On stilted writing
I'm working on a book right now that's making me very sad.
It's not the plot; it's the writing. This is, simply, a book that needed a good line-editor and a writer with better chops or more time. The writer has at least a dozen books to her name, so there's really no excuse for it; she can't claim youth or lack of experience.
The plot is exactly the sort of thing that ought to make me happy: a secret society of swordsmen, with one woman who has won her way into their number. They do spy missions and suchlike--it's all wonderfully cloak-and-dagger plotty goodness. Bonus points for the action scenes being pretty good--this author can actually visualize the scene and describe it in terms that demonstrate the action without anyone committing physical impossibilities.
BUT.
There are two major prose-level problems. First, in all the sex scenes, the head-hopping is just continuous; it happens in the middle of sentence, sometimes several sentences in a row. I imagine this is part of the romance novel thing of getting the reader to empathize with the characters and know how they feel about each other and so on, but all it really does is confuse exactly who has what body parts and what sensations they're feeling.[1] This is particularly annoying in light of the well-done fight scenes; it implies that the author did this on purpose, but just failed.
I'll give her points for trying, I guess. You don't improve if you never risk and fail. I just wish her editor had said something and made her rewrite those bits before passing the book along for production. This tendency makes the scenes not merely distracting, but unintentionally hilarious.
Second, is the stilted speech. Now, I acknowledge that this annoys me precisely because I can remember when I used to do it, and I still fall into it if I'm not careful. "Your characters kind of have robot-speech" malkatsheva once told me. By which she meant they never use contractions, and they sound stilted when read from the page. (In my head they sound all noble and with accents that enunciate. I could carry it off if I read it out loud, which is why the advice to "read your work out loud" always makes me a little skeptical.)
When I let something sit for six months, I see the robot-speech, the overformality. I have to revise with that specifically in mind, and decide who uses what contractions and when. (People speaking a language that isn't native to them may indeed have stilted patterns.)
I am doubly annoyed in the case of this book I'm working on, because the characters do all use one contraction:
'tis.
Which, you know, just makes it seem that much more artificial, that they've got this verbal tic which is cheap windowdressing for "We're in fifteenth-century England! Really!"
I dunno. Maybe I'm completely ignorant and 'tis was the only contraction in the English language before the Great Vowel Shift and what-all else happened to the language after the death of Henry VIII. But since nothing else of the dialogue says "pre-Elizabethan" to me (really, it reads exactly the same as in Regency romances), I'm doubtful that it's an excess of scholarship that's annoying me.
[1] Alas, no, it's not the sort of SFnal book where that might be part of the story. It's a standard hetero-mainstream romance novel.