Blog Tour Guest Post & Giveaway - Girls Love Travis Walker by Anne Pfeffer

Welcome to my tour stop for Girls Love Travis Walker by Anne Pfeffer. This is a New Adult contemporary recommended for ages 16+.  The tour will consist of reviews, with a few guest posts and interviews.

Girls Love Travis Walker

by Anne Pfeffer

Book Description:

To nineteen-year-old high school dropout Travis Walker, women are like snowflakes--each one different, but beautiful in her own way. He can charm any girl he meets, and yet down deep he fears he'll always be a loser like his jailbird father. As the landlady threatens to evict him and his sick mother, Travis takes a job he hates and spends his evenings picking up girls at a nearby night spot. When he enlists in a teen program at the local fire station, he finds out he’s amazing at it. Then he meets the smoking hot Kat Summers, enlists Kat’s friend Zoey to help him woo her, and falls in love for the first time ever. But he keeps the details of his life secret. His girl will never love him back if she knows the truth about him….

Book Links:

Amazon | Goodreads

Guest Post: The Grammar Grump Speaks

No one has perfect spelling, grammar, and punctuation all the time.  I sure don’t.  So let me say it up front. If you catch any mistakes in this post, call me on it. 

I’ll deserve it, because now I’m going to talk about some of my language peeves.  You know, those mistakes that appear over and over again in books, and let’s face it. A lot of times they’re in the self-published books.  In fact, self-published books are notorious for having mistakes, which is too bad, because it brings down the reputation of indie books and authors overall.

So here are a few things I see all the time and that are, for the most part, easy to get right, if you just know the rules.

1. “Loose” versus “lose.”   A lot of people insert a second  “o” when they shouldn’t.

If she failed, she would lose everything.  CORRECT

If she failed, she would loose everything.  INCORRECT

MEMORY AID:  When you lose weight, your skirt gets loose.  

         

2. “Myself.”  “Myself” should always be the object of a sentence, not the subject (except in this sentence).  Most people get this right in the singular, but in the plural they get it wrong. 

EXAMPLE:

Because it sounds funny, no one would never say:  Myself  went to the store. INCORRECT

Instead we say:  I went to the store.  CORRECT

But people do say:  Veronica and myself went to the store.  INCORRECT

It’s the same rule for singular and plural:  Veronica and I went to the store.  CORRECT  

MEMORY AID:  say it to yourself in the singular, then do the same thing for the plural 

I played tennis. CORRECT

James and I played tennis.  CORRECT

The  misuse of “myself” has become so common that now people even sometimes misuse it in the singular! (I added an exclamation point to reflect the horror that we all feel upon hearing this news.)

EXAMPLE:  He gave it to me yesterday.  CORRECT

 And yet, it’s not uncommon to see: He gave it to myself yesterday.  INCORRECT

As for the plural:

He gave it to me and Harold yesterday.  CORRECT

He gave it to myself and Harold yesterday.  INCORRECT

3. “Lie” versus “lay” (and what about “laid” and “lain”?)  Unlike the first two, this is genuinely complicated. So much so, that I confess I studied Grammar Girl before I wrote this section and discovered I didn’t know this as well as I thought I did. So I’ve learned something, too, from this post.

First of all, we’re not talking about “lie” in the sense of “telling an untruth.” We’re talking about “lie” as in “getting horizontal.”  (That woke you up, if nothing else did.)

I’ll do the present tense, which is simple.  “Lay” requires a direct object, while “lie” does not.

EXAMPLE:  I lie down on my bed.  CORRECT

I lay down on my bed.  INCORRECT

I lay the book down on my bed.  CORRECT

Again, these sentences are in the present tense. Those of us who write our books in present tense have to know this! Of course, all writers should know this, but especially us present-tensers.

For the past tense, I’m going to give you this link from Grammar Girl, because she explains it really well, and I would just end up copying all her charts and examples and probably violating copyright laws . So here goes:

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/lay-versus-lie.aspx

I’m going to bet that almost nobody reading this post understands this topic completely. I didn’t. So take the challenge! 

Learn about the author at:

www.annepfeffer.com

***Giveaway***

$25 Amazon Gift Card (INT)

a Rafflecopter giveaway