Even The Best Plans Won't Work if You're Trying to Improve the Wrong Thing
Somewhere there’s a saying that goes something like, “If you want to make God laugh, make plans.”
Recently we started planning to update one of the bathrooms in our house. The house was built in the 50s. Some of the fixtures are newer than that, but the bathroom still has all the original tile and it’s very dated looking.
Then we had our semi-annual termite inspection (something that’s necessary when you live in Florida), and down in the crawlspace under the house the bug guy and my husband found a leak. Under the other bathroom. Turned out the shower pan was leaking, and although some of the supporting beam was wet, it wasn’t actually damaged. Since it was the original 50s shower, made of tile, the only way to replace the pan is to rip out the shower.
All of a sudden, our plans had to shift. Instead of renovating the first bathroom, we’re redoing the second one.
I’ve had to do that recently with the draft of the book I’ve been working on. Somehow, I managed to write myself into a corner and couldn’t see a way out. Fortunately, another writer I trust implicitly helped me brainstorm some ideas. I’m scrapping some scenes and rearranging others, and on the whole I think the end result will be much better for it.
That doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
What I’m Reading
Murder on Black Swan Lane by Andrea Penrose
This historic mystery is set during the Regency period in England (the early part of the 1800s). The era has become a favorite historical time for romance novels — Jane Austen lived and wrote during the Regency and the TV series Bridgerton is set during that time. It was an era characterized by rigid class distinctions and enormous disparity between the wealthy few and everyone else.
In this book, first in a series, Lord Wrexford and Charlotte Sloane inhabit very different social spheres, but they’re thrown together as they each become involved in trying to figure out who brutally murdered the pompous Reverend Josiah Holworthy.
Interest in science and mathematics was strong among the upper class gentlemen of the day, and Wrexford was a serious chemist. Charlotte was an artist who eked out a fragile living as a satirical cartoonist, being careful to keep AJ Quill’s true identity hidden. It took his scientific approach to problem solving, and her acute artist’s eye, to unravel the dark plot behind Holworthy’s death.
A Killer in the Crystal Palace by Deb Marlowe
In 1851, London’s Great Exhibit, held in the Crystal Palace, is the pride of the nation. Showcasing the best in technology, art, and design of the day, it drew huge crowds.
Kara Levitt is the daughter of a baron, and a skilled clockmaker with an artistic vision. She creates clever automatons, including an automaton man. But her exhibit is robbed, her automaton torn apart, and the thief is killed, clutching the arm of the automaton.
Naturally Kara becomes the chief suspect. But Niall Kerr, another exhibitor who creates beautiful ironwork pieces, sets out to find the real culprit and they become uneasy partners in sleuthing. In this story, she’s the one with the scientific, logical mind and he’s the artist and it requires all the skill and cunning they each possess to unravel the complicated truth.
Notable Quotes
Still, I suspected underneath he had a mind sharp enough to slice overripe tomatoes without spilling one drop of juice.
- Murder at the Bookstore by Sue Minix
I don’t know about you, but my mind conjures up lots of cartoonlike images when I read this passage.
A fiery inferno exploded on my tongue, bounced off the roof of my mouth, and then blazed a trail to the top of my skull with a quick stop at my nasal passages and eyes.
- Death Runs in the Family by Heather Haven
This is clever, describing a taste sensation as a journey through various body parts.
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Wise Words
Last week’s challenge was a little different from our usual. Instead of asking you to vote for the better word choice, I asked you to vote for the better punctuation choice.
Here’s the quote I gave you:
Galen was the most _______-______ person we knew. . .
- Dog-Eared Danger by ACF Bookens
To fill in the blanks, your choices were social-media savvy or social media-savvy. Only two of you took a chance on answering it, and I’m thrilled to say you both chose wisely.
The correct answer is social-media savvy.
The more interesting question is why?
Could you have a media-savvy person? Of course you could, but that’s not what we have here.
It’s all about the modifiers. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. Adverbs modify adjectives, verbs, or other adverbs. For example, dog is a noun, and when you describe a dog as fierce, fierce is an adjective. Easy peasy.
But what happens when you stack adjectives one after the other? That’s where it gets a little more complicated. You can have a fierce, brown dog, and here, fierce and brown are both adjectives modifying the noun, dog, so you stick commas in between to make that clear.
But what happens if you’re not talking about the color of the dog’s fur, but the color of its eyes? Then you have a fierce, brown-eyed dog. Fierce is still an adjective, still modifying dog, and since it’s the first in a series of adjectives, you put a comma after it. Brown is also an adjective, and so is eyed. When you put them together (with a hyphen to make their relationship clear) they also modify dog.
So let’s go back to our puzzle example. Galen was the most social media savvy person we knew. . .
The noun is person. Not just any person, but a savvy (adjective) person. Savvy is an adjective modifying person. That’s the easy part.
But when we add social media, it gets trickier. Normally we don’t stick a hyphen in between social and media. That’s because, by itself, it’s simply a case of adjective social modifying noun, media. When both of them together modify a noun, though, you’re back into brown-eyed dog territory. Because there, social modifies media, and together they act as a single modifier.
But wait, there’s more! What are they modifying? In this case, it’s not the noun, person, but the adjective, savvy, which in turn modifies person.
Which means, in this case, you punctuate social-media like a compound adjective but it behaves in the sentence as an adverb. (Because adjectives aren’t supposed to modify other adjectives).
Isn’t English fun? Come back next week for another challenge.