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Geez, look at that, all fellas - on a Sunday morning before eight!
Huh. I read the other day that the most rapidly growing household demographic is single and male and over 50. Maybe they come down here for the company.
And for someone to cook for them ...
Well, maybe there is some truth to that. But, it is also just a cynical, throwaway line. Go on, admit it.
Hah! Never ...
You know, I reckon that if society keeps evolving as it is, the concept of a house will alter. We will need blocks of dormitories, motels – a double bed, a bathroom, and a jug. Human society is evolving into a bee hive. Males are courted until they produce offspring and then they are put out to pasture because they are more trouble than they are worth.
Get out of here! What the hell are you on about?
15 comments:
I bee-lieve your riff is now a rant! I wonder if they got up to go eat or simply rolled in from the night before???
A rant! Moi ...
I suspect this bunch got up to go eat. The ones in the sleeping bags on the top of the cliffs ... they were in deep strife.
I have a friend who's husband gets up early and drives to a trendy suburb for coffee then he would go to his office, which was their own company and she worked there too.
Now they are retired but he still gets up early and goes for a coffee. How wierd is that?
When my daughter was an exchange student in Washington DC, she said many houses didn't have a real kitchen just an alcove, because they ate out for all meals.
Diane, that goes a long way to explaining the obesity problem in the US. A problem that is gaining ground here as well. I have friends (a couple) who would appear to eat out more than they eat in.
Julie, I'm not as keen on this one ... to me it feels like you're talking to yourself. Perhaps I wanted just a hint to who the protagonists are.
Okay. Thanks for saying. There is a knack to conversation somehow. I am tryiing to avoid quotation marks and the "he said" then "she replied" pattern.
So maybe I need a paragraph in there which conveys some identifying information. I will try that for one of the ones coming. I will also try to make the conversation sufficiently different from each participant to ensure that they are distinguishable.
Your aability to be candid is useful to me but also very pleasing. Taa.
Knowing from your comment that this is a conversation gives it a completely different perspective. Now I’m eavesdropping on a couple’s (man and woman?) chatter, which is far more fascinating.
Don’t avoid dialogue tags altogether. Sometimes they’re necessary. I also have to ask why you’ve chosen not to use speech marks.
I find them annoying when I read, sort of clunky. Like the writer is getting in betweent the reader and the information.
I had two women in mind for this one. But I can see I need to give more clues. That is probably why written speech, as we know it, came into being.
You're obviously not a genre-fiction reader then... :)
Interestingly, a writer friend of mine in the UK touched upon this same issue recently: vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/song-yet-sung-by-james-mcbride-of-dreams-and-slave-traders/
Yes, I would have to admit to being a reader of the geeky form of literary fiction. Sorry. Maybe that is where I picked up the bias from. I seem to feel that direct speech is the writer telling me what to think, whereas the writer should get on with the story and I will think what I think.
I followed that link, thank you. And found this bit
Equally interestingly (if that is indeed a workable phrase at all), in spite of the fact that the text has absolutely no speech marks (which is one of my all-out literary no nos), this didn’t annoy me quite as much as I expected it to. Somehow, here, the sense of distance and strangeness engendered by the missing speech marks added to the feel of the novel.
So there is a layering here of what type of literature uses certain types of writing styles. This book Song yet Sung uses tags but not speech marks. What is wrong with NOT using speech marks. We don't use anything when we speak, why should we when we write?
LOL We don’t use commas when we speak either. It’s probably what you’re used to. I think of speech marks – like any punctuation – as signposts. How, for example, without speech marks, do we know what is interior monologue and what is actual speech?
P.S. If you’re allergic to speech marks, stay clear of anything I write. :)
Now I would go dip into your side-bar, except the chap in the apartment above me has just whinged to me that my cats dug up his lettuce tha he just planted over the weekend. So I gotta go make them a digging tray for outside. Groan ... only been here 2 months and he has whinged to me 3 times already. I was at my other place 3+ years and not a squeak!
I'll get to your side-bar ... you know I will!!
Parting shot: a comma is a pause ...
Somehow I knew you were going to say that about the comma. On that basis, think of speech marks as opening your mouth and closing it again. Whatever is outside the marks is narration or thoughts.
Since joining CDP, I’ve changed my blogroll to only include photoblogs, and only the 10 most recently updated of those display at a time.
Good luck placating your lettuce-growing neighbour.
I have noticed a tendency in recent work for speech marks to not always be there and even for capital letters to be left out. Look back at old books and you will see that there have been significant shifts in the way things are written over the years. I think this is just a new thing getting moving and may end up the norm we'll just have to wait and see.
BTW ... I picked it as a conversation between two women.
I will be inconsistent here.
Whereas I find speech marks (when did they stop being called quotation marks?) intrusive, I am Truss-like in my regard for all other punctuation. I don't always know the proper way to use it, but as soon as I learn that, I use it religiously.
It irritates me to see capitals missing, except maybe in poetry although I think cummings often went too far. I like commas to highlight the meaning I want to be read into the passage. I like colons and semicolons. I am not sure of the right way to use dashes and brackets for asides - but use then anyway.
I like exclamation marks and try to use them sparingly, but find that in comments, when trying to replicate speech, it is often useful to have more than one.
I think that texting (SMS-ing) styles will invariably flow into the written form of the language. It will become easier to tell social data from the one one structures sentences, just as it is now relatively easy to pick social data from the form of handwriting a person has.
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