WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

I like to think I'm a pretty easy going guy, but there are a few things that twist my poodle in a knot.

Like writers getting stuff wrong. Stuff they could just as easily get right, if they were sufficiently motivated.

For instance, I'm torqued by writers who put the word bicep in their books and stories. And I'm royally annoyed by the publishers who let it go. (Assuming there are publishers involved.)

There is no such word as bicep.

Idiots think there is because the word they want to use, biceps, ends in an s and therefore must be plural. When they want to call attention to just one of those muscles—say to point out a nasty tattoo on the upper part of the villain's left arm—they chop off the s and go their merry way.

And editors let them do it!

Has no one ever looked that word up? Biceps is the name for a muscle in the front of the upper arm. (The one in the back is called the triceps.) Biceps comes from Latin and means "two heads," because that's how the muscle is attached at the shoulder. The s comes from the plural of these attach points (the heads), not the muscle itself.

Because just one of those muscles (most of us have two, one for either arm) is properly called a biceps, you make it plural in the familiar way: two bicepses. The same logic applies to triceps (plural: tricepses) and (referring to the muscle at the front of the leg) quadriceps (plural: quadricepses).

Some dictionaries allow the word biceps to cover both singular and plural uses. Those dictionaries are what I like to call wrong.

Another word people get wrong is lie (and I don't mean falsehood). Folks hardly ever lie down anymore. They lay down. Television writers get this one wrong just about 100% of the time.

"Go lay down!" "He was just laying there!" "I gotta lay down for a minute." Et cetera, as well as ad nauseam.

If you get your ear for language from American television, you'll be getting it wrong.

There's a major difference between lie and lay. Lay is a transitive verb that requires an object. "Lay the gun down." Or, tricky: "Now I lay me down to sleep."

You lie down,see? But you could also lay yourself down—becoming the object of your action.

And it certainly doesn't help that the past tense of lie is lay. "I lay down for an hour, but couldn't get to sleep."

Another perfectly good word is often avoided: me. There's a strong tendency to substitute the word I.

Folks say: "Bob gave Tony and I a ride to the park." Or: "Just between you and I, this movie stinks!"

In both cases, the word me should have been used instead of I.

One way of ferreting it out is to remove the extra individual in the sentence and see how it sounds: "Bob gave [Tony and] I a ride to the park." Clearly it should be: "Tony gave me a ride to the park."

In the second case, the word between is a preposition, and the pronouns following are the objects of that preposition. Objects need to be in the objective case. That means him, her, and me.

In my theory, the affectation of avoiding the word me comes from getting corrected early in life. Someone asks who's there, and you say, "It's me."

Then some grammar-Nazi corrects you: "Wrong! It's I!"

Now, every time you want to use the word me, you panic and substitute I—avoiding the colloquial in order to be wrong for real.

Apparently "It's I" is correct, but I have no problem with "It's me." Even the French say, "C'est moi," not "C'est je."

Forms of the verb to be can be reversed to test for the correct usage. "It's I" reverses to "I am it." "Me am it" doesn't work. Even so, "It's me" seems more natural than "It's I," which sounds like something you'd say with your pinkie finger extended.

If the word is wasn't required to allow sentences to be reversible, it would made sense to say me is the object of is. This is certainly true of other verbs: "Bob shot me." Perfectly correct. Reversing this sentence gets you "Me shot Bob" and would call for a Tarzan-talk adjustment: "I shot Bob."

Reversing again brings out "Bob shot I." Wrong, obviously.

So, it's only the trumped-up ability of forms of the verb to be that gets this special (and somewhat illogical) treatment. Maybe it's time we revoked those privileges.

Another "mistake" I have little or no problem with is split infinitives. I try not to, but I won't tie a sentence in a knot to avoid one that sounds natural.

Fiction writers might want to save grammatical correctness for narrative text, allowing characters to make what mistakes they want in their dialogue.

