Okay, A New Version...

[robkelk]

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Anyway, let me know what you all think.

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Okay...
General Guidelines; Acquire writers' references,...

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And there's a book called "Eats Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss which is also very good.

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That should be "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves". As is appropriate for a book on punctuation, the punctuation in the title is important... (It's the punchline of a joke where a panda uses a badly-punctuated nature guidebook to justify eating a restaurant meal, killing the waiter, and walking away.)

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Don't worry about getting older editions; while the language is always evolving, the core elements are sufficiently constant that you'd have to buy a *really* old edition -- half a century or more -- to stumble onto something that's no longer relevant in modern usage.

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If you're writing a period piece, you might want an older edition. For example, a story looks more "Victorian" if compound nouns are hyphenated (e.g., motor-cycle), but a modern style guide won't tell you that.

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You can also consult the Net; there are a number of good grammar/style sites, although you need to be careful about your choice of site -- if you can, get an independent opinion on how good it is before you start to rely on it.

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Some (older) reference works are available through Project Gutenberg - while the style guides may be too old for modern writing, their copy of Roget's Thesarus is still quite useful.
General Guidelines; Proofread and preread

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spellchecker programs ... also *never* have every English word in them, and lacking them, can end up flagging and "fixing" a perfectly good and proper word that they don't recognize.

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I don't recall whether I mentioned this earlier: spellchecker programs will also not pick up a correctly-spelled incorrect word (e.g. "cold" instead of "called").
General Guidelines; Pay attention to what your prereaders say

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Especially if they say things like, "why does this happen?"

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Sometimes "why does this happen?" has an answer that would spoil a future chapter (see "Checkov's Gun" in section II). If your prereaders complain about these passages, note their complaints and act on them if possible, but leave the important information in the story.
General Guidelines; Know your source material

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I can almost excuse (misspelling names) for anime fanfiction -- trying to work with names in one of the languages most foreign to English speakers can be daunting at first.

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Most North American DVDs (and a few Japanese DVDs) have English subtitle tracks where the characters' names are spelled out, although this doesn't help with unlicenced anime.
General Guidelines; Don't Arbitrarily Violate Canon For Your Convenience

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Or "Ranma" fics where Nabiki has internet access on her laptop.

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Or, for that matter, "Ranma" fics where Nabiki has a computer.
General Guidelines; Know when to break the rules

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And until you understand almost instinctively what you can achieve by ignoring these guidelines, it's better if you adhere to them closely.

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On the flip side, sometimes the only way to know what happens when you break the rules is to break the rules -- that is, to experiment. But don't expect most of those experiments to come out well. (See "Don't be wedded to your text", above.) There's a cliche: good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. Don't be afraid to exercise bad judgement when writing; if you don't release the experiemnts, the only people who'll suffer because of them are you and your pre-readers.

Stupid Writer Tricks; Chekhov's Gun
Despite the old SCTV sketch to the contrary, this is presumably not a Star Trek reference...

Stupid Writer Tricks; Narrative Voice vs. Character Voice

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Do not use slang, jargon or informal terms -- there should be virtually no personality to a third-person narrator.

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But don't limit the narrator's vocabulary, either. "He said... she said... he said... she said... he said... she said..." gets boring fast. "He mentioned... she muttered... he demanded... she asked... he answered... she cried..." maintains the lack of personality, but is less likely to induce sleep in the readers.

-Rob Kelk
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Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012