My Weekends are Long and Delicious

            My weekends are long and delicious. This Sunday morning, my five year old opened the door and saw the snow lilt down from the sky. His eyes opened wide and he said, “Oh, wow.”

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            If you hadn’t noticed, my blogging has been sparse. Okay, non-existent. People have asked me how graduate school is going. I have consistently lied: “Awesome, easy, fun.” One of my friends who recently graduated with her Master’s in German responded to me: “Well then, you are doing grad school wrong!”

            The truth is mid-terms have shown their ugly faces. I don’t have tests in any of my classes. I have lots of reading and papers. Did I say I have lots of reading and papers? I have lots of reading and papers. And I have work in the IT department on campus and one-on-one consultations at the University Writing Center. I have kids and a wife. This blog, my own personal writing, and a balancing act with my schedule. Indeed, moving from a second-shift food service schedule to the first-shift meanderings of academia, the first half of the semester has been figuring out this new routine. I felt overwhelmed and disconnected from my cohorts and professors—at a loss for how to organize my life. Always behind in all of my work.

            Breath, Steve, breath, I keep telling myself that.

            In my teens, I was enthralled with essayist Robert Fulghum. In one untitled essay, I continue to remember, Fulghum says he is a professional breather.

            That’s cool, right?

            We all breath. But so seldom do we think about the therapeutic nature of deliberate, concentrated breathing. Don’t classify me as a creature born of 1990’s New Age metaphysical thinking. I was never into the power of crystals. Yoga always looked painful to me, and meditation was conducive to extended fits of snoring. My point, life has gotten crazy, busy, random, wild, beautiful.

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            Yesterday my wife told me I seemed more relaxed, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had gotten angry. Oh yeah, that anger stemmed from the food service industry. I enjoyed food service. I particularly enjoyed the pizza niche. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed all my pizza tweets because October is National Pizza Month. Thirty-one days of pizza tweets. I know more about pizza than you’ll ever probably care. But my heart was always just half-way in the pizza industry. I am forty years old, quickly staring down hard at fifty because ten years melt away so fast, slip through the fingers like ice in June. And finally, I am only beginning.

            Meine Wochenenden sind lang und lecker.

            I opened my eyes wide and said, “Oh, wow.”

 

WASTELAND: THE END OF WINTER

 

“I thought this book was beautiful. Having just finished it, I feel like I have just woken up from a really disturbing dream” – Rose Actor-engel, Amazon

Christine and Jack sat on the back deck of their cottage and watched the stars fall into the lake. They whispered to each other, "Beautiful." But Jack did not know his life was to forever change. A plague came. Christine died. Aliens landed and they put things in his food and soap. The sidewalks lit up blue to let him know when he was allowed to go to the store. Filled with drugs, sex, and cigarettes, the first of six inter-related short stories that make up the entirety of the Wasteland series all styled after Winesburg, Ohio and As I Lay Dying. Based loosely off T.S. Elliot's poem of the same name, The Wasteland is told from the perspectives of the people living inside Jack's head.

 

 

Would you like your book featured here? For free? Email me!

 

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Steve Bargdill writes “literary stuff” with the occasional foray into speculative fiction. Originally from Ohio, he has lived in Dayton, Columbus, Troy, St. Marys, and New Knoxville as well as West Branch, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; Muncie, Indiana; and currently lives in Laramie, Wyoming. Bargdill is the author of The Wasteland Series available on Amazon. He’s written for several newspapers and is currently a first year English graduate student at the University of Wyoming. You can read his short stories for free on Wattpad. You can also like him on Facebook where he posts a daily poem, Monday evening writing prompts, hump day videos and more nonsense!

Graduate Blues: A Good, Comfortable Place

My wife made the comment yesterday that she thought I seemed comfortable in my new graduate studies surroundings. Classes haven't even begun. I'm still knee deep in the middle of orientation. I say the word orientation because I can't pronounce the colloquium, which is just a fancy word for crash course in teaching Composition 1010. And trust me, I practiced pronouncing colloquium for two whole weeks before Monday came around, and I still can't get it to form in my mouth correctly.

