though one look at my avatar would've told you that *g*. But I don't mind the rain, it makes it easy to cocoon here in the cottage with my kitties and a latte (picked up after my work-out this morning).
Yesterday I completed my stay in Spell-checker hell, then moved onto Fixing-the-Formatting Hell. You see, I do galleys of my mss to save paper and make it easier to read just like a book. For that process, I use WordPerfect, BUT whenever I import an .rtf file into WP, I find tons of weird tabs at the beginning of paragraphs throughout the ms, so yesterday I went through and removed them all. Thrilling work, that. But it has to be done. I also fixed up little things like underlining foreign words/phrases. And found I had more of those than I remember. With Cécile being French, it's not really a total surprise, so for now I'm leaving them in. They're easy enough to identify and translate if someone is interested in buying the ms, and I'm really hoping an editor wouldn't turn it down just because of the bits and pieces of French. Some readers (including someone I know who copy edits for a major romance publisher) have even told me they really like the way Cécile talks.
Now, it might seem strange to other reaaders, though. I've even heard people say "No-one uses two languages at the same time, and certainly not in the same sentence." That really shocked me - my father was Polish, but became fluent in English. Still, at times, especially with those he knew understood both languages, he would go back and forth between the two. Listening to conversations in Polish and English is something I grew up with, so I guess it's no surprise that's reflected in my writing.
So, do you like it when writers use other languages and dialects in their mss? Is it all a matter of skill and context?
Teresa
Link of the Day: Historical Timelines
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