Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden I see Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules for Writers, which are a pretty interesting lot. I agree with most of them, although I'm not sure it's such a bad thing to open with the weather. But then, I'm from Buffalo, and we're a meteorologically-obsessed bunch.
I particularly agree with the bits about dialogue attribution. I try to never use anything more than "said", a lesson which took me years to learn after my sixth grade English teacher pontificated that "Said is dead". And so help me, if there's one word that should never ever ever be used as dialogue attribution, it is "ejaculated". I'm sorry, but to me, that word has but one use, and a character saying something ain't it.
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