eggdropsoap > Recent Status Updates

White room syndrome and so many talking heads. But I’m sticking it out. This almost-good prose and plotting is so very instructive.

HOW am I not at 70% yet?! This book draaags, and it’s all in the flabby prose. Tell, tell, tell for pages, with tiny bits of show. Showing with a tiny bit of telling would be more enjoyable, snappier, and better paced. Half the paragraphs tell me protag thoughts I already know because you just showed me them! Half!

I'm still on this ride so far for premise alone. The worldbuilding has potential but little depth. The characterisation: ditto. The treatment of space travel is superficial. The background strains suspension of disbelief (who sends multiple generation ships to the same star?!) The prose… well, half the paragraphs could have been cut, since the book goes [action]¶ [protag internal-monologues again what we just saw].

Tried one last Kristen chapter. Shame about casual gender stereotyping tainting it. I like Kristen. She deserves better boyfriends, and better writing. Actually the wordsmithing is fine—it’s the plotting and the worldbuilding that let her down. And Josh. DNF so checked spoilery reviews and omfg, that ending?! DNF twice over.

The weirdo middle-America middle-class stuff—big houses with new appliances, but working-class and self-employed jobs and eating McDonald’s—was offputting to start with. Now the existing boyfriend is too much the wrong kind of class markers, is why the best friend doesn’t like him. Blech. Class consciousness fail.

Don’t like Josh. Do like Kristen. Don’t like the bullshit gender role stereotypes, and I’m starting to think the writing is buying into them, not setting them up for being complicated or subverted even in little ways. That doesn’t bode well for continuing to like Kristen or starting to like Josh.

I promised myself I’d get to 30% before DNFing this, but I’m not sure if I can. It’s so… hollow. Questions raised by scene details are accidents of incomplete writing and editing, not things that will be explained later. It’s an incoherent mash of drafting bits. This needed another year or so in editing and rewrites to come together. It’s undercooked, half-baked. Flat. So much potential, unrealized.

The imagery in Yscalin is painful. It’s cartoony. It’s badly conveyed. Volcanic glass throne. “The” (not “the new”) badge of House Vetalda is all evil and anti-Virtudom… as of when? This religious development is mere months old, and already an ancient House has completely changed arms… and foreigners recognise it? When did they have time to rebuild the entire palace to look cartoon EVIL?

This book is frustrating. It keeps using words wrong, especially obscure or fancy-sounding ones. It makes me doubt and mistrust the prose. Is this turn of phrase poetic, or just thesaurusing a fancier word for “carved” that isn’t actually right for this context? Does the author know that chaff isn’t a kind of plant and can’t “grow taller than grass” by itself anyway? Less puffed prose, please…

Like much of the book, there are way too many words for so little substance in the section on publishing. It’s a long verbal shrug. Taking his own advice to eliminate words that do no work, all but three should have gone: “I”, “don’t”, and “know”.

And now disdain for feedback from writers’ groups. The mushy vagueness of the whole book jibes with the dismissal of learning craft that it ends with: he doesn’t know how he writes except in the broadest sense, and can’t tell the reader how to do it. Hence the mystical gestures towards “heart” and shadow selves instead of any real insights.

And here he dumps on the very concept of craft and skill, mumbling about quality coming from the heart, from some ineffable inner writerliness. This is offered directly as an excuse for the rudimentary nature of all that preceded it in this book.

A useful trick: let dialogue subtly reveal what the character doesn’t know about themself, when a 1st person or limited third POV won’t let you write it in the character’s head.

Oh: there is useful bits of advice here, among the slaughter. I almost missed it for the haze of repellence.

Cut your sentences in rewrites; let each word serve an irreplaceable purpose.

The majority of examples inexorably slide into sex or violence, and often both.

That’s… that’s a relationship to the world.

I feel like this advice on revision might not have been applied to this non-novel. It feels a lot like writing this non-fiction wasn’t approached with anything like the amount of consideration espoused within it.

You keep talking about the inner hidden self that novels spring from, this shadow self, this heart of a writer. Putting *that* beside *those* working examples is, uh… confessional.

“I write books about … people I like to think I understand.” Jfc. All these example people are awful, though.

“I write books about … people I like to think I understand.” Jfc. All these example people are awful.

No, we don’t have to keep returning to the awful, horrible, no-good example characters from the example plot of fecal grossness. Why did you make these choices, Walter Mosley. Why.

How is it that a book on mere writing advice can be so *sordid*?!

I don’t normally apply “sordid” to anything sex, but this book—again, on writing advice—manages to touch the topic with only the most repulsively prurient hands.

Finishing this now to cement the awfulness, and to rate it.

2007?!

What this author thinks is gripping characterisation is so very stereotypical and dull.

Hackneyed. Let’s use a worn out word for worn out turns of phrase and tired metaphors. When was this written?

Ugh, moments later I’m regretting that decision. Is this yet another author so convinced of the pedestrian, utilitarian value of sexual assault as a source of drama that he can’t shut up about it? Is it really necessary to smear feces thoroughly into your prose examples?

Almost halfway through and I’m not sure I’ve learned anything yet. Some of the absolutes aren’t, and the aesthetics of the couching of the advice are at times off-putting. I suppose I, perversely, persist because it’s not much farther to the end?

…But not all those percents in order.