Love triangles? How square.

Had a conversation over the weekend with a fellow reader discussing the books we enjoyed and what we didn't enjoy,

We love Romance for the HEA. What we didn't like was love triangles.

I do not like love triangles. Not at all.

I believe love triangles work anathema to the goal of HEA. If it's a true love triangle, somewhere, someone's gonna lose.

You've got Our Heroine and she's in love with two guys, Our Hero 1 and Our Hero 2. Both blokes are painted as decent fellows and it's really difficult for her (and the reader) to choose. Unless it's the kind of book where polyamory is the goal, eventually she has to go with one over the other.

Yay for Our Hero 1, if she goes that way.  May they live happily ever after.

But what about Our Hero 2? What does he get for all his effort?  He loses. He does not get the girl, he does not get his HEA. The author's gone to all this trouble to paint this really decent character, one who is worthy of loving and being loved and then shafts him. I think that a tragedy and dreadfully unfair.

So what about a false love triangle?  Our Heroine is in love with two guys, Our Hero and Dastardly Bastard. We, the readers, know that Dastardly Bastard is dastardly. We know he's no good and he's gonna break our heroine's heart. Yet she's still in love with him.

We hates this too, we does. We look at Our Heroine and sadly shake our heads. What on earth is she thinking, falling in love with Dastardly Bastard? He's a jerk! If she's so besottedly blind as to not see what he's up to, Our Heroine loses some respect from us.

Okay, there's the possibility of DB playing Our Heroine, fooling her, pulling the wool over her eyes, and we'll forgive her for that. We've all been played by Dastardly Bastard at one time or another.

But as a book [should be] the story of Our Heroine's personal growth, part of that is her coming to the realisation that Dastardly Bastard is dastardly and to get the hell outta Dodge, the sooner, the better.

I confess we do love it when she comes to her senses and goes, "These boots were made for walking."  No woman should put up with crap from a man if she doesn't have to.

All in all, the whole love triangle thing? Not my cuppa. I don't wanna see the perfectly good Our Hero 2 get his heart broken, and I don't wanna see Our Heroine spend too much time mooning over Dastardly Bastard.

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Her Grace has seen too many good people lost in the battles between Team Edward and Team Jacob.

Indie Books

Yes, I will read Indie Books.  Why not?

What works for me:

• Price point. Indies are often cheaper than commercial books. Some of the more clever indie authors also lead with a permafree, giving me a chance to get hooked on their series with no financial outlay.
• Daring-ness. I've found indie books who have taken chances with their characters or plots in ways that would make a commercial publisher cringe. I'll read whack-a-doodle, if it's constructed with skill.
• Release schedule. Back in the Old Days, I had to wait a year for the next book to come out. (I'm looking at you, Wheel of Time!)  But indies release on a quicker schedule. I can get two books a year, or even four books a year in a series. This quicker release schedule means I can get my fix faster. Also, if you're one of those annoying people who will only read a series if the whole thing is out, indies will release the whole series, regardless of how bad sales are. Commercial publishers have a reputation about not releasing the whole series because sales were poor for the first two books.
  If you are interested in a series put out by a commercial publisher, please buy the first book, even if you don't read it at the moment. If sales aren't good, the rest of the series might not ever be released, and you and the rest of the world will miss out.

What doesn't work for me:

• Quality control. This is left entirely up to the author. Some treat the indie publishing process with a level of professionalism. Others don't, and it shows.
• bad editing
• bad layout
• bad cover art
• bad plot/characters
• Availability. I read .epub on a Kobo. Sometimes I come across an author who is only on Amazon and their books are on Kindle DRMmed. (secret: without DRM, I can convert a book I purchased on Amazon to .epub and read it on my Kobo. I have a hard time reading Kindles on my laptop, and have bypassed exclusive Amazon books with DRM.)
  I guess 'availability' could extend to ebook vs hardcopy. I know some of my (potential) fans have asked if my TWRP books are also available in hardcopy. Alas, they're not, but that's a decision of the publisher, and one I understand from the back end. Fret not, Her Endearing Young Charms (out 20 May 2016) will also be out in paperback as well as ebook.

Question: What do you love/hate about indie books?

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Her Grace is going hybrid, but still enjoys the teamwork of commercial publishing. Some day she'll make an agent very happy.

A to Z Challenge: Double-spacing after every sentence

I learned to type about thirty-something years ago on a real typewriter. Loud clackety thing it was. I was about ten or so, and took a summer class. I loved to type, even though I wasn't very quick at it.

A couple of years later I took a typing class at junior high. Alas, I was the slowest kid in class, clocking in at a very slow thirty words a minute. I barely passed that class because of my (lack of) speed.

Yet I continued to keep typing. I loved typing because it make me feel like a real writer. So I typed lots and lots.

Pretty soon, I got up to a decent speed. Then someone introduced me to computers. I was hooked.

With the ability to make on-the-go corrections, I was able to get my speed up to a respectable 100 wpm, a speed I can still maintain to this day when I'm in the Zone.

One of the earliest skills I learned was to double-space between sentences. This was a practice left over from the early typesetting days and is called English-spacing. In typesetting, the em-space was often used between sentences to make it easier to read the text. On a proportionately-spaced typewriter, this was indicated by two spaces.

Since I practiced typing for years and year, you can bet that practice of double-spacing after every sentence was well-ingrained. Single-spacing was used after typesetting for stylistic purposes. It was called French spacing. After all, anything odd or out-of-the-ordinary must be French, right?

Computer really changed the art of typing (or 'keyboarding' as it was later called). Suddenly one did not need to have to know how to set tabs on a machine, and carriage returns at the end of every line became a thing of the past. Word processors enabled formatting of all sorts, and one did not have to apply formatting as one went.  Finished typing a document? You could go back and make changes of all kinds. Including replacing all those double-spaces with singles.

Mignon Fogarty, the Grammar Girl offers this easy suggestion: "On a typewriter, double-space. On a computer, single-space." So, what happens when you have one of these?

I have seen editors who insist that double-spacing is a No-No. (Fortunately, a search'n'replace can get rid of them.) But as much as I would love to please them, I can't seem to get rid of this double-spacing habit.

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Her Grace is grateful for Ctrl-H.