Writing

Pembroke Lecture on Fantasy Literature in Honour of JRR Tolkien

~ Cheryl

Pembroke valkyrieAs promised over the Holidays, here are the full details of the lecture that Kij Johnson will be giving in Oxford later this month, and the writing course she is doing the following day. I hope to see some of you there.

PEMBROKE LAUNCH FANTASY LITERATURE LECTURE SERIES IN HONOUR OF JRR TOLKIEN

(Oxford, January 3, 2012) Pembroke College have invited award-winning author Kij Johnson to deliver the inaugural Pembroke Lecture on Fantasy Literature in Honour of JRR Tolkien. The first annual lecture in the series designed to explore the history and current state of fantasy literature will take place on January 18th at 6 pm, it was jointly announced today by Meghan Campbell, President of the Pembroke College Middle Common Room (MCR), Catherine Beckett, Deputy Development Director, Pembroke College, and Kendall Murphy, Representative of the Pembroke College Annual Fund. Professor Johnson will also offer a fiction masterclass at Pembroke on January 19th from 10 am until noon.

The series is intended to memorialize Tolkien, who was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke for twenty years; he wrote The Hobbit and much of The Lord of the Rings during his time at the college. The lectures are sponsored through a grant from the Pembroke Annual Fund.

‘Fantasy literature informs contemporary society’, said Campbell. ‘Any glance at current cinema offerings — or at a list of the most popular films of all time — demonstrates that fantasy is still the mode in which we tell one another stories. This and our members’ desire to celebrate Professor Tolkien’s connection to Pembroke made the lecture series an obvious choice’.

‘The Development Office is pleased to partner with Pembroke’s MCR and broader student communities in honouring the contribution made by Professor Tolkien to the life of the college and to world literature’, said Beckett. ‘Having Professor Johnson offer the inaugural lecture is a dream come true. Her humane and searing fiction, and her expansive vision of the role and possibilities of genre, will place the series on a proper foundation’.

‘The Pembroke Annual Fund connects our alumni to current students and allows them to work together to make an immediate impact on college life’, said Murphy. ‘The Pembroke Lecture on Fantasy Literature in Honour of JRR Tolkien is precisely the sort of project the Annual Fund was designed to support, thanks to its resonance within and beyond the Pembroke community’.

Kij Johnson’s ‘fiction in the fantasy mode’ has won the Hugo, the Nebula (three times running), the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She has written two novels set in Heian-era Japan, The Fox Woman and Fudoki, available from Tor Books, and a story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, available from Small Beer Press. Among other subjects, her writing explores the human-animal interface, ancient and medieval Japanese culture, and narrative form.

She has taught at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, where she is also Associate Professor of Creative Writing.

Both the lecture and the fiction masterclass are free and open to the public, but online registration is required to reserve a place on the fiction course. Please go to pembrokemcr.com/Tolkien for more information.

New Aussie Podcast

~ Cheryl

Thanks to Kirstyn and Mondy of The Writer & The Critic I have been altered to a new podcast by prolific Australian blogger, Sean Wright. The podcast is named after his blog, Adventures of a Bookonaut, and Episode 1 is very interesting.

It contains three interviews. The first is with Luke Preston. He’s a thriller writer, but well worth listening to as he has come to novel writing from a screen writing background. Consequently he has some interesting views on how to write (which I suspect are better-suited to his chosen genre than to other types of fiction).

Next up is Joelyn Alexandra from Singapore who introduces us to her own writing, and to several other writers from her part of the world.

Finally there is an interview with Helen Merrick, author of The Secret Feminist Cabal. This is a must-listen for anyone with an interest in feminism and science fiction.

Thanks Sean, I’m looking forward to more episodes.

An Oxford Lecture

~ Cheryl

As you doubtless all know, Professor Tolkien taught at Oxford University, and wrote much of his famous work while there. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College, and in January Pembroke will be hosting the first in what will be an annual series of lectures on fantastic fiction in Tolkien’s honor. I’m delighted to see that the chosen speaker for the inaugural lecture is the fabulous Kij Johnson. The lecture will be at 6:00pm on January 18th, and Kij will teach a 2 hour course on fiction writing at 10:00am the following morning. Both will be free and open to the public.

