Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):
“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.
“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.
“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.
“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”
“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”
“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.
And!
“If you’re breaking dialogue up with an action tag”—she waves her hands back and forth—”the dashes go outside the quotation marks.”
PSA to fan creators who don’t have a lot of regular contact with children: They are almost always bigger than you think. A 1-year-old baby may already be walking. A toddler is likely already hip-high. A 10-year-old may already be taller than at least one of their parents. A 14/15 year old may already have reached their adult height.
People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.
An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.
Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.
It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…
It’s an ant again.
Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.
This is madness.
Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”
forms of eldritch horror include but are not limited to
- nobody will ever believe you, you must live alone with this knowledge
- you will never feel safe again, and you realize you were never safe before
- everything that was familiar is now strange and abhorrent to the point anything that now seems normal should be held in utmost suspicion
- having this new knowledge has opened doors that will continually reveal new equally cursed knowledge without end
- death and madness are no longer escapes
I’ve always felt that the idea of madness or sanity in an eldritch horror sense were misnomers. If anything, I feel a better term is a change of perspective. There is nothing inherent in seeing a greater being that “drives you insane”, it’s that this being doesn’t fit into your previous worldview at all and you have to wrestle that. Every character can and should react differently, changing in ways that “make sense” for them. It’s either a change in worldview or attempting to fit the greater being into your preexisting one. Both will have negative results, but will be interesting as hell to explore.
You know what? Unironically, I think this is the best comment I’ve seen on this post.
speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don’t say numbers. don’t give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it’s secondhand.
the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don’t let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.
you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it’s no fun anymore.
if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t
someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter
most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t
homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right
This post is the distilled essence of everything I believe in.
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
