K.M. Frontain's Blog, page 26
August 19, 2012
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August 15, 2012
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August 10, 2012
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August 9, 2012
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August 8, 2012
Word weeding and realisations
My continuity check of my epic, The Soulstone Chronicles, has resulted in another word weed and also a realisation. Realisations, actually. The latest is that my online spelling dictionary is set to U.S. English and thinks I’m spelling realisation wrong. Ha ha.
Ok, back on track. I noticed, while weeding out an excess of ‘at him’ from Gryphon 2, that I had a lot of ‘looking’ and ‘staring’. No, that’s not another realisation prior to another word weeding. It’s what I noticed before the primary realisation.
A thing had been bothering me for a while: criticism of that series of vampire books very popular with young women and which led to multiple films. Yes, I have a bad memory and I’m actually trying to drag out the name of the series, darn it… Still darn it. Darn it, had to ask my daughter. Twilight. Ok, yeah. Haven’t read the books, but I saw criticism over the amount of times the author mentions eyes. Of course I went all snake shit about how often I mention them. Then I looked at my series and realized I can’t easily get rid of them all.
It struck me that my surfeit of eye action is because I avoid a lot of think-think in my stories. You know what I mean: pages of agonising mental thought processes concerning the reasons behind what a character does or decides to do. I don’t like reading that sort of thing if it’s not well mixed with action or scene. I especially don’t like pages of it. I feel like I have floated off in a mental haze when a book has too much of it. I’m more visual, as a reader, and want to see what happens, not get into the “beautiful sadness” of some character’s reasons, or their dastardly anger/bitterness or whatever else.
And so, rather than use mental cues which often include a surfeit of ‘he felt’, ‘he thought’ and so on, I relied on visual cues to let the reader know how the characters in my stories felt and what they might likely do next. And I have loads of glaring as a result. My characters are angry often. I have lots of eye action.
Well, darn. I hope the story flow makes up for it. Really, I do. Apparently my skill has not progressed to the point of finding other cues for the reader to know the reasons and whyfors without resorting to think-think.
A writer friend suggested I keep going forward and stop going back over old stuff. She’s right (talking about you, Tressa Green). I should just keep going forward, but the OCD won’t let up, at least not until the continuity check is done and I’ve killed the overdose of ‘at him’ in the earlier sets of the series.
And all this whining aside, I’ve had a good review for Bound in Stone: Volume One this morning. Thank you very much to tomwild on Smashwords.
For those who have not read the first in The Soulstone Chronicles, here’s a coupon: NS24S
Not free on Kindle, but if you want to buy it there for 99¢, here is my author page on Amazon.
And here is where you can find it on other venues such as iTunes and Nook.
Now back to work on the weeding. I’ll try not to go totally snake shit over the eye cues.