You shouldn’t need me to tell you that Kij is one of the finest writers of short fiction working today. Her Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award wins stand testament to that. This is a unique opportunity for UK writers to hear a very fine exponent of the art speak.

Kij tells me that there will be some official publicity in the New Year, but for now all we have is a notice on Pembroke College’s Facebook page. I’ll link to the official announcement as soon as I hear it is up.

Women In Sensible Social Situations

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

There has been quite a bit of talk around the blogosphere recently about how “realistic” having strong female characters in epic fantasy novels might be. Apparently various authors have been getting complaints from outraged fanboys over their use of strong and independent women. Didn’t they know that in medieval times women were all busy in the kitchen or having babies? Having them actually go on adventures totally ruins the careful world-building that you have done to justify the inclusion of magic, dragons and so on. And as for pirate queens, well, no self-respecting, red-blooded fantasy writer would ever do that!

There have been some quite entertaining responses. Tansy Rayner Roberts put on her professional historian hat over at Tor.com, while Foz Meadows has done an awesome amount of actual research (including covering the race angle as well).

Because such things tend to run and run, I’m guessing that there will be follow-up articles popping up all over the place. One of the things I am expecting to see people say is that it is about time that someone actually wrote more epic fantasy with strong women in it, because there is so little of it about. Which of course is silly, there’s plenty of it. The trouble is that much of it is written by women, and so it doesn’t get noticed by a lot of people.

I’m naturally proud of my authors, so I’d like to point out that Juliet McKenna has been writing fine epic fantasy for years, all of which contains plenty of female characters of different types. Some of them are adventurers, or professional magicians, while others are wives and mothers. You could try her out, starting at the beginning.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to my pal Glenda Larke. Her latest series, the Watergivers trilogy, is excellent, and is also set in a very different world from the run-of-the-mill pseudo-medieval fantasy. Finally, of course, there is Mary Gentle’s Ash, which is a magnificent piece of work.

The other thing I’d like to note is that the reverse argument is not true. That is, while it is not “unrealistic” to have strong, independent women in your fantasy, it is not “sexist” to not have them. Sure, remarkable women have existed in all periods of history; doubtless far more than have actually had their stories recorded. They have a place in adventure novels for the same reason that remarkable barbarian boys from far off Cimmeria have such a place. But not everyone was like that. The majority of women in medieval societies had fairly tough lives, and unless your fantasy world has invented modern medicine the dangers of pregnancy will loom large over your female characters. Even with modern medicine, women still have it tough, especially in less wealthy countries.

If we produced fantasy novels where the only female characters were strong and independent then we’d both be erasing the very real struggles of women in the past, and forfeiting the opportunity to create parallels with women’s struggles today. Besides, I have a sneaking suspicion that a fantasy novel that only has strong, independent women in it will probably only have one or two women in it (the heroine, or the heroine and her rival). Realistic worlds have all sorts of people in them, and roughly 50% of them will be female.

No, No Wri Mo

~ Cheryl

Today is that start of NaNoWriMo. Many of my friends are hunkering down and starting to write. I’m not. I do have a huge backlog of books to read and review, but more importantly I have a backlog of books to edit. November’s task is getting Archangel Protocol done. It may not go on sale as I’ll be asking Lyda to check over it once I’m done, but progress needs to be made and now that BristolCon and Colinthology are out of the way I have to get on and make it.

Rambling About Writing

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Clearly I have been listening to Gary and Jonathan too much because I am about to ramble. Hopefully a coherent post will result.

My starting point is Justine Larbalestier being smart about publishing, which in turn led me to Diana Peterfreund torpedoing some really bad advice to young writers. Can I just echo what Diana said? Look folks, I run a small press. That doesn’t mean that I want to publish sub-standard books. Wizard’s Tower Press exists primarily to help existing writers get their backlists into ebook form. It will also run projects like the Colinthology that a bigger publisher wouldn’t touch, and I’d love to publish translated fiction if I can afford to do so. I’m not in the business of publishing books that can’t get published anywhere else because they are not good enough, and I suspect that most other small press owners would say the same.

So, young writers, please do have some ambition. The point is not to get published, the point is to learn to write really well. Getting rejected is part of that process.

