Larry Correia hits it out of the park again.

Nov 25, 2014 17:21

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 ( Read more... )

guns, larry correia

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werewolf_hacker November 28 2014, 06:00:32 UTC
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.

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yamamanama November 28 2014, 16:40:33 UTC
Bland means bland. I've read the War in Heaven, and believe me, it was a fucking slog to get through. It's turgid and lifeless and didactic and just plain boring.

It has this, at least: Christopher almost shivered, as the abrupt return of the room to a bearable level of light fell like the darkness of a winter compared to the summertime brilliance of the moment before. It was as if the sun had suddenly disappeared from the sky, turning noon to inky midnight in an instant.

That stood out. In a bad way, of course.

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agilebrit November 28 2014, 16:55:31 UTC
And this (again) isn't even a sentence: A garden, but mostly just dirt with a few crocuses in bloom and the sprouts of daffodils reminding us that winter was finally over, surrounded by piles of ice and slush melted and frozen over and over into delicate coral.

It's a forty-word fragment.

Planks and motes.

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yamamanama November 28 2014, 13:30:49 UTC
Now this is turgid: The cold autumn day was slowly drawing to a close. The pallid sun was descending, its ineffective rays no longer sufficient to hold it up in the sky or to penetrate the northern winds that gathered strength with the whispering promise of the incipient dark. The first of the two moons was already visible high above the mountains. Soon Arbhadis, Night’s Mistress, would unveil herself as well.

This is simply bad: "The guide was very nearly as unfriendly as a dwarf too, the man who was presently calling himself Nicolas thought, vaguely annoyed at his inability to crack the man's reserve."

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mauser November 28 2014, 06:32:32 UTC
Changing the subject again.

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yamamanama November 29 2014, 20:43:52 UTC
Also, it says a lot about my abilities when you can't distinguish between my writing and that of a multiple award winning novelist.

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werewolf_hacker November 29 2014, 20:53:25 UTC
...so what you're saying is that you stole the fish semen line. Awesome.

And what I'm saying is that the passage you quoted is a classic example of style over substance, award-winning or not, and is part of the problem with modern SFF. Someone can win multiple awards and still be bad.

After all, Larry's won multiple awards, and you think he's bad.

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yamamanama November 29 2014, 21:08:42 UTC
I said it stood out. I never said I used it myself.

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