I know I’m not posting nearly enough. I’m trying to get my act together over here, but it is my novel that needs to come first. I’m definitely in the I need to get this book out of the house right now oh please oh please phase of the writing process, which is also when my blog posts suffer—more than usual, I mean.
At least my taxes finally got done. Something goes weird with my taxes every year, and this year was no exception. I had the fun new experience of figuring out how to report royalties and expenses to the IRS, and then my taxes were rejected repeatedly when I tried to e-file. I never got an explanation for the rejection, just a message saying it was a system error and I should file again. I tried repeatedly to file over a few weeks, getting the same error each time.
Finally, I printed my forms off, and I’ll drop them in the mail next week. Maybe I really made a big mistake and they’ll get rejected yet again, but I figure if my mailed forms get rejected, the IRS will at least have to tell me the reason why so I can fix it.
Anyway, I’m pondering another issue of grammar, and I wanted to throw this one out to any grammar Nazis who might be with us in the peanut gallery. Here is a sentence from Dead to Rites, the soon-to-be-published next book in the Jake and the Dynamo sequence:
Remember how it was when you saw her for the first time, back when you were a bodybuilding Spanish billionaire and she was an impoverished governess with a physical disability!
My editor thinks there should be a comma after the word and, apparently supposing that she was an impoverished governess with a physical disability is an independent clause. Myself, I think the subordinating conjunction when, which begins the preceding clause, is implied but not repeated, so the sentence is correct (although informal and loose because it’s in dialogue) as written.
On the other hand, I wrote it, so maybe it just sounds better to me without the comma because my ear is used to it.
What do you think?
