Wanderin' Thoughts

Here’s a fun paragraph I read this morning. I’m still working my way through The Discoverie of Witchcraft… The story itself is one that’s somewhat familiar to me. Old as time, really. But I’m more talking about the way this little slice of life is presented. The little passage I’m about to show you is maybe a quarter of the wall of text I slogged through. I actually copied the whole thing into Notepad and added line breaks just to make sense of it. Normally, I highlight sentences as I go when I read huge blocks of text, but this monster… well, take a look:

The tiny bits of text to the left are margin notations from the previous page that have bled over. It’s an artifact of the e-book reader that I’m using, and I haven’t figured out a way to fix it.

This single paragraph stretches across three pages. Though to be fair, that’s on an e-reader, so I’m not sure how many it takes up in the original text. But I find it amusing because every grammar app I use yells at me if I use more than what? 130 characters in mine. They’re all obsessed with “readability” and mobile screens. Oh, how times have changed. I had to unlearn a lot because I grew up with the five-sentence paragraph. IYKYK. And look, y’all, two sentence paragraphs are weird. They just are.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if I threw older books into modern grammar devices. They’d probably melt down or something. ^_^ I mean, the spell check goes nuts whenever I paste archaic words. But the grammar check would have a field day with the sentence structure. And any kind of ai would want to just rewrite the whole thing.

Most of the passage is just “said he” and “said we” repeated endlessly, which is tedious even without it being a wall of text. If I wrote something like that, there’s no way anyone would publish it. Reading through it in Notepad, I was all: maybe I could turn this dialogue into a story? Then I was like. Nah, that’s been done to death. Still, it might be a fun writing exercise someday. ^_^

For context: the story’s about a seventeen-year-old maid who was supposedly possessed by the devil. Several “good men and vicars,” as they called themselves, prayed for her and commanded “Sathan” to speak. At first, he wouldn’t, just roared and cried mightily. They repeated their commands for nearly two hours until, exhausted, the girl finally gave them the answers they expected. Like I said, story as old as time. A quick Google search says the last official exorcism was done in 1976.

Anyway, that’s what was on my mind this morning. Thanks for reading. Take care of yourself. I’ll chat at you later.