New vocabulary aside, I am comfortable. More comfortable than I was as an undergrad throughout my thirties sitting with students ten, fifteen, twenty years younger that I. I had more in common with my instructors that I did with my fellow undergrad students--things like daycare issues and whether or not my eldest daughter was doing her homework or not.

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Monday, we had lunch in Hoyt Hall. During our meal, MFA director Beth Loffreda and MA director Caskey Russell gave presentations. Beth Loffreda stressed the importance of taking time out for ourselves to work on our own personal writing. She gave me, in effect, permission to tell my stories--something that never happened as an undergraduate. School came around, and whatever writing I had been doing through the summer got shelved for the semester. My book Wasteland, not T.S. Elliot's piece of brilliance, took me three summers to write because of the way I prioritized me time, and here Beth Loffreda said to me--to the whole group chowing down on fruit and ham sandwiches--she was saying in effect to take care of the business of spirituality and balance.

And then Caskey Russell comes along and blows me away even more. He said that we weren't just students anymore. He stressed how we had moved from the realm of the student to the realm of professional. That this was the beginning of our careers. And he pushed the idea of a Ph.D., something I already had on my radar, the pursuit of my dream.

How much more comfortable could I be?

Don't get me wrong. I received plenty of encouragement as an undergraduate, but nobody was totally on my page; nobody so completely addressed my fear that I would become so completely engrossed in the educational process that I'd have time for nothing else--my kids, my wife, my writing, myself.

I am positive over the next two years I will have my stressors. Those days when I want to strangle everyone I come into contact with. Those academic papers I want to burn. Concepts I will not be able to form correctly in my head just like the word colloquium doesn't form correctly in my mouth.

But this graduate school thing is going to be a good, comfortable place.

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WASTELAND: THE END OF WINTER

 

“I thought this book was beautiful. Having just finished it, I feel like I have just woken up from a really disturbing dream” – Rose Actor-engel, Amazon

Christine and Jack sat on the back deck of their cottage and watched the stars fall into the lake. They whispered to each other, "Beautiful." But Jack did not know his life was to forever change. A plague came. Christine died. Aliens landed and they put things in his food and soap. The sidewalks lit up blue to let him know when he was allowed to go to the store. Filled with drugs, sex, and cigarettes, the first of six inter-related short stories that make up the entirety of the Wasteland series all styled after Winesburg, Ohio and As I Lay Dying. Based loosely off T.S. Elliot's poem of the same name, The Wasteland is told from the perspectives of the people living inside Jack's head.

 

 

Would you like your book featured here? For free? Email me!

 

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Steve Bargdill writes “literary stuff” with the occasional foray into speculative fiction. Originally from Ohio, he has lived in Dayton, Columbus, Troy, St. Marys, and New Knoxville as well as West Branch, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; Muncie, Indiana; and currently lives in Laramie, Wyoming. Bargdill is the author of The Wasteland Series available on Amazon. He’s written for several newspapers and is currently a first year English graduate student at the University of Wyoming. You can read his short stories for free on Wattpad. You can also like him on Facebook where he posts a daily poem, Monday evening writing prompts, hump day videos and more nonsense!

Fezzes Are Cool

Quitting my job was hard enough. I'm forty years old and all I've known is foodservice. Overall, the food industry has made a decent career. But being on the tail end of the Gen-Xers, I've always known retirement, for me, was never going to look like the same retirement experience as my parents and grandparents. I wasn't going to just stop working at sixty-five, sit back and relax, but I couldn't see myself at sixty or seventy standing at a grill or working behind a pizza oven. And since high school, my dream had always been to teach at the university level. To be an academic. To pour over books and have smart things to say about those books.

