-
Go Set an Editor: What Harper Lee Can Teach You About Done-ness
*mild Go Set a Watchman spoilers in this post! Harper Lee is a beloved household name. Middle and high school kids all across America make friends with Scout and Jem and Dill as a rite of passage. Sleepy Maycomb seems to seep into the lives of everyone it touches somehow. (For real. I named my…
-
The Red Pen: Perfectly Peculiar Punctuation
The rise of texting may have brought about the downfall of punctuation…but these rarely-used marks are sure to bring a little dash of whimsy to your manuscript. The Manicule It’s vintage! It’s retro! It’s…the manicule! Hipster writers will party like it’s 1599 if they bring back the manicule (☞), that little index finger-pointing hand that…
-
The Red Pen: To pass, or not to pass…on passive voice
Passive (aggressive) voice might be appropriate for those mildly shade-throwing work emails that get CC’d to your boss, but should you nix it in your writing? What is passive voice? When we’re talking about voice in grammar, we’re talking about what part of a clause is on the receiving end of the action—the subject, or…
-
The Red Pen: That is such a cliché
What they are I am an editor and an English teacher to the core. What this means is that I’ve been known to take love notes from the well-meaning suitors of my children and students, red pen them, and send them back. All’s fair in love and war, but not in writing: a comma splice…
-
DEADLINE EXTENDED: Little Women 150th anniversary anthology open for submissions!
“I want to do something splendid . . . I think I shall write books . . . .” -Jo March, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, 1868 For generations, children around the world have come of age with Louisa May Alcott’s March girls. Their escapades and trials punctuated our own childhoods—maybe we weren’t victims of…
-
The Red Pen: Sentences…the long and the short of it
I sentence you to better control of your syntax. Perhaps you’ve seen this brilliant syntax exercise before from Gary Provost, sometimes called the “writer’s writer”: This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring.…
-
The Red Pen: Dangling Modifiers
Dangling: good for trained soldiers in rescue missions, bad for modifiers. Pardon me, but your modifier appears to be dangling…. Dangling or misplaced modifiers are feats of grammatical ambiguity that can create awkwardness for writers. A modifier is a phrase, clause or word that provides description in a sentence. Dangling or misplaced modifiers occur when…
-
Duck, Duck, Moose Blog Tour
Pink Umbrella Books is excited to announce the Duck, Duck, Moose blog tour, which will run March 20-30, 2018. NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON! About the book: Duck’s best friend Goose is gone for winter and Duck is lonely. The animals try to cheer Duck, but Duck, Duck, Pig is too messy, and Duck, Duck,…
-
Coming Soon: The Colorblind Series, by RC Hancock
Pink Umbrella Books is excited to announce the upcoming re-release of RC Hancock’s debut novel, An Uncommon Blue. Hancock’s acclaimed story about a society in which social class is determined by the color of the light in a person’s palm teaches timeless lessons about accepting others despite differences and gaining true self-worth through heroic acts…
pinkumbrellapublishing.com 