Larry Correia hits it out of the park again.

[agilebrit]

I'ma just leave this here: The Legalities of Shooting People.

ETA: Okay, I realize that everyone is having a blast smacking Clamps around like a cheap pinata, but I'm going to bow out at this point in time. I have a Sunday deadline I'm desperately trying to hit on a story that's making me crazy

Comments

[werewolf_hacker]

More pretentious, anyway. You write like a sixteen-year-old who just discovered what a thesaurus is for:

Shudkhers, vaguely reptilian or piscine with inhumanly sapient eyes and almost slippery and scaly skin of moss green or rust or light gray, tridactyl feet and sharp sickle claws. I jumped in a cleft in the ground, and a wave of shudkhers leapt above me.

We went into a cave network as shelter from the simoons and the marauding shudkhers. Where coarse sand had poured in through cracks and where dusty sunlight streamed through, cacti and manzanita and succulents grew under. In darker recesses, there were growths like severed and melted hands on naked rock and on chunks of machinery so wracked and ruined I could no longer determine what they were once part of, but if I had to guess, they were mining equipment, glowing a neon orange.

Please tell me this is a first draft.

[yamamanama]

Given where it is, it's a very rough part.

A lot of Requiem is just set pieces that need to be linked together somehow and guess what, it's still light years better than anything Vox Day wrote.

[mauser]

No mother ever admits her own baby is ugly, but you've given birth to the literary equivalent of John Merrick.

[yamamanama]

I had a comeback for this ... I'm not going to stoop that low.

[mauser]

You do know that with the e-mail notifications, I see what you wrote before you edited it.

Son, you would have to climb a very tall ladder to stoop that low.

I imagine it would have been a lame and predictable comparison between myself and Mr. Merrick. Congratulations for having the minimum level of perspicacity to figure out what a pathetic move that would have been on your part.

[yamamanama]

No, no it wouldn't. It would be a comparison between yourself and Trig Palin, if you simply must know.

[mauser]

Which of course would be TOTALLY in context. Sheesh. Even your attempts to insult my intelligence are an insult to my intelligence.

You should give up on trying to insult people, because you're really not very good at it.

[werewolf_hacker]

So, worse than we imagined, proving once more that you're a nasty piece of work. Gotcha.

[mauser]

To be fair, more people love Trig than love Yama.

[jordan179]

So you're laughing at a six-year-old child with Downs Syndrome. That's nasty even for you.

[mauser]

nah, that's par for the course.

[werewolf_hacker]

Ahaha. Such hubris.

No. No, it's not. It's turgid, amateurish, and wordy, is what it is, and makes me want to scramble for a gross of red pens.

[yamamanama]

Vox Day isn't turgid and amateurish?
Knighton isn't turgid and amateurish?

[werewolf_hacker]

I'm reading one of Vox's novels right now, in fact. A lot of times, I read something with an editor's eye, even my favorite authors, and (at least in this book, "The War in Heaven") the prose is clear and doesn't get in its own way. I can't speak to Knighton, as I haven't read him (yet), and I'm not going to take a couple of out-of-context sentences that you've pulled from somewhere and judge the whole of his writing on it.

There's a lot of "tone" stuff in fantasy and science fiction. My secondary-world fantasy has a far different tone than my space opera, and my angel stories have a different tone than my urban fantasies starring this guy. Word choice comes into that, a lot. Turgid is as turgid does, and amateurish speaks for itself.

[yamamanama]

"clear and doesn't get in its own way" is just a euphemism for "bland."

I think The War In Heaven actually had an editor. His newer generic fantasyland novels are filled with tautologies and other bad things.

[agilebrit]

"Bland" is a word people use who write like their thesaurus vomited on the page and think that's "evocative."