Excerpt:

“We’re all in favor of cheesing exactly the right verb for the action, but when you’re writing speaker attributions the right verb is nearly always said.”

Another handy tip:

“Place the character’s name or pronoun first in a speaker attribution. Reversing the two, though often done, is less professional. …slightly old-fashioned, first-grade-reader flavor… fell out of favor sometime during the Taft administration.”

There’s much more of course – using beats instead of tags, etc. Lots of good stuff so far.

But, anyone who’s had to slog through the queries and rejections and edits and all that – they’re in the same arena as I am. Except that I haven’t got to that step yet. :P.

Sure, you have to keep your target market in mind, but I assume those things go without saying.

And, unfortunately, vampires are kind of big with the pubescent ladies at the moment. Wait, I mean forever. Just more so now.

That being said, who doesn’t like vampires? I just don’t like them being done all glow in the daylight douchy… there will eventually be some vampires in my 1st series, if I ever get to book 4ish. I suspect…they will be highly amusing.

http://naturalartificial.blogspot.com/2009/10/scarf-weather-answers-part-eleven.html

quote:

No fancy tags. “He said” and “he asked” is all you need, 97% of the time. Please refrain from peppering your dialogue with, “he exclaimed” or “he shouted” (the shouting should be apparent from either the content or an exclamation point).

Of course, her target market is different than that dude who writes all those Zen books about repairing your motorcycle, but it’s always good to have variable input.

And hey – I assume by now you’ve read some of what I’ve written, so you can see I’m no Maya Angelou of prose.