The dreaded words that signal DO.NOT.WANT
I spotted this list on a friend's FaceBook post (friend is also known in these parts, but I don't know how they feel about crossing the streams, so won't) of words in book blurbs that are a turn-off: Life-affirming
Heartwrenching
Uplifting
Feelgood
Kooky
Heartwarming
Madcap
Quirky
Hilarious
To which I would add: Whimsical (especially if qualified as 'delightfully')
Romp (esp. in context of hilarious or madcap)
'In the tradition of', with particularly minus points if the tradition it is meant to evoke appears to have been randomly generated from a vague memory of reading a description somewhere.
'An [X] for the [---] generation'
I feel that there are some genre-specific markers which are not quite the same thing, but I am guaranteed to back away slowly from 'chilling psychological thriller' or any combination of words signifying 'woman in peril suspense'.
And in the spirit of those posts popping up on my reading list about how to be a good blogger, and the need to have posts that bring about audience interaction, I throw this out to solicit my dr rdrz to come up with their own blurb kryptonite words. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2743919.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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