That makes sense, but often the narrative of a book is slanted toward the character whose viewpoint is used. In this case, I suppose the text can skew toward the illiterate (if that's how you want to portray your character). It's a judgement call to see how how close to unreadable you want to go.

Not too close, I would think. By definition, the truly unreadable goes unread.

(Parts of Finnegans Wake are fun to read, but a little goes a very, very long way. I would never claim to have read that thing, but I guess I'm okay with it existing, almost completely unread, on my shelf.)

Some colloquialisms do annoy me. Using alright for all right, for instance. I suppose in dialogue aw-right is okay. Or aw-ight. Though some might take offense. And you run the risk of falling into dialect, which is a pit containing some sharp-ass rocks at the bottom.

Often a mistake has to be heard to be detected.

Almost everybody says "fortay" when they use the word forte. (It's properly pronounced "fort.")

(I am of course referring to the French word meaning "the thing I do best." The Italian word forte is pronounced "fortay". It's mostly used as an instruction in music. A musician who enjoys playing loudly may say, "Forte is my forte." Pronounced: "Fortay" is my "fort".)

Some people say "hee-nous" for heinous ("hay-nous").

On The Big Bang Theory, Dr. Sheldon Cooper says "coy-tus" for coitus. It's properly pronounced "co-EE-tus" or "CO-i-tus." (In the second case, think of the i as a schwa.)

People don't get that the past tense of spay is spayed. They tend to add an additional -ed to the word: "spay-ded."

People say mano-a-mano and think it means man-to-man. It literally means hand-to-hand. (In Italian, the phrase translates as "little by little.")

People use the word theory when they should be saying hypothesis.

A hypothesis (or do I mean "an hypothesis"?) is a well-thought out statement that explains the current information about a situation, but hasn't been proved correct by experiment (though it should suggest methods of experimental proof). A theory, in science, is the hypothesis all shined up and encrusted with ingenious demonstrations. It will do until new information comes along, often as a result of newly invented observational instruments.

(The Theory of Evolution is not some wild-ass guess, which is what most people mean by theory. "Is that your theory, Einstein?")

Sometimes people get things wrong by trying to ingratiate themselves. On TV news, they'll say some geezer is "ninety-nine years young." They don't want to offend anyone who thinks they just got called "old."

(The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had the bizarre notion that lawyers who stood before him in court and used contractions in their arguments were trying to "buddy-up" to him by this informality.)

Not a mistake, I suppose, but I notice on TV the avoidance of fractions. Instead of saying something is "one forth" of something else, they'll say it's "four times less" than the other thing. Are they really worried the average American can't decode the words "one fourth" because "fractions are hard!"

Another mistake that does annoy me a bit: Folks mixing up less and fewer. Use fewer when the thing referred to can be counted. "Less time" but "fewer hours." "Less money" but "fewer dollars."

Saying "fewer time" sounds wrong, obviously, but "less hours" doesn't sound that wrong. ("After the reorganization I have less hours at work.") It is, nevertheless, wrong.

The words amount and number work by the same rules as less and fewer. "A great number of people had gathered." "A vast amount of water flowed out of the spillway."

And speaking of less, folks say they "could care less" when they mean they "could not care less." Unfortunately, this one may have passed into the protected territory of the colloquial, where both versions have equal validity.

Note, however, this is not a case of literal equivalency, like flammable and inflammable, or raveled and unraveled.

Another pair of words often abused: farther and further. Farther ought to refer to physical distance. Further indicates psychological distance. (NB: I've read that in Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations, further is preferred for both senses.)

Google the phrase "common mistakes in English" for a great many other errors you'll want to avoid. I'm just noting here the ones that grate on my ear nearly every day.

If you're going to publish independently—and are proceeding without a professional editor—you owe it to yourself to get it right most of the time. Readers have been known to throw books across the room.

Having your book on an expensive electronic reader may not protect you from that precipitous action. In fact, your outraged readers may want to sue you for damages.

(Nobody said the literary life would be easy.)

Perhaps you have your own pet peeves. Feel free to comment.

