Editing does funny, funny things to my thought process. And to my control of my mouth. And to the way I read things, especially to how I read them aloud. Most recently, I've been trying to catch up on the first chapters of the revision of two friends' science fiction novel. It's much better than it was before, but certin issues have carried over from the original. Namely, cliched descriptions of pain and awareness, and a tendency to avoid the word "said" as if it were...well, something very, very smelly.
But the newest development is the most inventive use of semi-colons I have ever seen in my life. It blows my mind. Sometimes, I can spend at least five minutes trying to understand why a semi-colon is present in a sentence. Only to give up with no more enlightenment than I started. I'm trying to figure out if it's my fault or not. During the first draft, I advocated comma rights and tried to get them to back off on the run-on sentences. One of my suggestions was the use of semi-colons. I don't know if this phenomenon is due to that or due to the fact that one of them caught semi-colon fever and infected the other with it as well. Worst part is, I don't even know how to address the problem, because I don't understand their logic in many of the uses.
0.0 I don't know.
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