Posted by Splay on June 21, 2004 at 08:41:06:
Let's get this straight once and for all. "Its" and "it's" are two different words. "Its" is the possessive form of the pronoun "it," and "it's" is the contracted form of "it is" or "it has." It's not that hard. If something belongs to it, it's "its." If it's doing something, it's "it's." It doesn't have to make sense, it's about spelling.
Like, I'm trying to read and every other sentence I come to an "it's" for "its" and it's like listening to a child practicing a melody on the piano hitting a wrong note in the same spot EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Look, just do this--when you're (don't get me started on that one) all done spellchecking, do a global search and replace "it's" with "its." That will make different errors, but far fewer and somehow less annoying--I guess my mind registers "typo" when the apostrophe is omitted instead of registering "Jesus fucking Christ" when it's wrongly inserted.
Whew! Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. And that's the only thing wrong with Annette's story.
Adranna is swallowed by a snake. (No surprise there.) Annette shows mastery of storytelling technique in her measured inexorability of pace and in the steady pressure of tongue in cheek. The thing reads like a Dofline cartoon in words, and I call that high praise. Any more detail would have swamped the humor, any less would have been unsatisfying. But the true mark of excellence is her shift in point of view at the end--how do you round off a story once the protagonist has been devoured/shot/strangled/poisoned/younameit? You jump to the real protagonist who's been standing there the whole time unseen, of course.
Bravo, Annette.