It must be late; I'm feeling forgiving

Feb 15, 2010 23:58


I shouldn't snark too hard on the book I'm working on. I mean, apart from the eye-dialect and the malapropisms and homonym-abuse, the author can actually put words together in active sentences that engage the reader ( Read more... )

romants nobbles

Leave a comment

Comments 4

dulcimeoww February 16 2010, 05:48:45 UTC
There is a romance novelist that I want to kick every single time I read her sex scenes. She insists on peppering them with the word "flagrant," often using it several times in a page. The problem is, she's not quite using it correctly, so every time I come across it I have to ignore the word's meaning in order to assume the word she actually should have used. That's not the only example of her using words that sound pretty but don't mean what she evidently thinks they do, but it is the most frequent. Everything else about her writing I can tolerate or even enjoy, but her abuse of vocabulary makes me want to take away her word processing software. Or at least disable its thesaurus.

Reply


oracne February 16 2010, 14:14:17 UTC
That is because many writers cannot write hot sex (not that anyone can agree on what is hot and what isn't).

Possibly, the melodrama is a feature and not a bug, depending on what you're reading for.

Reply

barbarienne February 16 2010, 16:50:57 UTC
What's hot isn't the what, it's the how. The most interesting catalogue of positions would not be hot if it's rendered in a mechanistic way. What made the sex scenes in this book work is that they were written very strongly from inside the characters' heads. The author did an excellent job of immersing the reader in the scene, rather than setting the reader up as a voyeur.

Reply

oracne February 16 2010, 17:07:34 UTC
That does seem to work the best.

Reply


Leave a comment

Up