Next Noble Pen Meeting

December 12th, 2013 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Some very old and rare books and manuscripts at Oxford and the Vatican are being digitized and will be available free for scholars.

Three stories by J.D. Salinger that were never published have been leaked to the world.

Victories

Dylan wrote a 65k word pulp scifi novel in two weeks.

Janice is meeting with a writing mentor at the U of I Writing Center.

Cassie has almost finished a short story at 4k words.

Education

Past perfect tense sometimes confuses writers.  Basically, it is used to show that something happened before another past event or a particular time, as in “Joe said he had called home.”  In this example, “said” is past tense and we need to show that the call was prior to his statement.  The word “perfect” refers to something completed or as in older usage “perfected”.

The use of past perfect is optional in cases where some other word shows the time relationship: “Joe [had] called home before he left work.”

Here’s a tutorial, some examples, and another version of the explanation.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future. ~Margaret Atwood