 

I failed my first year of college though, and was happy enough for a long time with my Associate's where I got kinda okay grades. Being a professor seemed unreasonable and out of reach. An impossibility.

 

It took me twenty-two years to finish my bachelor's. I've been told that's an accomplishment. I chock it up to ingrained genetic stubbornness really. Not anything spectacular, just a doggedness to keep going back to class, to be willing to work like a mule. Just one more class checked off the list, you know. And another class and another class, until one day I applied for grad school.

 

And I got in. Then I was invited to a get-together. Kind of a meet and greet before the semester with alcohol.

 

Broke (because that's what you are when you're a college student, a parent, and someone who just quit his job), I had nothing to bring to the party--no bottle of wine, no scotch, not even PBR. And, the last time I was at a gathering without the spouse or the kids and alcohol was available, believe me, I took full advantage. So by rights, I was pretty nervous. Scared maybe would be a better word. Intimidated a better description.

 

I mean, who was I but some schmuck who had a couple of things self-published up on Amazon (please, btw, buy so I can continue to support my educational addiction)? I was only someone who had read a bunch of books and knew my way around a kitchen really, really well. These people--my cohorts, my fellow educational adventurers--as young as they were/are surely were/are smarter than I; more deserving of the Graduate Assistantship.

 

However, in an awkward lull in the conversation at the meet and greet, I made a Doctor Who joke and people laughed and I knew I was in good company.

And I thought, I can do this: I am so organizing a fez day at the university. Because, you know, fezzes are cool.  

 



 

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WASTELAND: THE END OF WINTER

 

“I thought this book was beautiful. Having just finished it, I feel like I have just woken up from a really disturbing dream” – Rose Actor-engel, Amazon

Christine and Jack sat on the back deck of their cottage and watched the stars fall into the lake. They whispered to each other, "Beautiful." But Jack did not know his life was to forever change. A plague came. Christine died. Aliens landed and they put things in his food and soap. The sidewalks lit up blue to let him know when he was allowed to go to the store. Filled with drugs, sex, and cigarettes, the first of six inter-related short stories that make up the entirety of the Wasteland series all styled after Winesburg, Ohio and As I Lay Dying. Based loosely off T.S. Elliot's poem of the same name, The Wasteland is told from the perspectives of the people living inside Jack's head.

 

 

Would you like your book featured here? For free? Email me!

 

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Steve Bargdill writes “literary stuff” with the occasional foray into speculative fiction. Originally from Ohio, he has lived in Dayton, Columbus, Troy, St. Marys, and New Knoxville as well as West Branch, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; Muncie, Indiana; and currently lives in Laramie, Wyoming. Bargdill is the author of The Wasteland Series available on Amazon. He’s written for several newspapers and is currently a first year English graduate student at the University of Wyoming. You can read his short stories for free on Wattpad. You can also like him on Facebook where he posts a daily poem, Monday evening writing prompts, hump day videos and more nonsense!

Hugh Howey the New 'Gangman Style'

Why are people posting articles on the decline of ebook sales? This article by Nathan Bransford doesn't really answer that question, but it does point out how faulty some of these articles are that claim ebook sales are slumping.

And even though 2013 has seen a plateau, ebook sales are still up in comparison to paper copies. The music industry came into the digital world of mp3 players kicking and screaming, and I don't see the publishing industry doing anything differently. Because the music industry's evolution was so incredibly recent, you would think the publishing world would realize what's happening to their books.

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Interestingly, hard copies of music (read CDs) still come out on top of the sales charts in the music industry. Last year, 2012, CDs held the market share of music sales at just over 35%, according to Digital Music News. DMN’s Gif doesn’t take into account the increase in the overall size of the music industry though; or the music industry’s 1999 decrease in revenue; or the current plateau the music industry is predicted to have over the next five years (PriceWaterhouse Predicts Near-Zero Music Industy Growth Over the Next 5 Years, Digital Music News).

