Pete's favorite author is Guy Gavriel Kay and he has been trying to get me to read more Kay for MONTHS. I introduced the big kids to Kay, but Tigana was the only one of his books I had read until June, when I read Under Heaven after, like, a year of coaxing. Now I am 60 pages into Lions of Al-Rassan, but I am taking a quick break. There is a character with no tongue and the dialogue is frustrating me. You cannot say /s/ with no tongue, my friends; it is not possible. You can't say /r/, either.
I'm putting it out there: if you ever need to write dialogue for a character with no tongue, my consultant rates would be very reasonable.
Also, if you ever need to put some Latin in your fiction and want to double-check your Latin grammar, my reasonable consultant rates apply here too. I get disproportionately irritated about sloppy Latin. It's like people think, "Well, no one will notice if I just wing it." SOME PEOPLE NOTICE [she said irascibly and perhaps pedantically].
Also also, if you are a native speaker of British English and you wish to introduce an American character, I will proofread that dialogue for free to avoid situations where putatively American speakers produce utterances like "I learnt from my mum." This drove me up the wall when we lived in Scotland. Whenever the newspapers carried alleged quotes from AmE speakers, I would shake the paper at my husband and say, "That is NOT what came out of her mouth, I guarantee you."
How about you -- what's your freelance editing niche? And can we also talk about that Louise Penny/Hillary Clinton collaborative novel, in which a key plot point was the radiation from MRI machines? even though MRI machines produce no ionizing radiation?
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