There was pop from some glowing embers in a fireplace behind him.

Adam crossed and knelt by it. He threw a birch log onto the dying fire and turned to look directly at the reader.

"Ah, your here--good. Thanks for coming." An easy smile as he stood. "I thought, perhaps we could discuss dialog and what makes it feel authentic."

He cleared his throat. "Damn cigarettes." Another smile.

"I am no expert at dialog, but I do like to start posts where others can expound their views. What are the important points to remember when writing dialog?"

Adam consulted a small silver watch from his jacket pocket.

"Hmmm, 13 lines of time is nearly up..."

He muttered some words under his breath; his face began to change...

Taro looked up from cleaning his paw. "Listen to yourself," he said. "What if a writer accurately transcribed all your hmmm and uh -ing. Would you want to read that?"

"Well, no," Anne said, "Of course not. But there's accurate, and there's believable. Here, the two main characters are colleagues, both professional chimney sweeps. So why would one explain the hows and whys of chimney sweeping?"

Taro twitched his whiskers. "Because the writer chose dialogue to convey information. Always a risky proposition, in my opinion."

"Weirdly enough, the writer has the opposite problem elsewhere. I mean here," she said, grabbing the book and flipping through it. "There's this whole section where they basically rehash what they just experienced. And here, where the characters greet each other and make chit chat. I mean, if there were tension it might work, but there's not, as far as I can tell."

"So dialogue has to do _something_?"

"Well, yeah. Like anything else, it needs to have a reason for being there."

"But not to convey information?"

Anne sighed. She hated it when her cat tried to be Socratic. "Well, no. I mean, not just plot information or context. I think it works best when its roots are emotional."

"Ah," said Taro. Just then, a spider caught his eye, and he jumped off the couch to chase it.

"No, no," Susan said. "You don't need to say what we both already know. Also, people don't posit, they say."

"What?!" Brandon questioned loudly. "But all those 'said's will get repetitive! Won't they, Susan?"

"Actually, no. 'Said', unlike most other words, is nearly invisible to the reader, even if its repeated. And try to cut back on your exclamation points, too. You're going to give yourself a hemhorrage."

"But I'm upset, Susan!" Brandon countermanded huffily. "I have to use exclamation points!"

Susan shook her head. "No you don't. If the dialogue's written well enough, the tension of the words will come through to the reader. If you use too many exclamation points, people will accuse you of trying to inject tension in with punctuation instead of writing it in. And multiple exclamation points at the end of a single sentence is a sign of a mentally unbalanced individual. Ask Terry Pratchett."

"There's just so much I don't know,Susan," Brandon moped depressingly.

"You can't 'mope' a sentence. Stop trying. Even if you don't stick to 'say', you still can't stick just any old verb back there. Are you trying to do everything wrong or is it just coincidence?" She put her hand to her head. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I'm just frustrated. Why do you keep saying my name in every sentence? Real people don't talk like that. Why are you putting a speaker attribution after every line? There's only two of us, so a few lines without an attribution won't be confusing, especially since our manner of speaking is unique from each other. Have you ever heard of beats?"

"I don't think so, Susan," Brandon cogitated placatingly.

"You can use them instead of saying 'said', to show who's speaking." Susan sipped her coffee. "And it adds some pauses to the dialogue to give the reader a feel for the intended pace, while giving a bit of characterization at the same time by showing the speakers actions."

"Now I understand, Susan!!" Brandon roared intricately.

"I don't think you do." She sighed. "And could you PLEASE stop using so many -ly adjectives? If I can't tell how you said something, the dialogue is probably weak and you should work on that instead."

"Look at me, Susan! I'm dialoguing!!!!" Brandon ejaculated profusely.

The door slammed shut.

"And you can perceive a bit about someone from one's verbiage," she said, with a condescending smile. She raised an eyebrow and watied for him to continue.

"What they do when they're talking tells you a lot about 'em, too." He stuck his tongue out at her. "And just because they don't sound so bright don't mean they ain't geniuses."

She sipped her tea. "Just so. Because one has an extensive vocabulary does not guarantee one is invariably able to spell the words so eloquently used."

"Or have the class to admit the other guy's right," he said.

"Listen, my friend, are you saying" the man said, pressing his nose against Jack's, "that I don't have to conform to any stereotypes?" He thought for a moment. "And that a thug like me could have a degree from MIT in particle physics?"

Jack was mindful of the knife pressed against his throat. "Yes. D..do you?"

The thug smiled and stepped back. "As it happens, I do. Class of ninety-seven."

He dragged Jack by his collar into the nearest pool of light and pulled a battered piece of paper from his pocket.

"Check it out--my degree certificate. The title of my dissertation was The Estimated Mass of the Postulated Higgs-Bosun Particle. A cracking read."

Jack rubbed his throat then looked at his hand in the light. No blood. "Okay, okay. But what about how you handle accents in prose?"

"He's right--"

"He used bad grammar."

"--and it's bothered me from time to time," I said, ignoring the interruption of a precision thinking machine. "I fear sometimes my characters sound too much like me. I've noticed it on Firefly, where just about any character can at times sound like Joss Whedon--waxing a mite too eloquent."