(For instance, the expression "pet peeve" always brings to my mind the image of a puppy throwing up. But that's just me, right?)

RED RYDER - READ WRITER

This is a follow-up to my previous post (DISCIPLINE), taking a look at the question of readership.

A writer writes, that's a given. But does a writer absolutely need the other half of the equation? Does a newly minted chunk of writing need a reader to make it real?

This sounds a little like the famous reality koan: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?

(This is not actually a philosophical question, like: "Does the back of your head exist if no one's around and you don't have a mirror?" In a subjective world, Lord Berkeley would like to think God is there to see all the parts you can't get eyes on at a given moment. As for trees and forests, the question is actually about the definition of the word "sound." It does no one any good to suggest the tree won't at least send a vibration through the air when it slams into the ground. Some will say "sound" occurs only when such vibrations are detected by an ear—and maybe interpreted by a brain of some sort, however primitive.)

In my opinion (and I don't think I've inched too far out on the limb), the stuff you put down on paper (or save onto you hard drive or send to the cloud) exists as a real quantum of writing, even if no one ever lays eyes on it.

The thing is, most writers do write in hopes of having a reader, preferably one with sufficient acumen to recognize the genius of their words.

Praise is good, people. Praise, however slight, can act as a spur to further (and perhaps better) work.

Contrarily, if everyone who sees your stuff takes a massive dump on it, that can act as an astringent, drying up your output. Or worse, a goad to reach for a loaded revolver.

(You probably recall the story of John Kennedy Toole, who offed himself when he was unable to get any traction with his excellent and funny book, A Confederacy of Dunces.)

Readers, it seems, come to the table armed with double-edged swords. (Not the best metaphor: slice you one way or the other, it's all blood over the dam.)

It doesn't help we now live in a world where anybody's opinion can be thrown into the public mix. In the old days, if some guy didn't like your book he'd have to write a letter to the publisher to complain—and that takes a pretty advanced level of determination (and outraged anger, maybe).

You could, of course, avoid reading reviews altogether.

But there's a danger there, too. A useful tidbit might be hidden in the pile that would explain a serious lack of sales. Maybe you need to know this. Maybe you could fix it. (Grievous errors of ebook formatting may be driving readers away, the sort of cheap-jack stuff you could easily fix if you knew about it—and were in control of your own publication, as we indie pubbers are.)

Most reader, thank God, don't take the time to chime in, even when it's relatively easy. Robust sales are the best form of criticism.

So, how do you get sales?

It's problematical, since readers are attracted to reviews. A book without reviews of any sort is likely to garner few readers. (Read 'em or don't, reviews still have value.)

One way to get feedback is to give away copies of your book. Those with Kindle books can sign up for Select and hold promotions from time to time. There are Web sites that list freebies. Other sites will pick up on the item and list it, even if you don't ask them to. (They need content to support their ad-based income.)

See my post: [BOOK PROMOTIONS] (Some of this information is undoubtedly out dated.) Or just Google "ebook promotion" and see what comes up.

Elsewhere, you can offer free copies to those willing to contribute reviews. That could get the ball started.

Contacting other authors in your predicament, asking to swap reviews, might work. It might also attract negative attention from Amazon. Those guys are fast to purge a sales page of suspicious, possibly quid pro quo reviews.

Readers are also wary of a big fat pile of five-star reviews. Lot of paranoia out there...

Probably the best method of attracting readers is to post a lot of really good books. If you have a series of novels, making the first one "perma-free" may be a good strategy, but Amazon won't let you do it. (Kindle Select promotions allow only five free days every three months.)

You'd have to put your work up on another site, like Smashwords, and make it free. Amazon Web spiders may discover it there and match the price, though that's not a guarantee.

Folks with their own Web pages are free to sell or give away books (though if they do they can't be a Select author, which requires exclusive ties to Amazon). Hold contests or something to attract readers to your site. See if you can transfer that interest to your books.

