Grammar rules for fools

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.

2. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. Winston Churchill, corrected on this error once, responded to the young man who corrected him by saying “Young man, that is the kind of impudence up with which I will not put!

3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.

4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)

6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.

7. Be more or less specific.

8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.

9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies endlessly over and over again

10. No sentence fragments.

11. Contractions aren’t always necessary and shouldn’t be used to excess so don’t.

12. Foreign words and phrases are not always apropos.

13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous and can be excessive

14. All generalizations are bad.

15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

Quotes about Writing – Part Four

• I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. ~Norman Mailer, Writers at Work, 3rd series

• To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. ~Lord Byron

• If I’m trying to sleep, the ideas won’t stop. If I’m trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness. ~Carrie Latet

• Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. ~Theodore Dreiser, 1900

• It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. ~Havelock Ellis

• The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys. ~C. Astrid Weber

• Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason. They made no such demand upon those who wrote them. ~Charles Caleb Colton

• Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ~Author Unknown, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson 

• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851

• I am a man, and alive…. For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog. ~D.H. Lawrence, preface to Shestov, All Things Are Possible, 1938

• Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head. ~From the movie Finding Forrester

• It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write. ~Sinclair Lewis

• Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? ~Friedrich Nietzsche

• Writing is both mask and unveiling. ~E.B. White

• Let’s hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks. ~Peter S. Prescott<!–, Newsweek, 8 November 1976–>

• It’s not plagiarism – I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do. ~Uniek Swain

• True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. ~Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism”

• Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. ~Franz Kafka

• An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. ~Gustave Flaubert

• If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it – I might be writing in my dreams. ~Danzae Pace

• There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

• One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen. ~Leo Tolstoy

• A man will turn over half a library to make one book. ~Samuel Johnson

• What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach. ~Logan Pearsall Smith

• No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. ~Russell Lynes

• A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order. ~Jean Luc Godard

• Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life. ~James Norman Hall

“Mask of the Beast: the Life and Crimes of a Convicted Triple Murderer

This blog will be the proving ground and launch pad for my new True Crime thriller titled: “Mask of the Beast: the Life and Crimes of a Convicted Triple Murderer. “ I will also post my thoughts on writing as well as items of interest to writers and those who want to be. And, because of the subject matter of my new book, items pertaining to True Crime, forensics, and yes, even murder most foul, will also be fair game. It should be quite an interesting ride…

A copy of the book proposal

This is the book proposal for Mask of the Beast: the Life and Crimes of a Convicted Triple Murderer. It has garnered interest from several publishers as well as Dystel and Goderich Literary Agents in Manhattan.

——————

“My first hit was an act of treachery, the ultimate deceit. 4 [sic] bullets in the back, 1 [sic] in the neck and a broken promise made at the parting of the oncoming river. . . . The second I pulled the trigger I became larger than death to all my associates.”

Thus began an admission of guilt by convicted triple murderer, Craig Francis Szemple in a letter to his wife. Or, was it?

In 1994, an article in a local New Jersey newspaper caught my eye. It told of an Army Reserve Captain who had been held in jail for the previous four years, and who was now being tried for one of three murders he had been charged with committing over the course of sixteen years. And it told of the fact that the letter containing the above quote was deemed admissable as evidence of his guilt in that trial. The letter should have been protected under the ‘marital confidences privilege’ rule, but it wasn’t, and New Jersey case law was turned upside down (temporarily) to allow its admission by the Prosecution.

And when a confession to a jailhouse priest was also allowed as evidence of guilt, completely disregarding the ‘Priest-Penitent’ rule of confidentiality, the New Jersey legal system was once again turned on its ear and this ‘confession before God’ was allowed.

His trial attorney bounced back and forth between believing in Szemple’s innocence and in the certainty of his guilt. Many times this attorney tried to get himself recused from the case, but Szemple simply wouldn’t release him. This part of the story lays the groundwork for current appeals

Whether Craig Francis Szemple is innocent, and was framed by two of his eight siblings as he claims, or is guilty as charged, he has now been serving 16 years in jails and two of New Jersey’s maximum security prisons.

The book’s length will be between 250 and 300 pages and will address his childhood, his unusual relationship with his rather large family, the facts behind the three murders, an attempted suicide, his near death from a heart attack while in prison, an attempted prison break, becoming a born again Christian, his conflicting attitudes toward religion today, as well as his past and present legal situation.

The murders have been researched and are portrayed in all their brutality and the trial transcripts have been carefully scrutinized and parts of them are included for maximum effect and understanding.

My book will appeal to both True Crime afficiandos, as well as legal scholars and trial attorneys. It attempts to portray the human side of a convicted triple murderer and to show how the NJ legal system was subverted in order to convict him.

I write website content for a Los Angeles attorney and have a good grasp of the criminal legal system. As a freelance writer, I’m published with five short stories, several articles, and two ‘how to’ manuals, as well as being listed in a 1997 Barnes and Noble anthology of new writers.

While Mask of the Beast is not yet complete, I can send several chapters and a synopsis/outline.

Sincerely,

Barry Gluck