And talking of ambition, this month’s The Writer and the Critic features books by Kate Forsyth and Lavie Tidhar. Kirstyn and Mondy liked them both, which pleases me in different ways. I reviewed Kate’s first novel for Emerald City. It was terrible. So I’m absolutely delighted to hear that, 15 years later, she’s got to be really good. I shall get hold of a copy of Bitter Greens, because I owe that to Kate for having savaged her early work.

See, young writers, even getting published by a major publisher doesn’t mean that you are good. You can still have a lot to learn.

And then there is Osama, which as Kirstyn says is wonderfully ambitious. And I totally agree with her, I would much rather read a wildly ambitious book that isn’t 100% perfect than a merely competent one. Which takes us back to the beginning of the podcast where Mondy says he’s sick of short fiction and Kirstyn says she’s having trouble getting the enthusiasm to read novels. It happens. When you read a lot (which they do, and I do as well), you can get really jaded.

Osama ought to be a cure for anyone who is jaded. I didn’t say too much about it in my review because it is way too easy to be spoilery (and the podcast is massively spoilery — you have been warned). However, one of these days I want to write a critical essay about how clever the book is. I’m bearing in mind Damien Walter’s sage advice here, but academic tongue firmly in cheek I’d like to note that I think Kirstyn and Mondy missed something very important about the book. And that has specific bearing on Kirstyn’s concerns about the book being noir.

Finally I note that next month’s episode of The Writer and the Critic will focus on ebooks recommended by listeners. Two of them were recommended by me (and possibly by others). They are Anticopernicus by Adam Roberts, and Paintwork by Tim Maughan. They are both in the bookstore, and both are short and cheap. So if you want to play the game of reading along with Kirstyn and Mondy (and shouting at the podcast when they get things wrong), you know what to do.

Farewell, Diana

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Diana Wynne Jones died in March last year. The funeral was a private, family affair, but it was obvious that something should be done for the many friends and fans from all over the world that Diana had acquired over her career. That something happened in Bristol today, and I was lucky enough to be there.

The event was held in St. George’s concert hall, the same former church that housed the Peter Straub event last year. A lot of people, including Farah and Edward, arrived from London on the 11:55, and there was a local train due in just before then so I was able to be there to meet them. We headed off to the Wetherspoon’s at the top of Park Street for lunch, where our party grew steadily in size. Greer Gilman and Cathy Butler joined us, as did Jo and Roz from BristolCon, and long-time UK fans such as Chris Bell and Caroline Mullan.

When it came to head down to St.George’s the heavens opened. I gather from Twitter that we got off lightly as hail stones the size of small asteroids were falling in other parts of the city. If I believed in life after death I would suspect Diana of having arranged that as a prank.

As is only fitting, books were on sale in the foyer. I finally managed to pick up a copy of Fire & Hemlock, which I have been wanting to read for some time. I also got the new non-fiction collection, Reflections, which contains much of Diana’s writing about the craft of writing. There’s a foreward by Neil Gaiman in which he waxes lyrical about just how well Diana understood her craft. Someone had built a tower out of foreign language editions of Diana’s books — I suspect that each one is different — and it was much photographed. Here’s mine.

Something that was very clear from the various speeches is that Diana’s whole family is extremely talented. There were contributions from her sisters, Ursula and Isobel; from her sons, Richard, Michael and Colin; and from her nephew, Tom. They all spoke well, and with ready wit. One of the highlights of the event was a reading of the first few paragraphs of the book Diana was writing when she died. It concerns a young girl who appears to be a trainee in some sort of goddess cult who has just been through her initiation and thinks she has flunked it but very clearly hasn’t. Ursula did the reading, and was extremely good.

Whether that book ever appears is currently uncertain. I guess someone would have to finish it, and the family may not want that. But there is, apparently, a finished adult novel called Incubus that Diana wrote years ago and which may see print soon.

Other speakers included Diana’s agent, Laura Cecil; her UK editor, Stella Paskins; her US editor, Sharyn November; and her Israeli translator, Gili Bar-Hillel. Greer Gilman, Robin McKinley and David Devereaux all spoke movingly, and Sharyn read a message from Neil Gaiman, who was unable to attend and will have been desperately disappointed not to be there.

I have been asked whether the event was recorded. I didn’t see any signs of it, but the audio could easily have been run through a recorder so it could have happened. Isobel’s contribution is available online here (PDF). Reflections contains the orations that Richard and Colin wrote for the funeral, and I know that Richard gave the same speech today as he said so at the start. Other material may appear online later.

