Derick W J Tan

Major Error

You’d think that after writing 3 different novels with 150,000, 95,000 and 65,000 word counts for each of them, I would be aware of every major writing formats now.

WRONG!

Here’s the error:

“Very nice to see you again, Mr Halne.” the boy greeted politely.

A non-capital letter after a fullstop.

Here’s the fixed one:

“Very nice to see you again, Mr Halne,” the boy greeted politely.

And here’s an example of a correct format.

“There’re only four of them.” Gordon noticed her in deep thoughts. “The Project was shut down before the fifth could be made.”

Basically you don’t put a full-stop even if the dialogue sentence is over, if your entire sentence itself is not finished yet. And that error is basically inherent through my entire manuscript for every single draft. It won’t take long to correct them but there will still be a delay nonetheless.

Yes, there’s a good chance even a Primary One student already knows this, but finding mistakes like these and learning from them is the whole idea of writing this series.

Glossary

*In the following paragraphs, whenever I say the words ‘dumbing down’, I simply mean ‘making things simpler/less complicated’. Do not take it as an insult in any way.

I realize from HHHL that the majority of my readers get lost during the more technical areas of the story. Things like radio or military commands, police operation protocols and military ranks will confuse a lot of people. And being aware of that, I basically had to ‘dumb down’ the technical details of this rewrite so that I don’t bore that particular group of readers.

And now here it comes.

HOWEVER, that decision has ran one whole round and bit me on the bottom. When I work on my fantasy/sci-fi series in the future, I’ll be using an even higher level of technical knowledge, so it’s not really benefiting me as a writer to not practice that now. That is why I am going to include a glossary.

Yes I do realize that it will be quite troublesome to be flipping clicking links back and forth to check for terms, so I’m going to implement it slowly. This means that the first story won’t be so heavy on the technical terms, but the subsequent ones will get heavier and heavier until the last one, which by then, you’d already be familiar with most of the terms.

It will definitely turn off some of my readers (which is  you guys really so I don’t know why I’m typing it as ‘my readers’ and not ‘you guys’) but I still feel that it is very necessary for me to improve myself. There was even a period of time when I thought of tossing aside Project M.I.G.H.T and work on a (free) fantasy/sci-fi series. But then I persuaded myself to stay on with “If I can give up halfway on this series, what’s stopping me from giving up on the other?”.

Anyway, the point is that this rewrite will be heavier on technical details but I’ll help you to learn with a super-detailed glossary. I even have more ideas to make the learning process simpler but I’ll keep them to myself for now.

Oh and I’ll be announcing the release date of this rewrite on 12/12/2008 =)
Remind me if I forget =X

edit: I’ll consider footnotes as well but I think there might be too much information for footnotes.

- Derick