Prologue or NO Prologue--What do you prefer?

The use of prologues have sparked many opinions—some authors swear by them, some say never use them.

What is the purpose of a prologue?

It’s a writing technique that allows authors to outline a complicated back-story that would otherwise bog down a chapter with flashbacks. It is also used as a tease introduction to hook the reader. You’ll find prologues used more in the fantasy and science fiction genre than any other genre.

This prologue serves to let the reader know up front that there are ancient ties between the planets of Otharia and Earth. It also gives hints about the origin of the Arthurian legends, the Lady of the Lake and the magician Merlin., at least, according to Dave and I. Here’s an example of the prologue used in QUEST FOR NOBILITY:

Prologue – Earth, 5^th Century AD

With bloody sword in hand, Reaver looked over the scene of the massacre.  It did not sit well with him, what he had done, but he was loyal to his commander.  The orders had been simple: kill them all, and so he had done his best.  Now, with most of the killing done, he had time to reflect.

May the gods have mercy on our souls.

***

The Telkur duty telekinetic looked up as the unauthorized portal started to form. He checked the coordinates and was shocked to see that the incoming portal was from the planet Earth. That off-world expedition was not due to check in for another month.

“What the...”

Before he could finish his sentence, two bloodied men staggered through the opening.

“We’ve been attacked,” the first man said. “All is lost.”

More men and women stumbled through the portal with varying degrees of battle wounds. The duty telekinetic was stunned. Earth was a primitive planet, but from all the previous indications, its people were peaceful.

Snapping out of his shock, he opened a comm link directly to the Duke of Telkur.

“Sire, we have trouble at the portal station. Some of the expedition members are back and are badly wounded.  Please come immediately and bring the healers.”

***

The gavel banged and the Master Clerk read the declaration.

“Let it be known that, from this day forward, off-world travel to the planet Earth is prohibited.”

Duke Rael Telkur sat unmoving in the Grand Council chamber room. The decree was final. There would be no more travel to Earth. He had lost a fortune financing the ill-fated expedition.  It had required four 10K crystals powering the portals to transport the hundred-plus explorers and their supplies.  Normally, a 10K crystal would provide a duchy with more than three years of local planetary travel.  But more importantly than the crystal expense, he had lost fifty loyal men and women to brutality.  Only five of his expedition team had made it back to Otharia, but they all subsequently died of their wounds.  The Vogdo team members had fared only slightly better; a mere ten of their men returned. 

Rael glanced down the table to where his partner in this venture, Duke Jaks Vogdo, sat stone-faced. There was nothing more to be done.

Jaks looked at Rael and nodded.  You naive fool, Rael.  If only you knew the truth.

Jak’s duchy was rich in crystal mines located within the Sharellian Mountains.  Everyone believed the crystal veins were bottomless, and the Vogdo family thought the same until the veins started to dry up.

Fate and fortune had shone favorably upon Jaks Vogdo when mineral-rich Earth was discovered. He eagerly agreed to form an alliance with Rael to explore this strange new world. They would share expenses for the exorbitant cost of off-world exploration and divide any potential riches evenly. 

At least that was the plan, but greed has a way of eliminating alliances even among friends. Blinded by unimaginable wealth, Jaks had no compunction about turning on his partner and ordering the massacre of the Telkur team members.

“The crystals must be shipped back here without a trace,” Jaks told his man on Earth.  “I’ll open the portal from Earth directly into my mines and transfer the foreign crystals unseen.  No one will ever know the truth.”

***

“I told you this would work,” Merlinius Telkur said.

His partner Vivienne shook her head at his boasting.  She hated this planet Earth.  They had been running for days from the Vogdo hunting party and she was at the end of her patience.  Their 10K traveling crystal was gone and they had no way to return to Otharia or even contact them to let them know what had transpired here.  There were so few of the Telkur expedition that had escaped the initial attack, and now they were stuck on this primitive planet. 

“Save your breath, Merlinius,” Vivienne shot back.  “Just concentrate on holding your shield until those bastards out there leave and we can get out of here.”

 “I know that,” Merlinis replied, exasperated at Vivienne’s curt command.  “You make sure your own shield holds.  If they detect our life signs, this ruse will be for nothing and we’ll have to run again.”

Vivienne sighed heavily.  At the moment, she didn’t know which was worse: Merlinius’ bravado, or being stranded on Earth with a band of Vogdo killers outside the cave hunting them.

When we began writing QUEST, we struggled with how to convey these hints without bogging down the story of royal twins, Darius and Dyla Telkur, and their struggle to hold onto their duchy when they are accused of murder. There had to be a reason that the twins would flee to Earth and this served that purpose because in less than 900 words, it put the link between Earth and Otharia in the reader's minds from the beginning of the story. 