All in all, it was a lovely day. I’m very glad to have been a part of it.

Writing Classes

~ Cheryl

Earlier today Neil Gaiman made a tumblr post in response to a question about the cost of networking for young writers. The questioner made the point that going to conventions and attending writing workshops is expensive. I guess they were thinking about going to World Fantasy, or attending Clarion. Neil made some good points about minimizing hotel costs, and mentioned a much cheaper writing course, but I’d like to go one better.

Over the holidays I participated in an online writing course run by Cat Rambo. It took place in Google+ Hangouts, and I thought it worked very well. It was also quite cheap. $145 from memory. Obviously you’ll get a lot more out of Clarion, but if you want to test the water an online course is a good way to start.

Cat is a fun tutor with plenty of experience as both a fiction writer and a professional editor. She has plenty of sound, practical advice to offer, and the writing exercises are enjoyable. A course like this allows you to meet other writers of varying levels of experience and talent, which is a very good way of finding out what you are good at and where your skills need work. It also gives you a bunch of potential writing buddies, which can be very valuable.

In answer to the obvious question, I’m not going to post anything I wrote. I have a very long way to go before anything of mine is publishable. And I don’t have anywhere near enough time to work on it. Also I simply don’t have the instincts to be able to write something good in class the way that many of the other students could, so I failed a lot.

And finally, if even that amount of money is too much, you could read one of the books that Cat recommended. The exercise that she got from this one was great fun, and very insightful. Yeah, it’s Le Guin, how did you guess? 🙂

SF & Malt Whisky: A Perfect Blend

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As many of you will know, one of my current favorite whiskies is Jura Prophecy. I had no idea that the Jura distillery also owns a writer’s retreat. I should be paying more attention to what Ken MacLeod writes about. Still, thanks to SFX, I know now. And I also know that you (if you are a UK resident) can enter one of those ridiculously simple competitions that is really a prize draw, the prize for which is a free stay at that very place.

It occurs to me that if I win it I won’t be able to afford to get to Jura, but maybe they’d send me some free whisky instead.

Film Agents?

~ Cheryl

This is a bit of an odd request, but does anyone know any good film agents? It’s not for me, I hasten to add, it’s for a friend. And it’s a US company wanting rights to a UK author’s work. I’m not sure that there’s a huge amount of money involved, so I don’t want to call people on spec. Thanks!

How Did I Do?

~ Cheryl

NaNoWriMo is now well and truly over. How did I do in my attempt to write 50,000 words of non-fiction in that period?

As it turned out, I managed just over 30,000. I’m reasonably pleased about that. I was fairly busy during the month, including a fair amount of rushing around the country. I also found that when I did get a chance to write the fact that I was doing multiple, discrete pieces tended to cause me to stop when one was done. A typical book review is about 1,000 words, and I really needed to be doing around 2,000 a day to make up for the days when I couldn’t write. Of course with a novel I might end stopping at the end of a chapter, I won’t know until I try.

Anyway, it was an interesting experience, and hopefully I will keep up trying to plow through the backlog of reviews, even though hardly anyone reads them. I do, after all, have a lot left to do.

Book Review – The Watergivers Trilogy

~ Cheryl

Another day, another book review done. Well three books actually, as this time I have turned my attention to Glenda Larke’s excellent Watergivers Trilogy. If you think these books are just fat fantasy for girls, think again. Go read the review to find out why.

That’s 11,454 words actually published thus far. That’s pretty poor, but I do have another 7,300 or so words in first draft stage, which certainly counts as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned. And that’s not counting words edited (for Clarkesworld) or papers I have written for the Day Job. It is proving an interesting exercise this far. My main worry is running out of books to review, but at least then I will have cleared the review backlog.

Hundred Stories Update

~ Cheryl

You may recall Liz Williams commented on my mention of her Hundred Stories project to the effect that donations under $100 were OK, but there were problems with PayPal accepting them. It appears there is some sort of issue between IndieGoGo and PayPal, so Liz has put a donate button on her LJ. She says she’ll add anything received there to the project. Details here.

