snapshot Sunday, on using capital letters, why my dialogue looks British, and how hard your little finger works

-- Christine at The Writer's Hole sometimes has us post a snapshot of our work in progress, the last thing we wrote, either one paragraph or 5 lines of dialogue. i think this is a fun way to give teasers without giving away everything.

here's mine from the middle of chapter 6, not corrected for no-caps or punctuation. This is in Tiana's POV (Tiana is my female main character in Black Heart) and Trysta is Tiana's older sister.

‘I am glad you put away your childish fancies and married Devan,’ Trysta said. ‘being married to a king would have made you miserable.’


‘but now that I’m not a king, maybe she wouldn’t be.’


Arathor’s timing was horrible. And why would he tease her about marrying him, especially in front of Trysta? certainly he wasn’t considering it.


‘barging in uninvited,’ Trysta said. ‘boorish as ever.”


‘my apologies,’ Arathor said, ‘but I need Tiana’s help.’

-- for those of you who worried that i'd stopped being a rebel in my last post because i used caps at the beginnings of my sentences, don't worry. i wrote that post in Word and i use auto caps to save my little finger. it would have been a pain to go back and un-cap everything. unfortunately, as you can see from my snapshot of dialogue, it won't auto cap after a quotation mark. if someone knows how to fix this, please let me know.

-- and if you're wondering why my dialogue looks British with the single quotation marks and not a double, it's because not capitalizing my quotation marks is another way to save my little fingers.

-- do you realize how much work your little fingers do when you write? you use them for capitalizing, quotation marks, apostrophes, question marks, semi-colons, colons, dashes, backspacing, deleting, tabbing, starting a new line with the enter key... and in my case, using the letter A a lot - there is no letter A on my laptop keyboard. it's just a blank key, along with the N and D keys. i must write "and" a lot. i also noticed the S is almost gone. that has to be because i write "said" a lot.