Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with flash fiction and its subgenre micro fiction as a way of trying to crystallize my writing. One tangible result is this story, “Lunch break.”
Wouldn’t you know it: two days after telling you that I seldom use the exclamation point, it makes an appearance in the title of a post for the second time in a row.
Its presence is deserved, I think, to help convey the joy of getting published less than a month into this new leg of my writing journey.
“Lunch Break,” a bit of micro fiction I submitted to the website Paragraph Planet, is today’s featured story on the site. Huzzah!
Continue reading “Published!”Some see the ! as the comic sans of the punctuation world, a clownish affront to all who take their writing and reading seriously.
When I decided to rename this blog Andy writes! to signify its new direction, I’m sure a few readers cringed at the sight of an exclamation point in the title.
I understand. For writers, the exclamation point (hereinafter referred to as “!”) is perhaps the most maligned and most offensive of all punctuation marks. In his book Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, Benjamin Dreyer calls the ! “bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying.” In her Grammar Girl Style Guide, Mignon Fogarty, without passing judgment, advises, “Don’t overuse them.” The late Elmore Leonard, a prolific and best-selling crime novelist, laid down the law on the ! in his 10 rules for writing: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.”
Continue reading “That exclamation point!”
Andy writes! 