 Action/Adventure: January 29, 2014 Issue [#6133] |
  Action/Adventure
This week: Action Verbs Edited by: Annette  
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| Hello writers and readers of action and adventure, I am Annette , your guest editor for this issue. |
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Action Verbs
Make your action sequences more dramatic by focusing on active verbs.
When writing action stories, you will often hear the advice to use active verbs. The first question that comes to mind is, "Aren't verbs active by definition?"
Yes. They are. However, there are verbs that don't "do" much.
Those lazy verbs are all forms of "be." They include am, are, is, was, were.
Another set of lazy verbs are the forms of "have" and include has, had.
Whenever possible, try to avoid using these verbs. There will be many instances in every text where you are required to use them to make your text grammatically correct. Therefore, make sure that you eliminate as many of those verbs as possible in instances when they don't add to your action.
"I had coffee with a friend." versus "Jim and I sipped Ethiopian coffee."
See what I did here? Not only did I replace "had," I also gave the sentence some flavor. I know, Ethiopian coffee seems to lay it on thick. I used to work for that coffee place with the green logo. Tasting coffee was part of the job. 
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Comments I got for my last Action Adventure Newsletter "Your Action Needed"
A*Monaing*Faith  wrote: Amen x 1 million; after 12 yrs of grade school and 5 yrs of continued education, God forbid but, if I were to ever contract amnesia I don't believe I will EVER forget "Save early, save OFTEN!!!" I still get ticked off when I forget to copy a loooong comment and I'm on my work pc because the filter will deny it until I manually hit "Continue" but by then all my hard work is lost! Thank God for WDCs auto save feature on some updates. "Reflections: A Book"
Thank you for reading and agreeing. Saving our creative work one of the most important parts of writing.
Jeff  wrote: Don't forget that you can often use some kind of cloud backup these days too! There are quite a few options (many with a certain amount of space for free!) which will allow you to upload to a cloud server that's maintained by Google, Dropbox, Apple, Microsoft, etc. so you've always got a backup in place. I totally agree with you, though... the best way to ensure you don't lose your work is to save it in more than one place! 
I just learned that today when my computer gave me first the black screen of death and then, when I wanted to restart it beeped and had a black screen with zeros on it. Virus? Death? I don't know. Luckily, I have this laptop. I hope I can activate that old computer one more time to get my pics off it.  At least I know that my writing IS backed up in my yahoo email, gmail, on CDs, this laptop, and my husband's laptop, and a hard drive. Hopefully between those places, my writing has survived the crash.
The Run-on King PDG Member  wrote: I'll tell you how the cat gets out. Ninja uses a hole under one of the side paneling the house siding installer created when they put the siding on the house. It is just above the bottom frame in the far back left corner. The setting and cat are real lol. I was having trouble starting the book, so I wrote about something familiar. My wife suggested I go back and have dialog with the cat as well to get it where it is not so dry and boring. I am doing a new rewrite on the first chapter now. It really is fun trying to do cat dialog I'm sure it will always be short and to the point. lol. Thank you for adding it to your newsletter.
Once you re-wrote, let me have that item number once again. You did the right thing to start with something you know. It worked! I wanted to know how the story goes on, so mission "rope the reader in" accomplished.
GaelicQueen  wrote: Thank you for the reminder to copy projects that you have much effort and many hours into creating. Do not trust automatic timed backup.
Not the backup and not your computer. Nothing is stable enough any longer. Back up, back up, back up.
monty31802 wrote: This Newsletter is so true. I just went through this. Found 388 poems on my hard drive. Knew I was missing a lot. Three older computers and still 388. Knew I had transferred to older computers just for a quick way of backing up. Three CDs and recovered about 50 more. I always print out my work so as a last resort went to the paper. Now after two days with my wife's help I have 469.
Still missing a lot but I had saved a lot on 3.5 floppys so bought the last one that staples had here and plugged into a USB port Now to find where I packed my floppys away about 4 years ago.... Your Newsletter hit the nail on the head for me...
Floppies? You need to update your storage! And ... how many poems did you fit on those floppies? Five?  Sorry. Kidding. I have some old stuff backed up on those smaller square ones that we used to call floppies out of habit although they weren't floppy any longer but hard plastic with a little metal thing on the outside.
JACE  wrote: Amen, and AMEN, Annette ! I, too, read about some poor soul who has lost an item on WDC for whatever reason. This happens all too often. I have a plaque over my monitor that reads, "Thou Shall Save Frequently, Or Thou Shall Regret It!"
A plaque! Nice!
Steve wrote:Love this letter because I totally agree. Everything I write goes to my flash drive, my writing folder on my laptop, every 3 months I burn a new CD and destroy the old. I don't want to be that person who's computers hard drive quits and loses all that hard work.
Great thing for everyone to read!
That is great. I suggest instead of destroying the old CDS, start a filing system where the newest is in front. I've found stuff on old CDs that somehow didn't make it on more recent back-ups.
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