"What about that time you were revising a story and did one revision for each character, revising just that one character's dialogue with their idiosyncrasies and background in mind?"

"I did that?"

"Yes," said Zac. "You tried to think about what they knew, how they talked, whether they were excitable or measured when responding to events--that sort of thing."

"Hmm, good process, that. I must remember it."

"And skadder wonders how one handles accents in prose," said Zac.

"I've read that you hint at them when the character first speaks, then ease off but with little reminders from time to time, else it gets a bit wearing to read."

"That sounds sensible. I'd be interested to hear you say that again with a London accent."

I paused for a moment, trying to remember how I talked when I was a kid. "Oiv'e read that you 'int at 'em when vuh bloke speaks for the first toym, ven eeze off bu' wiv l-uhl wemoynduhs fwom toym to toym else it gets bloody impossible to wread."

Take a deep breath, and then breathe out slowly--that's how it's done in the movies.

He peered down the telescopic sight at the old, run-down hotel.

The second window to the left on the third floor, Pat had specified....there he was, a thin worn-out figure hunched over his computer.

Adam zoomed the telescopic sight in on Pat's ear. A tiny antenna poked out. It flicked backwards and forwards as though there was a tiny metallic mouse in his ear feeding on his brain.

There you are, you little bugger!

Adam took up the slack on the trigger...exhaled, and fired. The crack of the fifty caliber echoed round the empty street...

Resting the butt of the rifle on the floor, Adam turned to face the reader.

"Of course, thinking to yourself isn't a dialogue. You need two people to dialogue, but it utilises the same skills to make it sound natural."

He glanced back through the open window and frowned.

"I missed." He shrugged. "Missed Zac, that is. Doesn't matter, they both paid me to kill the other."

-----------------

Loki scampered through the living room and into my office. "Coast is clear, master. Your offsprings out of house now."

"Excellent." My left hand manipulated the mouse, and my right hand stabbed out keyboard commands. Within seconds, several Word documents blinked into view on my monitor.

"Why wait 'til offspring are gone?"

One of the documents, bearing the text of a short story, flashed to the monitor's forefront. "Heeeeee ensures characters sound unique," Jolly the deer said through the PC speakers. "Heeeeee explained this before. Yeeeeewwww are dumb dog."

Loki charged towards the monitor. "I don’t take critiques from a herbivore, so shut up!"

"Knock it off, both of you. You two act worse than my kids. Just so you know, I read my stories out loud to make sure they sound good to the ears as well as to the mind. I'd rather not do that with the kids around, though. Too many distractions. Plus, they already think I've lost my mind."

"Athena thinks you have, too," Loki said.

"Why can't you get along with other animals?"

A second manuscript moved forward. "With all the weird things Crank has introduced me to," Curtis Nystrom said, "reading to himself is the least craziest thing I've witnessed since I was created."

"Welcome to 2008, Curtis."

"Thanks. Can't stay but a few minutes. But, you already know that."

"Sure do. Jolly is right, by the way. When I read out loud a passage of dialog between multiple characters, I can make sure I don't accidentally make them all sound the same. I'm not saying I do a very good job at it..."

A third document appeared. "I, personally, am of the opinion that our creator, Mr. Husk, has done an exceptional job at making Jolly sound different than any character he has created thus far," Calvin Stafford’s droning voice sounded. "In my story, the combined number of primary and secondary characters is, in most occurrences, is equivalent to the unique speech patterns and choice of vocabulary."

"Always glad to hear from a 'Most Likely to Deserve Laryngitis' finalists," Curtis said with a slight laugh.

"Yeeeeewwww are not nice. Calvin created as wordy biped. Yeeeeewwww created as pointless dropout."

"I get to travel to the past and the future. You get shot at. Who’s the pointless one now, bitch?"

"Yeeeeewwww dumb biped. I am male. Word 'bitch' means female canine."

Loki howled in amusement. "That would be Athena."

My hands hovered over the Control-Alt-Delete combination.

"Thank you, Jolly, but I'm immune to unwarranted verbal antagonization," Calvin said. "Mr. Husk has surrounded me with band mates who would rather torment each other than to create good music."

"Why would you say that?" Curtis asked. "Your leader, Billy, is one of the most thoughtful and most complimentary people I've ever read."

"But, if he’s German," Loki said, "why doesn't his dialog sound German?"

"Yeeeeewwww cannot even read," Jolly shouted, "so yeeeeewwww shut up!"

Loki sounded an angry bark at the monitor.

I huffed, frustrated with myself for believing I would never have to face this topic again. "Do you know how difficult it is to translate an accent onto the page without making the words themselves incomprehensible? That's something I'm still working on."

"Crank did the best job he could," Curtis said. "He established within the first three sentences that Billy was German, and even made reference to how a remnant of his accent tended to give away his true feelings about whatever he was talking about. I was convinced."

"Greatly appreciated, Curtis."

Calvin laughed. "That's one of Billy's favorite phrases. Wonder where he got that from?"

Barks and laughs filled my office.

English teacher got a bug where the sun don't shine. Been there done that, don't need it no more. What planet she from anyway?