive, but so do I. The difference is that I recognise that my view is a matter of personal taste, whereas you seem to think that your view is inviolable law.
Isn't “My mood does not depend entirely on you.....[rant]" just a thought and not actually spoken by the char? I was told that no quotation marks are required for thoughts, so I am confuse. I think nobody mentioned it, so at the risk of sounding totally ignorant I am posting this
You're right that quotation marks are not usually used for speech. But in this case it is speech -- it's just speech that didn't actually take place. It's reported as what the character wanted to say, not as what the character thought.
Might there be a value in reversing the order of that which is wished to be spoken and that which is actually spoken? Will that is wished to be spoken perhaps cause the reader to think: 'at last they've said what needs to be said!'... and then, rather naughtily, pull the rug from under them..
I do like that, Art, but the line before doesn't work - I can't really have a gap several sentences long between a repetition like the "that's strange" "yeah we are strange" or it loses its effect... Eh. Well, to me, it does. I'm sure people would want to re-write this scene very differently if they were in control and it's not like it HAS to be this way... Just that that's how it came out and I'm okay with it... Just not looking to re-write at this stage. Maybe later I'll come back, but I haven't really done more than edit awkward word choice as I read through on my way up to the latest point of writing so far.