We ended up using two options to convey information to the reader and keeping the story moving. We opted for a prologue and also at the beginning of each chapter, set down the rules from the Chronicles of Otharia. This informed the reader about the history of Otharia rule without slowing down the story. Here’s an example:

Excerpt from the Chronicles of Otharia during the reign of the First Vacancy:

Division I – The Rule of Otharia

Subsection I – The Kingdom

The planet of Otharia has two major landmasses and multiple island chains.  The larger of the two continents is referred to as the Kingdom of Otharia, though there hasn’t been a reigning king in over a thousand years.  The kingdom is subdivided into a number of duchies, each ruled by a royal family and a seated duke or duchess.  The duchies vary in size, but their wealth is dependant on the natural resources of the region and the ingenuity of the reigning duke.  The smaller continent is ruled by multiple clans of gypsies, who broke from the Kingdom at the death of the last King.

So what about you? Have you used prologues in your books? Do you like them or do you think they are unnecessary?

 

Regular vs. Irregular Verbs by Grammar Girl

Today, we’ll talk about irregular verbs. Why do we say we saw a movie instead of we seed a movie, and did you know that the past tense of the verb “help” used to be “holp” instead of “helped”?

Regular Verbs Versus Irregular Verbs

Most of the time you add -ed to a verb to put it in the past tense; “slurp” becomes “slurped,” “scarf” becomes “scarfed,” and “offend” becomes “offended,” for example. When you make a verb past tense back tacking on an -ed, you’re dealing with a regular verb. It’s the regular way we make things past tense.

English also has verbs that don’t follow this pattern: verbs such as “am,” which becomes “was”; “tell,” which becomes “told”; and “sing,” which becomes “sang.” These are called irregular verbs because they don’t follow the regular pattern.

 

Think of irregular verbs as relics from Old English.

People who grew up speaking English just know the irregular verbs, but children and people who are learning  English as adults struggle with them. As toddlers are learning the language they often say things such as “He breaked my doll,” instead of “He broke my doll,” and “Daddy goed to the store,” instead of “Daddy went to the store,” and adults who are learning English are faced with memorizing a long list of irregular verbs.

The Root: Old English Irregular Verbs

Irregular verbs are relics from the past. Believe it or not, the rules for conjugation (a fancy word for “working the verb”) were even more complicated Old English. Our regular verbs are called “weak verbs” in Old English, but Old English also had at least seven different kinds of strong verbs. Many of our irregular verbs are holdovers from those seven types of strong verbs (1), which is why you can’t see any one pattern when you look at a list of irregular verbs. There are actually multiple sparsely represented patterns. For example, “teach” and “catch” become “taught” and caught,” “choose” and “freeze” become “chose” and “froze,” and some verbs don’t change at all: “Hit”* and “quit” stay “hit” and “quit” in the past tense (2).

 

The Role of Foreigners Learning English Irregular Verbs

Over time, English became simpler and many verbs were regularized. Languages become simpler when a lot of foreigners learn the language as adults, especially when they’re just learning by listening to everyday interactions and don’t have formal books and classes (3) as would have been the case between Old English and Modern English.

And researchers noticed something really interesting about which verbs stayed irregular and which verbs changed to become regular: the more often a word is used, the more likely it is to stay irregular. In fact, every one of the 10 most common English verbs is irregular:

“I am” --> “I was”
“I have” --> “I had”
“Do you?” --> “Did you?”

These are all easy words: single syllable words from Anglo-Saxon origins (4). Besides “be,” “have,” and “do,” they are “go,” “say,” “can,” “will,” “see,” “take,” and “get.”

Irregular Verb Evolution

Researchers at Harvard found a strong correlation between how often a verb is used and whether it regularized (1, 5). They think these 10 common verbs held on to their irregular form so firmly precisely because they’re so common. They actually compared the process to biological evolution, in which changes--mutations--in the most important genes are the least likely to propagate.

Think about how often you hear the verbs “am” and “have” in everyday conversation. “I have to go now. I am hungry, and I have a headache.” If you’re learning English just by listening, these are going to be the easiest verbs to learn properly because you hear them over and over again.

But if you were someone learning English in the Middle Ages dealing with words you don’t hear very often--”to chide,” for example--you may not be able to remember that the past tense is “chode,” and instead you’d just default to the regular rule and say “chided” on the rare occasions when you need the word; or you wouldn’t have learned the verb and wouldn’t know to correct your children when they defaulted to the regular form. Once enough children grew up thinking “chided” was the normal form of the verb, “chode” was doomed.