 

Seems like every time we had a new tech advance though, the music industry experienced an uptick in sales. Just over a year ago in June 2012 ebooks outsold the traditional hard copy paper book, and according to a 2010 survey people who owned a Kindle or Nook purchased more books than they would have if they did not own an ereader. This was all about the time I also decided to self-publish my Wasteland series, when a couple years prior (2009-2010) I made fun of people who self-published. But then came along authors such as Hugh Howey of Wool fame, who brokered an unprecedented print publishing deal with Simon & Schuster. Thanks to literary agents contacting him—not the other way around; not authors contacting agents, begging for representation—and Kristin Nelson was not the first agent to have contacted Howey.

Howey is not the only author to be contacted by Nelson. For example, have you heard of Jasinda Wilder? Wilder has sold 70,000 ebook copies of new adult romance Falling Into You, and Nelson picked her up sometime around April as a client. Wait and see: more literary agents such as Nelson will emerge, picking up indie authors who have made big sales on their own in the e-world.

The e-reader world has become the new proving ground for authors. Soon, novels will no longer be acquired by publishers or agents as they have in the past. The agent query letter may indeed soon be dead, perhaps replaced by the author query letter.

Which brings me back to music, and in the words of David Bowie, “The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it” (excerpt from the 2002 New York Times article “David Bowie, 21^st Century Entrepreneur” by John Pareles). Music CDs certainly haven’t disappeared from the marketplace, but the way we discover our new pop idols has radically shifted. Think about Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Park Jae-sang—a.ka. Psy.

 

Eventually, the music industry embraced the new paradigm, but why hasn’t the publishing world embraced the emerging new paradigm of empowered artists/authors? Why are they running so scared they have to publish pieces concerning the fictional decline of ebook sales?

 

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WASTELAND: THE END OF WINTER

 

“I thought this book was beautiful. Having just finished it, I feel like I have just woken up from a really disturbing dream” – Rose Actor-engel, Amazon

Christine and Jack sat on the back deck of their cottage and watched the stars fall into the lake. They whispered to each other, "Beautiful." But Jack did not know his life was to forever change. A plague came. Christine died. Aliens landed and they put things in his food and soap. The sidewalks lit up blue to let him know when he was allowed to go to the store. Filled with drugs, sex, and cigarettes, the first of six inter-related short stories that make up the entirety of the Wasteland series all styled after Winesburg, Ohio and As I Lay Dying. Based loosely off T.S. Elliot's poem of the same name, The Wasteland is told from the perspectives of the people living inside Jack's head.

 

 

Would you like your book featured here? For free? Email me!

 

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Steve Bargdill writes “literary stuff” with the occasional foray into speculative fiction. Originally from Ohio, he has lived in Dayton, Columbus, Troy, St. Marys, and New Knoxville as well as West Branch, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; Muncie, Indiana; and currently lives in Laramie, Wyoming. Bargdill is the author of The Wasteland Series available on Amazon. He’s written for several newspapers and is currently a first year English graduate student at the University of Wyoming. You can read his short stories for free on Wattpad. You can also like him on Facebook where he posts a daily poem, Monday evening writing prompts, hump day videos and more nonsense!

The Top Twenty Grammar Posts: Last Post

So finally, the very last post in this blog series: the top twenty grammar errors. Before I began this series, I had a blog at Wordpress, but grew increasingly frustrated with it: not knowing what to post, how much to post, and the logistics of posting to Wordpress just seemed really confusing to me. I ignored the blog at Wordpress for a long time, ready to give it up entirely.

In the back of my mind, I had toyed with the idea of writing a blog purely on grammar, but I also thought who the heck would read it. So much grammar information and grammar bloggers already exist on the Internet, what the heck did anyone need another one for? You people have pleasantly surprised me, and I’ve managed to discover a small reader base—to date I’ve had over 1000 people visit the blog. I’m extremely grateful. Thank you Splinter4all for this challenge.

