Miscellany

I have had it with MS Word's grammar and spell check tool!

This morning, I left off my new manuscript and set about proofing "Stranger Faces." Silly me, I used Microsoft's tool which presented me with the following correction flags that make no sense:

• Repeatedly stops to change "it's" to "its" when the text of the sentence clearly means the contraction of  "it is" and not the possessive of "it." This is a quirky rule of English that is not all that intuitive, but Word always gets it wrong! Beware, authors! If you are using this tool to check your manuscript, remember that "it's" is a combination of "it" plus "is" and "its" indicates something that belongs to "it." 
• My sentence reads, in part: "that he turned to Alex and me for help." Word suggests changing it to "Alex and I." Back in school, I was taught that if in doubt whether to use "me" or "I" in this way, take out the other person or people and the conjunctions. In this case, "that he turned to me for help" sounds better than "that he turned to I for help." 
• In dialog, Word often wants to insert commas in odd places. Example: "Who is he?" Zak asked.Word suggest a comma after the name Zak. Huh? Shortly after that, it hit on "A friend," Alex answered. It wanted a comma after Alex. ???????
• It stopped at the words "crock pot" and suggested hyphenating them. I did that. When the tool resumed, it hit on the correction I just made to "crock-pot" and suggested removing the hyphen. 

I may change the settings on Spell Check to do only spelling. Thank heavens that once I ignore the ridiculous suggestions above, it won't hit on them again unless I tell it to recheck the entire document.

On a different subject, I was watching one of my favorite TV shows last night, "The Big Bang Theory" and I spotted the perfect actor to play Kevin Fox if any of the "Faces" books was made into a movie. His name is Ryan Cartwright, and he looks so much like Pierce Brosnan did in "Remington Steele." Ryan Cartwright is about the same age as Fox, too! Here's a link to the IMDB photo of him, for anyone who wants a look-see:
Ryan Cartwright Photo on IMDB

In other news, as they say, I submitted "Dabblers" for consideration in the Love Is Murder convention "Lovey Awards." Do I really expect to win? Nah. But the value is in that attendees and readers of the newsletter and blog might buy and read the book. It's (note--it's for it is) all about reaching readers.