You Don’t Have To Be Mad…

~ Cheryl

Love of the weird is an affliction. There can be no doubt about it. The very reading of that dread tome, The Necronomicon, can cause a man to lose his sanity. And while that book might be quite a hefty chunk of paper, it is hand-written and full of hideous illustrations. It is a little difficult to keep count, but at a rough estimate I put it at barely over novel length, around 42,372 words. Fortunately it is not fiction, so that won’t cause Jess Nevins any problems when he comes to do Medieval Hugos over at io9.

Ahem. I digress. The book is relatively short. How much more mind-warping, then, would a full 750,000 words of weird fiction be? For that is the size of the monster that Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have unleashed upon the world with The Weird. In the wake of the book’s launch, the true cost of its creation is beginning to be revealed.

Exhibit 1: Adam Mills, a young man supposedly hired by the VanderMeers as an intern to help produce the book. So hopelessly obsessed has this unfortunate lad become, that he has taken it upon himself to compile a list of the opening lines of all 116 stories collected in the anthology. Mills writes about the experience here. Donations towards his psychiatric treatment are gratefully accepted.

Meanwhile the heartless VanderMeers are seeking to profit from the poor boy’s condition. Not only have they published the list, they are asking innocent readers to add to it with opening lines from their own favorite stories. Where will this end? Tabloid hacks around the world are already sharpening their quills in anticipation. Weird Fiction Causes Cancer! You read it here first.

And yet, can some good possibly come of this sorry tale? I think perhaps it might. You see, these opening lines are the work of some very fine writers indeed. They are mostly highly intriguing, designed to draw the hapless reader into the story from the very outset. In other words, they are all stories waiting to happen. Were I ever to be in the position of running a creative writing course, one of the challenges I might set the students would be to pick one of the opening lines — obviously from a story that they haven’t read — and complete the tale. There is no need to wonder where to get your ideas from. Here are 116 of them, all ready for use.

Digging Up The Dark

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

I often joke about living in Darkest Somerset (which I don’t quite now as Trowbridge is just over the border into Wiltshire), and these days the country doesn’t amount to much save for a cricket team famous for losing finals. Years ago, however, Somerset was one of the more important parts of Britain. And of course a few millennia back Wiltshire was home to the civilization that built Stonehenge. So archaeology is important here. I like to support it.

Now it so happens that Liz Williams’ partner, Trevor, is embarking on a Masters degree in community archaeology that will involve a project somewhere close to their home in Glastonbury. No, Trevor isn’t going to dig up Arthur & Guinevere. That grave is mediaeval fake. There are plenty of other sites worth investigating, including the Sweet Track, an ancient causeway across the Somerset Levels. (That was one of the things I took Kevin to see when we did a whistle-stop tour of Somerset a few years ago.)

As Liz explains here, doing this requires money for tuition fees, and she’s helping out by running a funding campaign on Indiegogo. The minimum donation is $100, which I guess will be a bit steep for many of you, but the premium is rather impressive. Liz says:

I’m starting the Hundred Stories Project. From January 1st, 2012, I’ll be writing a story a day, about the people who have lived in and around Glastonbury from Neolithic times. You’ll get 7 stories at the end of each week, plus the extra. They’ll be short stories, a page for each person, and when the project is finished I’ll be binding the stories for display.

There’s also a $1,000 level option that involves a 4-day stay with Liz & Trevor and a guided tour of the area.

If you want to participate, the project page is here.

Novels: More Than Just Words

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

With BristolCon over, and various other commitments being dropped, November is actually starting to look relatively relaxed (at least for me). As some of you will have noticed on Twitter, I’ve actually contemplated doing NaNoWriMo. This is, of course, stupid. I do have plenty to do, and I should be prioritizing earning money with the skills I have, not learning new skills. But it did lead me to actually think about what I’d need to do in order to make a decent attempt at novel writing.

The well-known cliche from author events is that someone in the audience will ask, “where do you get your ideas from?” But any good fiction writer will tell you that ideas are ten-a-penny. It is turning them into a story that is hard. You need structure and motivations. I noticed someone re-tweet this post from Writer’s Digest with some very good advice. Before embarking on writing a novel, you need to know these three things:

  • What’s going to happen in the story?
  • What does the character want?
  • What will the turning points be?

There may well be more things too. After all, I’m not an expert.

In addition to all that, there are techniques to be learned. In the interview I linked to yesterday, Zoran Živković said:

The trap of turning a work of fiction into a tedious tract is always there, threatening an inexperienced, careless, or simply untalented writer. Such a work betrays the very essence of the art of prose: that it is the art of storytelling.

