The Pecman

Unless it's gay prostitution. Thousands of people in Paris protested against gay marriage not too long ago...

Amen. Teachers who can put up with all the BS and still find a way to change their students' lives for the better are golden.

Ah, in America, the Double Tap means something different -- particularly with Zombies:

Just got off the phone with my sister in Buffalo, NY: 5 degrees with 40MPH winds and showing. Yikes... The weather is so screwed up in LA, it was over 75 degrees and a lot of farmers' crops in Southern California have been fooled into thinking it's spring and are growing early. The problem is, by next month, it's predicted it'll go into the 40s and rain, which will kill all the crops again. Could be very tough times in the agriculture business. I always say, "global warming doesn't mean it's getting hotter... it means the weather is getting very screwed up and unpredictable."

This is classic: an 18-year old high school senior in Florida just got suspended from school because the principal found out that he had starred in a gay porn film. The teen claims he did the film in order to make extra money to help his single mom pay the rent and groceries. From CNN: Robert Marucci, a senior at Cocoa High School in Cocoa, Florida, told CNN affiliate WKMG that he picked up his X-rated gig to help his mom pay the bills. His mom, Melyssa Lieb, said when students discovered the explicit material online, her son became a target. "He was bullied, he was threatened." Then, according to Lieb, her son was suspended, because the principal didn't approve of his after-school activities. Initially, Marucci was bullied at school after other students found video clips online, but I think the tide kind of turned in his favor (which figures, since the kid is a surfer). At first, the principal expelled the student because the bullying was determined to be a "class disturbance," though that was quickly reduced to 4 days' suspension. What's pretty heartwarming is that after the kid was suspended, 79 of his friends at school put up a Facebook page protesting his suspension, and dozens of them walked out of school as an expression of solidarity. Needless to say, the kid is, shall we say, very talented. I think Mr. Marucci (whose stage name is ) has got the school board dead to rights, because he's of legal age, getting passing grades, hasn't been arrested, and can do what he wants on his own time. It might be different if he were a school teacher working under a contract, but I don't think they can do anything to a student. More reports here on the Huntington Post and USA Today. I think there's an interesting novel in this premise...

Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone!

You can change, you can change, you can change! Took me about 10 years of arguing with copy editors in the 1980s, but I eventually broke myself of the habit of double-spacing after every sentence. And I learned to type at the age of 12 in 1966, so this was decades of that habit. I still do a global search-and-replace to get rid of any errant two-space combos, but there's generally very few in any of my finished manuscripts these days. It really does look better with proportional fonts. I'd agree that two spaces would work for a monospaced font like Courier, particularly if this were being handed in as a legal paper or a thesis, where they may have specific requirements for formatting. One exception to this would be film scripts, where they specifically warn against using double-spaces in formatting.

Shouldn't it be Hardonify? Erectremendous? Biggusdickus?

That's stupid. I would absolutely, hands-down legalize marijuana, and then say, "everybody convicted of possession or buying pot is now set free." The issue, though, is drug dealers, none of whom were legally licensed (and probably wouldn't be even after pot was made legal), so they'd have to stay in jail. Even in Colorado, you can't sell pot unless you have a license and are collecting state taxes.

Movies don't count. Then can switch points of view and not knock you out of the story. I would say that none of the movies you mentioned were multiple point-of-view -- I'd say they were all omniscient point of view, strictly 3rd person. I've seen Titanic about 20 times -- I had to do a lot of foreign audio work on it for Fox back in 1998 -- so that one I know very well. Amadeus is pretty much told only from Soliari's point of view, since he's dying and telling the story as a flashback; we don't see anything that isn't known to him. Saving Private Ryan is strictly 3rd person, very detached. Neverending Story is all told from the kid's point of view, very 1st person for the most part, with isolated moments that are 3rd person. Movie convention makes that all work very well. I did say it's possible to pull off if you have extraordinary skill, but I don't see a lot of that out on the web. I think fiction works a lot better if you just keep it simple and don't pull any fancy stunts. Just tell the story and get to the point in the fewest words possible, make it interesting, and make the reader care about the characters. Anything more just mucks it up, to me. There are some famous mysteries where they deliberately fog things up with an unreliable narrator. The best movie I can think of that pulls that off is The Usual Suspects, which is a hoot when you see it for the first time. Another good one is The Sixth Sense. Each of these has an incredible gimmick that's extremely powerful, and it would work just as well in a novel as it did in the films. I'm sure there are many more examples.

Naw, Wicked Boys is a terrific story. Don't listen to the criticism. I think there are people out there who have rigid, inflexible rules on certain aspects of writing. The only two that I can think of that are inarguable are 1) don't be boring, and 2) keep your readers wanting to read more. Everything else is just fillagree. I'm not a fan of doing stuff like mixing tenses, writing in second person, writing in present tense, or changing points of view, but even I admit that there are brilliant writers who can pull that off under specific circumstances. I haven't come across too many examples on the net, but there are a handful of examples in published fiction.

My eyes!

85 degrees in LA. The cat is very hot and annoyed.

Note that you wrote this entire paragraph without having used a semicolon. (BTW, one space between sentences with proportional fonts. My brother the graphic artist would kill us both if we saw us using two spaces.) I think semicolons can be useful, but only sparingly, and only on very rare occasions. Consider: I gazed at him from afar; for all I know, an hour or two might have passed, but perhaps it was just mere minutes. I think the sentence works just as well with a period. I'm not a big fan of it in fiction, but again, I concede that there's a right way and a wrong way to use them. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon

I'm not a pot smoker at all, don't drink, don't do any drugs except Ambien to sleep, but I'm 100% for legalizing marijuana. If they taxed the living f@@@ out of it, I think it'd raise a ton of money for state governments, plus it would allow thousands of prisoners to be released from jail on pot charges (buying, selling, or possession). It's a waste of time for the police to go after this. Let them go after serious criminals and violent crime, not this crap.

Love this show. One of the best damned British imports of the last ten years. I'm with you: I can't wait to find out how Mr. Holmes survived plummeting 50 feet off a building onto a sidewalk. (Oh, I know how the original Holmes survived the Reichenbach Falls in 1891; this is the new guy.) I must have read every Conan-Doyle story about the master detective at least 20 or 30 times as a kid. I still have them all on my iPad. I should go back to reading them again.

I tend to use them sparingly in non-fiction, but god help you in fiction. It's very hard for me to think of a case where just a regular period won't work every bit as well as a semi-colon. I don't dispute that there's a right way to use them and a wrong way.

Just caught this on the web and thought it was terrific. I won't spoil anything except to say it's the story of two teenage boys, one of whom is handsome and athletic, and the other of whom is gay, and how one uses a comb to measure... well, you watch it.

Just don't use the dreaded semi-colon. I had a creative writing teacher once tell me, "the road to hell is paved with semi-colons."

And the link is here: http://www.awesomedude.com/chris_james/singer/ I agree, an intriguing story with a good beginning.

When they do, they better watch out... because He will be pissed-off.

It, is, possible, to, use, too, many, commas.

A better view: Whatever he's selling I'm buying.

http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuation/dp/1592402038/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390009774&sr=1-1

On the very rare occasions I had to miss school as a kid, my parents would contact my teachers and work out a way for me to do all my homework while on vacation (to stay current with the class), and I'd get assigned a special term paper or something that would tie into the courses. Not that big a deal. No fines paid, no complicated rules... just common sense.