Orbis Writings

I’ve been working through Google Docs lately and noticed that with the Word Count feature comes a number of readability index values:

• Flesch Reading Ease
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
• Automated Readability Index

The Flesch-Reading Ease value can be between 1 and 100, the higher the value the easier the content is to read.   The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Automated Readability Index are representative of the grade level required to be able to read the content.

My question is,  how important is the reading level?  The values for the current short story I’m  working on are 91.17, 2.0 and 3.0 respectively.  The novel I am working is at 80.44, 4.0 and 4.0.  Should I be aiming for a more advanced reading level, is grade five the standard for universality.

I did some research and it seems that the top selling authors are at the 80% level.  From what I’ve been gathering everywhere these are the average values that the best selling authors are falling under:

• No more than 4.25 characters per word
• No more than 5% passive voice
• No less than an 80% readability on the Flesch Reading Ease scale
• A Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 5

The following article explains how sentence structure can affect the readability index.

Back in 1966, William Barnes shot and injured Walter Barclay, a police officer, rendering the officer paralyzed.  The police officer died last year.  What’s interesting is that the shooter was charged with murder. See here.

Prosecutors say a urinary tract infection that afflicted Barclay was a direct result of his paralysis. That in turn was caused when Barnes shot him in the spine during an attempted break-in on November 27, 1966.

This could be a setting for an interesting story.  What if the the police officer has been injured by a second criminal ten or twenty years after the first shooting. Which of the two criminals would be charged?  Assuming they had proof that could go either way as to which injury killed the officer, who’s to say that the powers-that-be wouldn’t use the opportunity to put the criminal of their choosing in jail.

I get the word of the day regularly showing up across the top of my GMail account.  And today’s word I’m sure is one of Mary Poppins’ favorites, supererogatory.

Personally, I think the word itself is a supererogatory.  But I suggest we all try to use it today and confuse your friends, family and co-workers.

While I’m in between writing I thought I’d start compiling a list of publishers. I’m working hard to make sure I have a completed book by the end of the year. So when it’s complete, hopefully, the only thing I’ll need to do is go down the list and check off each publisher one by one when I send out my manuscript for publication. I’ll probably make that list available to everyone to save them the time. If any of you know of any publishers send me their 411.

You can refer to this link for regular updates.

Thanks to all

I’m having a real hard time following my own advice. I decided a little while back, maybe three weeks ago, that if I were to get stuck at any point in my writing that I should do the best I can and just write through. After all I will come back to it in my first edit and take care of the issue then.  But it’s tough advice to follow.

Like any beginning writer, I guess, you want to do the best job possible.  But getting the story line correct is more important than getting details right on your first draft.  But everyone wants to do their best job first time around; even though that’s not a realistic possibility.

Why would anyone want to connect electronic test equipment to their piercings is beyond me. This guy I guess thought it was a cool thing to do. Then he died. Well at least one good thing came out of this; he has become a Darwin Award nominee.

But eh, it’s a good source of story ideas.

There are times when I’m stuck in the middle of a scene where I can’t figure out what to do next and keep worrying about getting myself stuck in a situation where either the story won’t make sense or I simply won’t be able to write myself out of it.

Well yesterday I had the opposite problem; I had too many options. I’ve been replaying the last bit of the recent scene I’ve been working on for my short story over and over again. No matter what I do, this one event still wants to happen.  But yet I have these other options I want to explore.

tick. tock. tick. tock.

Alright, I thought about it. Let’s do it. For those of you critiquing my short story, thanks. Maybe you’ll get an early glimpse to my second act.

I was browsing through Lulu’s just now to see what kind of novels were available and I came across this horror magazine which is very well priced for a literature magazine full of interviews, stories, poems and artworks.  It seems to contain some very good stories.  You can view a list of the issues available here.  There is a sample issue available for download here.