This blog is by no means over though. I’m going to post additional series on different themes. No grammar for a while! But I wanted to let you know some of the different series I’ve been planning:

·         The Story of Food: My Journey to Loose the Weight of Another Person

·         The New Dialogue Rules

·         How to be a Radical Intellectual

I am, however, taking a small break from the blog. I need to finish up two books: The Yellow Mountains of God, and Banana Sandwich. Plus, in a few weeks I’ll start my first semester as a graduate student at the University of Wyoming; starting my new job at the Writing Center as well. In the meantime, I wanted to leave you with some online grammar resources that are my go-to’s.

General Grammar

Grammar Girl: Quick And Dirty Tips

Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style

Dr. Grammar

Guide to Grammar & Writing maintained by Capital Community College Foundation

HyperGrammar maintained by University of Ottawa

Grammar for Fiction Writing

The Sentence Sleuth

The Language of Fiction

The Rules Are Meant to be Broken

Academic Writing

OWL at Purdue

 

Style Guides

The Chicago Manual of Style

The MLA Style Sheet

The BBC News Styleguide (because I know I have some readers from across the pond)

Grammar History

The History of the English Language in 10 Animated Minutes

History of the English Language

Grammarphobia

The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 1921

 

 

The Top 20 Grammar Errors: Spelling

We have reached (almost) the last of this blog series on the top twenty grammar errors. Today’s grammar error number twenty-five deals with spelling. This is officially the last grammar error I will write on, but my last post in this series will cover links to online resources that you can utilize in your own editing.

Going forward, I’d suggest that at a minimum you should go through your manuscripts twenty-five times, using this blog series, or the resources I’ll post tomorrow, as a guide to your final edits.

The preamble finished, let’s move on to spelling!

Spelling in the English language is inherently difficult. The problem began when the Normans invaded the Saxons, mixing old German with French. The two languages are the reason why we have so many synonyms in the English language, which I always want to spell as cinnamons, because why the heck would we have two different letters for the same sound—the s and y in synonym in comparison to the c and i in cinnamon.

In 1066—the conquest of England by the Normans—the French C had been pronounced like our English S, and this is why cinnamon today is spelled with a c instead of an s and confuses the bejeezers out of me. Latin was also introduced into the English language around this time as well. Approximately 40 years later, extra letters were added to spellings to make our words sound more French.

In the Fifteenth Century, the printing press was invented, and those sneaky printers were normally not English. They spelled a lot of words wrong. Sometimes because they didn’t speak the English language well and other times to make more money—they charged by the letter, so the more letters in a word, the larger their fee. You can imagine some of the “mistakes” such as silent e’s or spelling had as hadd or even worse, hadde. Many of these “mistakes” became accepted. Matters were not helped by The Great Vowel Shift—when English speakers shifted the way they sounded out their vowels, yet the printers continued printing spellings of the old pronunciations. Think about the words blue, shoe, flew, through, to, you, two, too, and gnu—they all have that same sound [yu:], but they are all spelled radically differently.

Fast forward to the 16^th Century, and we come to the Bible Wars. People raced to translate the Bible into the English vernacular, but many times were chased out of England for doing so, and some of the spellings within the various bibles adopted foreign spellings.

Finally, in 1755, Samuel Johnson created the first English dictionary assigning different definitions to alternate spellings of the same words—which is why we have so many homophones in the English language. When Webster came along in 1806 and published the first American dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and in 1864 the U.S. Government Printing Office adopted Webster’s standard, the state of affairs for English spelling was a complete and total mess.

Thank God for spell check!

Still, a good dictionary by your side is incredibly helpful. The main two problem areas which English spelling writers run into today deal with homophones and the doubling rule. You can thank Samuel Johnson for the homophones and thank the shady printers for the doubling rule.

