Barbara V Evers

Courtesy of Pixabay I'm disappointed in one of the authors I enjoy reading. Why? I started reading one of her books this week, and I can't keep the characters straight. I've read Game of Thrones and The Wheel of Time  and managed to keep most of those series' characters straight. This is one book, not a series. Characters should be recognizable. Yet, one-third of the way through the book, I'm scratching my head over: Who is Terrence and where did he come from? Why does he have a point of view chapter here? Does this character (pick any of them for this one) sound like they did in the previous chapter? Who is Justine, again? Why can't I tell the three sisters apart? The questions go on and on. The story intrigues me, and I usually love this author's storytelling, so I'm sticking with it. But seriously? What's happened to her writing? I've run into this problem before...more times than I care to admit. Writers need to develop...

Save the Bunnies! © Barbara V. Evers, All rights reserved. I have a pet peeve related to grammar. Ok, ok, I have several.  BUT... I want to address one that I see daily on social media and in email messages. It's driving me crazy. (And every time you do it, a bunny rabbit dies.) When referring to you and someone else in a sentence, please make sure you use the correct pronoun (me or I) for you. Lately, I've seen people use "I" when they should use "me" and vice versa. Every instance cranks me a little closer to crazy...and a bunny rabbit dies. I'm kidding, but it does bug me. Ok, so how do you know which pronoun to use?  I could put this in grammar terms (subject or object of the verb), but I find most people do better with a simple test. Next time you're faced with the question of which pronoun to use, do the following: Drop the other person out of the statement and notice which word works. That's the one you use. F...

Our director, Aaron, hard at work. Check us out on the screen behind him. Yesterday, I sat in front of a camera for five hours filming an e-learning course. As I wrapped up one of the modules, I tried to state a simple and articulate closing to the lesson. I ended up saying: "Although it may look complicated, this will make your spreadsheets more effective." Not one of more shining moments. I laughed after making this statement and said, "Yeah, we need to redo that one." As I tried to shake off the chuckles, we bandied about useless statements: This will help you with this and that. It's an amazing something. I really love working with this and you'll love it, too. After we got the sillies out of our system, I did another take: "Although Index-Match-Match looks complicated, the combination is easy to use once you get the hang of it. And it's a more effective tool than VLookup for evaluating large amounts of data....