A reliable way to avoid this trap is to master various fictional techniques. This was the reason I emphasized, in my answer to your previous question, the technical aspects I have learned from the masters of Middle-European fantastika. These aspects are essential. In my creative writing course at the University of Belgrade, I spend the first three out of four semesters teaching my students basic prose techniques. Only the final semester is devoted to content.

So even if you have a plot, and motivations for your characters, you still have to present those things to the readers in a way that is believable, and which keeps them turning the pages.

Again all of this is fairly trivial for those of you who write fiction, but for those of you who don’t it will hopefully explain why simply diving in and writing 50,000 words won’t result in much of a novel.

Of course you can just write, and clean the mess up later. When Erin Morgenstern was talking about the origins of The Night Circus during her event at Foyles, that’s exactly what she said she did. That’s partly because her particular skill is in writing descriptions. She imagined scenes, and wrote them. Plot came later. But a consequence of that is that the final novel was very different. The central character, Celia, wasn’t even in the book that she wrote during NaNoWriMo.

From my point of view, I have plenty to do. I have a magazine article to write, an interview to transcribe for Locus, a Trans Day of Remembrance post to write, the BristolCon panel recordings to edit, website updates to do, and a huge pile of books I need to read and review. If I concentrate on getting that out of the way, I may well end up writing 50,000 words in November anyway. In fact, that would be a very useful target to set myself.

Then again, as I understand it, half the point of NaNoWriMo is the process: the camaraderie and mutual learning that goes on. So if, over the weekend, I can come up with a plot and some characters to add to the idea I already have, I might just sign up anyway. It’s no disgrace to fail, right?

Erin Morgenstern at Foyles

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I spent yesterday evening in Bristol at two events. The first one was a signing at Foyles for Erin Morgenstern and her debut novel, The Night Circus, which has been garnering rave reviews around the world.

The event space in Foyles is really nice, and I’m starting to get to know the staff who are very enthusiastic about SF&F. There may be some developments on this front in the New Year.

Erin was very good. Her book has particularly been praised for the quality of its descriptions, and that very much came over in the reading. Also she’s a theater major, so she’s very confident on platform and reads well. I’m looking forward to reading the book. Erin will be at Toppings in Bath on Wednesday night if you missed the Bristol event.

Interestingly the book began life as a NaNoWriMo project, although what was produced in the writing frenzy is very different to the final book (the original didn’t include the now lead character). I took a punt and asked Erin if she had used Scrivener to write the book, and to my delight she began gushing about what a wonderful piece of software it is. This is, of course, a reminder that Keith Blount, the man who wrote Scrivener, will be a Guest of Honour at BristolCon in just over a week’s time. If you are a writer and have been thinking about buying the software, or are a keen user, you really should come along.

The other meeting was founding a local LGBT History group. I’ll be talking more about that later once the website has launched, but it is getting me some very useful contacts.

SLF Gulliver Award

~ Cheryl

The Speculative Literature Foundation is seeking applicants for their 2011 Gulliver Travel Research Grant. The successful applicant will receive $800 towards the costs of a research trip for a writing project. Full details of the application process and requirements are available here.

Logical Punctuation

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

As you may have noticed, I am not a language purist. I adopted a lot of American spelling when I went to live there and had to write as part of my job, and I have stuck with it since as the majority of my readers are American. But one thing that really grated on me was American punctuation. If you are going to put something “in quotes”, those quotes should logically relate to the piece of text being quoted, and should not expand to include punctuation that is part of the parent sentence, but not part of the quote. US style insists that, if you something “in quotes,” they should encompass any following punctuation.

See the difference?

I had always thought that what I was doing was a British style of punctuation, but looking at contemporary UK books and newspapers I discovered that they tended to do things the American way, so I changed. Or at least tried to, I’m not very consistent because it irritates me so much.

Now, thanks to Jonathan Strahan on Twitter, I have found this article in Slate, which not only supports my instinct that I was using a UK style, but also argues that it is much more sensible than the American way of doing things. Hooray! Now I can go back to doing quotes my way.

Maybe.

If Anne and Deanna don’t kill me.

And except in Clarkesworld where I need to follow Neil’s house style.