Remember how, a couple of years ago, everywhere you turned someone was using the word "fleek" or the phrase "on fleek"? And remember how - about the time it started to show up in mainstream culture on TV and in social media - it was already going away? This is one of the big problems I have with using full-on slang in a book. Yes, having your characters use words like "fleek" will definitely let your readers know that your book was written by a hip, trendy, and oh so au courant author in 2015. But what if your book didn't go to print until 2016? By the time the book was out, your oh-so-cool terms had already become last year's news. Honestly, the same can be said - to a lesser degree - about
I debated for a while on what to call this post. To give you an idea of what we'll be discussing, here are two of my other options: Graphic Smatter Space Smatter Yep. We're talking about unfortunate font/graphic/space choices that can truly alter how your reader sees (and understands) what you're working on. On the most basic level, this can be something like the choice you make when offered Times New Roman, Calibri, and Comic Sans. Each has a purpose and a place - and they're not entirely interchangeable. For most fiction works, a serif font (like Times New Roman) is used. For a lot of non-fiction works (or online web pages), a sans-serif font (like Calibri) is used. For comic books (or for
I've been working with authors for a long time - probably close to a decade on at least a semi-professional basis, but really all the way back to college - in creative writing courses as well as just helping out friends as they wrote papers. Not me. I'm part of the generation that started working with keyboards on typewriters (mostly electric, at least), and experienced things like "daisy wheel" typewriters (which kept typing even when you had stopped because they had to catch up with you - which completely threw me off in the same way that an out-of-sync movie does). I also had a dictionary. And - in my parents' house - a full set of World Book Encyclopedias. And - at school - a full school
