Cover for Yesterday’s Songs Transformed
Here’s the cover! Click on it for a larger view.
Mark Mandel now has the draft for copy editing. I hope to have the book up for sale on Smashwords before long.
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The Sanity Project
British English for American writers
Ghostwriters have to write in a voice different from their normal one, and sometimes even in a different dialect. When writing for a Canadian, British, or Australian site, you want to look like a native writer. It’s tricky to get it really right.
Each nation’s treatment of English is different. British, Australian, and New Zealand English are fairly close to one another (in spelling, not pronunciation!). Canadians use a version that’s somewhere between American and British English. I’ll focus mostly on the American and British versions here, for the sake of brevity.
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HTTPS (finally)!
This site now is entirely behind HTTPS URLs, which I should have done a long time ago. You won’t get browser warnings of an “insecure” site, and you can submit Web forms with more confidence.
The old URLs will still work, redirecting to the corresponding HTTPS ones. You may want to update your bookmarks, though.
Yesterday’s Songs Transformed: Update 1
Yesterday’s Songs Transformed is getting close to completion. I’m working on the introduction, which traditionally is one of the last things you write. It deals with the relationship of the book to Tomorrow’s Songs Today. TST is about filk music. YST grows out of my interest in filk. It puts the rewriting of song lyrics into a bigger context. I expect a large part of my audience to be people interested in filk, people who love the idea of replacing old lyrics with new ones. I also hope that other music lovers will get enjoyment out of it.
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Maximizing the value of each word
When I’m polishing text that I’ve written, I find myself thinking about the value each word contributes. Can I replace a long phrase with a short one with equal value? Can I use a high-value word in place of one that has relatively little?
By “value” I mean the precision and impact which each word contributes to the statement. A precise word has more value than one with a broad meaning. A straightforward word or phrase has more value than a cliché. A sentence with a high value per word has more impact than one that’s full of low-value words.
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Working with Finale and Open Office
A current project of mine is compiling and editing the songbook portion of the ConCertino 2018 program book. I’m using OpenOffice for the pages and Finale for the music notation.
This is the first time I’ve worked with the full version of Finale on a project. Previously I’d used the budget versions, called Finale Allegro and later Finale PrintMusic. When the publisher dropped PrintMusic and offered a cheap upgrade to Finale, I took them up on it. I didn’t think that the extra features would be that useful for my purposes, but they’ve turned out to be quite helpful.
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The right word 4
Of all the crimes against good writing, the worst is using the wrong word. A grammatical error looks sloppy, but as long as it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence, people will get what you mean. Use the wrong word, though, and you fail to convey what you’re trying to say. That amounts to failing as a writer.
Usage errors fall into several categories. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it includes the types of errors that annoy me the most.
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W. A. Mozart, ghostwriter
A stranger approached Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in July 1791. He wanted Mozart to write a Requiem for a patron and to finish it as quickly as possible. Mozart never finished it. On December 5, he died. Some people think he was poisoned.
The patron was named Count Franz von Walsegg. The Count wanted to pass off Mozart’s work as his own, in memory of his recently deceased wife. In other words, he hired one of the greatest composers in history as a ghostwriter of music. Mozart’s students, Franz Xaver Süssmayr and Joseph Eybler, finished the work. Walsegg made a partial payment to Mozart; it isn’t clear whether he paid for the completion. The condition of secrecy had been thoroughly ruined by that point. 
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Writers: You’re Always Being Screened 1
It’s a tough life, being a professional writer on the Internet. Everything you post reflects, well or badly, on your professional qualifications. You might just be chatting with your friends, but if it’s under your name, potential clients could judge your skills by it. If you regularly make a lot of mistakes, you could lose work as a result.
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Three steps before submitting an article
I’ve gotten it down to a pattern, and I’m seeing fewer rejections. It’s always hard to tell just what affects acceptance rates, but submitting articles with fewer typos and clumsy formulations certainly has to help. It’s a simple three-step process after I’ve finished the article and think it may be OK.
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