Thursday Thoughts from Staycation: Where is My Head At?

I am on a staycation this week from the day job. This has given me some extra time to work on the house and the preparations for launching Three Worlds Press. I have been reading some of the initial submissions and editing one of the first releases. I also have been reading already released novels for future reviews.

On the Three Worlds Press website, we have submission guidelines that are primarily mechanical: font, margins, page breaks etc. We do HIGHLY recommend that an author polish their manuscript before submitting. I have edited and read many manuscripts, published novels and articles (I have also edited for several ezines and websites).One of my current pet peeves is:

Headhopping- applies to fiction. Please, please, please use only ONE point of view per scene, preferably per chapter. Consciously or not, readers are derailed by sudden, repeated and unacknowledged point of

view shifts. For those who do not know what this refers to: point of view (POV) is the character who is the camera lens through which the reader views the scene. The reader can only know that which that character knows.
 
For example if Mary is the POV character we could know that she has a little lamb and that its fleece was white as snow. We could also know that the lamb follows her everywhere.

We CANNOT know that the lamb follows Mary because it is afraid of the big bad wolf zombie that Mary is unaware of and and because it is the runt of the herd and has an enormous inferiority complex.Mary cannot read the lamb's mind. However, if the lamb talks, then we could be told all this through dialogue and other nuances of behavior when Mary and Larry the Lamb stop for a snack under an apple tree.

But since Mary is my POV character and Larry can't talk.... I, as the reader, don't know anything about this until the big bad wolf zombie jumps out from behind the tree.

Another post will cover: 2 words, hyphenated or compound? subtitle: Do you know where the online dictionary is?