Strange Exceptions

Finally, there’s a nuance and a couple of exceptions to this verb-evolution process that are worth talking about just because they’re so strange and interesting.

“Burned” Versus “Burnt”

First, verbs don’t always evolve at the same rate in different countries. As far as I can tell, nobody knows why, but British English speakers have held on to irregular verbs more than American English speakers, which is why they say “dreamt,” “burnt,” and “learnt” in Britain, and we say “dreamed,” “burned,” and “learned” in America.

“Sneaked” and “Snuck”

Second, there are a few rare verbs that were regular but have taken on an irregular past tense. It’s like evolution going in reverse. “Sneaked” is the regular past tense form of the verb “to sneak,” but sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, “snuck” started sneaking into English (6).

“Lighted” and “Lit”

Sometime after 1800, people began to prefer the irregular verb “lit” to the regular past tense “lighted” (7). “Lit and “lighted” both currently exist as fully acceptable past-tense forms of “to light.” “Snuck” is still considered slightly less than acceptable, but according to the Harvard researchers, 1% of the English-speaking population switches from “sneaked” to “snuck” every year, with the shift being most powerful in America.

Summary

The bottom line is that you either know the irregular verbs because you absorbed them by growing up in an English-speaking country or you have to memorize them, which is a pain. But if you have to memorize them, I hope you at least find it more interesting now that you know you’re digging into the relics of English, and that one reason these irregular verbs still exist is that English learners in the past could remember them.

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/irregular-verbs.aspx 

Mignon Fogarty is Grammar Girl and the author of the new book, Grammar Girl Presents the Ultimate Writing Guide for Students, available online, in bookstores, and this fall, through Scholastic book fairs.

References

1. Lieberman, E. et al. “Quantifying the Evolutionary Dynamics of Language,” Nature, vol. 449, no. 7163, p. 713-716, October 11, 2007.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2460562/ (accessed September 13, 2011).
2. “English Irregular Verbs,” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs (accessed September 13, 2011).
3. McWhorter, J. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, Gotham Books, 2008.
4. Stephen Pinker “The Irregular Verbs,” http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2000_03_landfall.html (accessed September 13, 2011).
5. Michel, Jean-Baptiste et al. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science, vol. 331, p. 176-182, January 13, 2011. http://mfi.uchicago.edu/publications/papers/Science_Culturomics.pdf (accessed September 13, 2011).
6. Gellene, D.  “How English adds the '-ed'” Los Angeles Times,  October 11, 2007. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/11/science/sci-verbs11 (accessed September 13, 2011).
7. Yong, E. “The Culture Genome: Google Books Reveals Traces of Fame, Censorship, and Changing Languages,” Discover Magazine. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/16/the-cultural-genome-google-books-reveals-traces-of-fame-censorship-and-changing-languages/ (accessed September 13, 2011).

News Flash from the Land of the Clueless

Hang on to your hats, ladies and gents, you are about to enter the IDIOT ZONE:

IDIOT SIGHTINGS:

We had to have the garage door repaired. The Sears repairman told us that one of our problems was that we did not have a 'large' enough motor on the opener. I thought for a minute, and said that we had the largest one Sears made at that time, a 1/2 horsepower. He shook his head and said, 'Lady, you need a 1/4 horsepower.' I responded that 1/2 was larger than 1/4. He said, 'NO, it's not.' Four is larger than two.' We haven't used Sears repair since.

My daughter and I went through the McDonald's take-out window and I gave the clerk a $5 bill. Our total was $4.25, so I also handed her a quarter. She said, 'You gave me too much money.' I said, 'Yes Iknow, but this way you can just give me a dollar bill back. She sighed and went to get the manager, who asked me to repeat my request. I did so, and he handed me back the quarter, and said 'We're sorry but we could not do that kind of thing.' The clerk then proceeded to give me back $1 and 75 cents in change.

Do not confuse the clerks at McD's.

I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, 'Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?' To which I replied, 'If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?' He smiled knowingly and nodded, 'That's why we ask.'

Happened in Birmingham, Ala.

And my personal favorite:

How would you pronounce this child's name?

"Le-a"

Leah?? NO

Lee - A?? NOPE

Lay - a?? NO

Lei?? Guess Again.

This child attends a school inKansas City, Mo. Her mother is irate ecause everyone is getting her name wrong.

It's pronounced "Ledasha", When the Mother was asked about the pronunciation of the name, she said, "the dash don't be silent."

SO, if you see something come across your desk like this please remember to pronounce the dash.

If dey axe you why, tell dem de dash don't be silent.

Who says the USA lags behind the world in education???????