Do you know what a dangling participles are?
Last month in the middle of the night I thought of Dangling Participle as the title of my next blog.It's perfect I thought. Do I even care about dangling participles? Not one damn bit! Do you know what a dangling participle is?
Geez, it must have been in a fifth or sixth grade English class when my generation was introduced to such, and later in high school when we had to diagram sentences and learned the danger of a dangling participle. Whatever, I don't care. What I have been concerned about are commas, colons, run on sentences, incomplete sentences, and over use of certain words such as "just". You can take the boy out of West Texas but you just can't take the West Texas out of the boy. In addition to being born and raised in the heart of West Texas I had a father who earned a teachers certificate in English and forever corrected my spoken language in front of God and everybody. I unconsciously rebelled and did not exactly love my grammar and English classes. I did however love my English Lit classes and one teacher in particular.
God saved me by giving me a daughter who graduated from Stanford University and became a professional writer. Having my daughter close by my side I fearlessly started a project over two years ago to write a book on a topic that I knew would contribute to a community that I have been part of for the last 18 years. The recent experience of buying our fifth vessel put the finishing touches on the book and I felt confident that I finally had closure and the book was complete. My daughter completed editing the book just before her second child was born as a gift to me knowing she would not be able to work on it for the foreseeable future. Somehow I was hoping that she might be able to just read through it one last time and catch any glaring bits that needed correcting. Was not going to happen, With an almost four year old red headed Eveready battery boy child and a new infant red headed girl child that required four adults all their awake time to care for, there was no time in her day for one last edit.
I read and edited the book the best my brain could manage. Looking for proper placement of commas and other punctuation is super detailed work and only highly gifted writers are capable of. I now have the utmost respect for professional writers. I have learned a lot in the process but is mainly that I am woefully inadequate in editing written language. I needed this book to be done so I turned to Amazons' CreateSpace editors to do the final review and edit. After a week I got the draft back and now the manuscript is finished. I did one final read through and changed a few words here and there and I am fully prepared to hit the publish button. There could be a remaining gremlin in there but at some point you just have to let go and let it fly
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The Book is now available on Amazon at:
Or Kindle at:
Many friends have contributed greatly to our experience and I have included them in my acknowledgements. If for some reason my 65 year old brain missed a important connection please inform me, I want to include all those important moments and the friends we shared them with. Also if you read the book and could provide some constructive criticism or additional details that relate to the manuscript please forward them to me. The great thing about publishing through Amazon's CreateSpace is that you can update the manuscript at any time allowing me to insert those missed details at any time. Huge thanks to the boating and sailing community that have touched our lives, we look forward to becoming a part of the Puget Sound community as we begin our new adventures from our home port Eagle Harbor, Bainbridge Island, WA.
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