opera142

Plural of Jack-in-a-box?

Jacks-in-the-box sounds like many Jacks in one box; Jack-in-the-boxes sounds like one Jack, many boxes. Jacks-in-the-boxes, I dunno.

Still struggling with The Ending That Won't Magically Pop Out Of My Brain Fully Edited And Awesome. My usual work-around, Pick At The Rest of the Story Until My Self Esteem Bleeds, feels unsatisfying for some unknowable reason.

The trouble is, I'm frustrated with all my sentences. Stunted, grotesque abominations! My phrases, they dangle as tackily as over-sized novelty earings on a bingo hall matron. I blame the pride I took earlier when I thought hey, I'm thinking at sentence-level, instead of word by word.

I wish to break free from the bonds of S-V-O. I want rhythm. I want melody. I want music, and all I gots is THUD.

I realized today that the timespan between me thinking OMG, I have an awesome idea! and then compiling mental lists of why the idea sucks/is unwritable/is beyond any skills I'll ever have is about 10 minutes.

The way I remember being taught dialogue was that whenever someone new speaks, it requires a new line. I double-checked The Well-Tempered Sentence, and that's the advice it gave.

However, I've been seeing mashed dialogue in books lately. The sort of exchanges that go: "Do you want to come with me to the store?" I asked, gathering my purse and cloth bags. He scowled, not even bothering to look away from the television. "Hell no!"

I would split that into two paragraphs, either between "bags" and "he" or at "Hell no!"

Have I been seeing bad editing, or is there an exception to the dialogue rule that I'm unaware of?