A homophone is a word pronounced the same as another word, but differs in meaning. What’s confusing is that the homophone word set can be spelled the same or differently. For example, rose as in the flower and rose as in the past tense of rise, and its versus it’s, or in the Samuel Johnson example: their, there, and they’re. For a fairly complete list of homophones, check this site out.

The doubling rule involves word endings. We’ve talked about the er ending before:

·         Joe is hot.

·         Joe’s brother Steve is hotter.

And we’ve talked about the ing ending as well:

·         I run.

·         I am running.

So when do you double and when do you not double? For the most part, when the word ends in a C-V-C pattern, that is the last three letters of the word are consonant-vowel-consonant, you double that last letter when adding the suffix, but there are a lot of exceptions.

So, really, we’re back to spellcheck and a dictionary!

 

 

The Top Twenty Grammar Errors: Double Negatives

 

Today’s grammar error is the double negative.

A double negative occurs when two negative words are used in the same clause:

I did not do nothing.

The standard wisdom is that two negatives make a positive, so the above sentence actually means that I did indeed do something. However, English is not math and writing should never be confused with math.

The Old English West Saxon dialect was once considered the standard, more pure, and proper dialect of English. And West Saxon had double negatives going all over the place, believed by many modern day linguists to be totally random occurrences, neither wrong nor correct but simply flavorings of the language.

But in 2006, linguist Richard Ingham published an article in Language Variation and Change, a quarterly language journal, that argued double negatives in the West Saxon dialect were deliberate, that the use of a double negative was meant to balance out the sentence. Ingham even found personal correspondences gently correcting those who used only single negations in their sentences.

By the time Shakespeare arrived on the scene though, the double negative was almost completely gone from the language. Not quite gone though. Celia in As You Like It complained, “I cannot go no further.”

Today, the double negative is still used. It crops up when we want to make subtle variations in meaning and context of a sentence. For example, what are the differences between these following two sentences?

·        I am convinced by his argument.

·        I am not unconvinced by his argument.

Although both sentences mean I am convinced of his argument, the second sentence with the double negative flavors the meaning, suggesting I may still have some lingering doubts.

Many of today’s grammar gurus eschew the idea of double negatives having a respected place in our English language in both a historical and modern sense.  But then, thanks to The Rolling Stones, what does one do with the following, which has so entrenched itself in the modern language:

 

This song has certainly created a situation where people believe it is perfectly okay to use double negatives and grammarians everywhere every time they hear the song cringe. The hairs on the back of their necks stand straight, rigid, and scared. Double negatives, though, have wormed their way into our everyday language:

·         I can’t hardly believe

·         Could care less

·         Ain’t got no

·         Don’t need no

·         Don’t have nothing

Many languages never had an issue with double negatives. Portuguese, French, Persian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Spanish are all examples of modern languages that employ double negatives, and when you run into a double negative in those particular languages, that double negative doesn’t just mean no, but it means really really no.

In other languages the double negatives cancel each other out and turn the sentence into positives: such as Latin, German, African American Vernacular English, and Cockney. Double negatives can also be found in East London and East Anglian dialects in Britain. Original Old English a double negative meant really really no.

But in today’s English, the double negative can mean the really really no as in The Rolling Stones’ “I can’t get no satisfaction,” or the double negative can mean it’s antithesis as in our earlier example, “I am not unconvinced of his argument.”

Double negatives are all about context in the English language.

So how do you handle this in your writing? Well, what is the writer saying exactly in this sentence?

I did not do nothing.

Is the writer saying he did not do anything all day except lie around on the couch watching TV, or is the writer saying he isn’t guilty of stealing office supplies? Well, you as the reader do not know because there is no context to come alongside the sentence to help explain the meaning.

As a fiction writer, double negatives can be useful. They can help characterize a person for example. One of your characters could be on trial, the prosecuting attorney grilling him, and your character shouts from the stand, “I didn’t do nothing!” What kind of assumptions do you automatically make about that character by the type of language he uses?

What if, however, you are writing something more formal? Probably should stay away from the double negatives then.