As always, it's largely a matter of getting readers to find you, to find your site, to find your books.

Traditionally published books can be found on the shelves of brick and mortar stores. But only for a couple of months.

Ebooks (and PODs) are forever.

It's a trade off.

Just write your books and let them go. It's the half of the writer/reader equation you have the most control over.

Unless you don't.

Good luck with that. Sincerely.

Or maybe you don't care a fig about readers, you just want the money. (Reminding us of Dr. Johnson's dictum: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.)

If some monster offered you money to own (and utterly suppress) every word you've written to date, and prevent you from writing anything else in the future, including diaries and grocery lists, what would it take to get you to jump at the deal?

DISCIPLINE

Turns out I'm not overly freighted with writerly discipline. Writers, they say, need to write every day.

I don't. Does that mean I'm not a writer?

Certainly, writers ought to write sometimes. If you want to call yourself a writer but never sit down to actually do the deed, are you a writer at all?

Well, maybe.

If you spend hours every day composing in your head, but never putting those words on paper (or on the computer screen), you may still be a kind of writer.

If, for some reason, you are denied the opportunity to put your words down, maybe you are some sort of tragic figure—someone who is a writer but can't prove it.

Composing in your mind obviously has a part in the process of writing. It'd be good, though, if you could transfer that stuff to a more tangible form.

For the purposes of copyright, in fact, you need to put your words into "tangible" form. But that does not restrict you to paper. Words count if they're saved on your computer's hard drive.

And so do words "printed" in an ebook.

You just have to careful you're not fooling yourself. You don't want to be the kind of writer who points to his skull and declares, "It's all right up here," when it's not anywhere at all.

How long was that famous poem supposed to be, the one interrupted on its path from brain to paper by the person from Porlock? No doubt Coleridge was convinced there was a lot more packed into his noggin (some two or three hundred lines, he estimates). Unfortunately, it's altogether possible he only had the illusion of more text.

Dream words tend to evaporate, but that's not the worst of it. Dream text can easily be bolstered by the illusion of bulk that's not earned by actual composition.

All it all, it's probably safer to put your words down someplace before you clear a spot for the inevitable Pulitzer. And don't fritter away your time spending that Nobel Prize dough.

If you write at all, you can probably count yourself some variety of writer, though I recall a dissenting opinion voiced once in a movie. In HEARTS OF THE WEST, Jeff Bridges thinks himself a writer and heads for Hollywood to prove it, only to be shot down by the words of an old screenwriter (Andy Griffith): "You're not a writer until a writer says you're a writer."

It seems writers are supposed to be anointed by their fellow practitioners before they can wear the beanie with the quill stuck behind the ear.

Personally, I don't buy it. If you write—with the intention of being a writer—you're a writer.

On the other hand, if you write reports for a company about company business, you're probably not a writer in the sense we're looking for. The intention—to entertain or educate or astonish—is not really there. It's likely your only intention is to keep your job.

It used to be there were two kinds of writers: published or unpublished. And that meant, read or unread.

Nowadays, the concept of "published" is a lot more flexible. There has always been some method of privately printing your work, but substantial expenses were usually involved. Not anymore. If you're reading this blog, I imagine you're aware you can publish for free on Kindle Direct Publishing and elsewhere.

I'm going to skip the controversy over the legitimacy of self publishing. Success in this area can attract "real" publishers with "real" contracts. But even if it doesn't, that doesn't mean you're not a writer.

Technically, you can still be a writer even if you never intend to be published by anyone. Wasn't Emily Dickinson a writer, even if she only published a half dozen poems in her life?

Bottom line: You just have to write, that's all.

So, how many words do you have to write to qualify for the title of writer? Do you have to write every day? Can anyone set "legal" requirements for the industry?

Isn't there such a thing as an undisciplined writer?

I've experimented with that category most of my life. In fact, I'm something of an expert in the field.

I am, nevertheless, some kind of writer. And I plan to keep being some kind of writer for a long time to come.

Join me, why don't you?