Yesterday I read a post on writing a great book… You know those posts... The type that attempt to teach you all the things we learned in Comp-1 about punctuation and sentence structure , and then the dynamics of writing a story that we learned in Comp-2, where we read all the great works of literature throughout the ages. Yep, that stuff. I’m sorry, but if you don’t know that you need to insert a comma before a direct address, no writing post on the World Wide Web is going to help you write a great book. Of course the post also included all the other stuff that ‘professionals’ throw at aspiring writers: Don’t use prologues Don’t use adverbs Never use a dialog tag other than ‘ said ’ Never use ‘asked’ as a dialog tag Never use ‘had’ in non-dialog writing Don’t sigh or huff your words Never write in first person Blah, blah, blah … So, being the curious author that I am, I decided to download samples of...