Kerry Allen

Angelic Daughter (who is fascinating to talk to, if you ever get the chance) and I were discussing books, and she complained about over-description because it interferes with her participation in the story. Like her mom, she converts books to mental movies, and like any good director, she likes to add her own interpretation to the scene to enrich the personal experience.

We came to the conclusion that over-description is the product of an author being a control freak. “I have a clear vision of this scene, and the reader must receive that vision in all its authentic glory. If I leave anything to the imagination, she’ll get it all wrong. Therefore, I’m going to describe every carpet fiber, every leaf, every freckle on the heroine’s perky bosom to ensure the reader doesn’t contaminate my vision with her inferior imaginings.”

Psst. Hey, Ms. Control Freak. I have to tell you something.

WE SKIP YOUR PAGES OF DESCRIPTION AND INSERT OUR OWN.

Sorry, but we have no respect for the minutiae of your artistic vision. We’re hanging out with you solely for action and dialogue and forward momentum. Put those toys away for too long, and we’re outie.

Give your readers a little credit for imagination. If we had none, we’d be watching TV or a movie and having our entertainment spoonfed to us instead of curling up with a book.

As a general rule, I do not want to be grossed out when reading a sex scene in a romance novel.

Now, I am generally not squeamish about being grossed out (in fiction, that is—real life is another matter entirely). I have a nifty stack of horror anthologies from which I am reading one gruesome tale here and there as time and mood permit, and there’s plenty of grossness. Even sexual grossness. But they’re horror stories. They’re supposed to squick you out.

A romance novel, in my opinion, should strive to portray romantic happenings in an appealing fashion.

Reading that the heroine’s delicate flower of womanhood “drooled” as a result of her ardor made me think of a gaping mouth, which made me think of this Review of Movies We Haven’t Seen, resulting in much nauseated giggling.

Plus, copious vaginal discharge is usually an indication of some kind of infection, which also is not the most romantic thought while reading of a couple’s physical consummation of their transcendent love for one another.

Conclusion: “Drooling” reproductive orifices = not sexy.

And while we’re at it, “slurping”? I’m thinking pig at a trough. Just… no.

A while ago I mentioned not being in the mood to read a book in which the heroine was sexually assaulted and beaten within an inch of her life within the first chapter.

It has since come to my attention that character was not, in fact, the heroine, but her mother.

It was an honest mistake, considering the book is written in 1st person POV, and that person is usually the protagonist.

I don’t have the aversion some people seem to have for 1st person, but multiple-person 1st person? Oy.

I thought the use of present tense in the book was a little jarring, but it wasn’t enough to deter me from reading further. The POV thing on top of it, on the other hand, has served as reader repellent for me. Knowing I’m going to have to head hop in 1st person has totally put me off.

Like the one James Patterson novel I read, in which POV switched from 3rd person to 1st person for one character for no discernible reason other than to demonstrate the author’s supposed cleverness, I find toying with POV and tense distracting. Instead of telling a compelling story, the book turns into an opportunity for the author to say, ”Hey, look at my craft! See what I did there? It sets me apart.”

Sure does. Sets you apart in that stack I’m never going to finish reading. Good job.

Dean Koontz did the switch-to-1st-person-for-one-character thing in One Door Away from Heaven, but it worked because the character was a 10-year-old boy on the run, and the intimacy and immediacy of 1st person conveyed perfectly a child’s fear and coping mechanisms. It served the story. He pulled it off so seamlessly, I didn’t even notice the shift in style until I was almost finished with the book.

I want the author to disappear when I’m reading. I can count on one hand the number of times recognizing craft on a first read has been a good thing. Bump me out of the story to show off what a brilliant revolutionary stylist you are, and you’ve just lost me forever.

But I’m just a trailer park/Wal-Mart kinda reader—you know, one of those hicks who indiscriminately buys a shitload of books regardless of what more tasteful and scholarly folk think of them—so what do I know?

One of your favorite authors has a book coming out, in a sub-series that hasn’t gone hardcover, so you preorder it months in advance and have it in your hot little hands ASAP.

You can’t help but notice as you compare it to another book in the shipment that it’s a little, ah… thin. Both books retail at the $6.99 price point, but one is two-thirds the size of the other.

You give the publisher the benefit of the doubt because they send you all these nice preview emails and you want to have happy thoughts about them, so maybe they figured out they could save paper and make a greater profit if they use a smaller font, and you’re totally supportive of saving a tree and the principles of capitalism, so you open the book to a random page, prepared to squint.

The font is HUGE and bordering on double spaced.

That bad feeling you were trying to stifle comes roaring to the fore. You flip to the end to check the page count: only 282 pages. Fuming ensues. What is this, frickin’ Harlequin Presents? And if that is the case, shouldn’t you be getting four books for this price?

Then you happen to notice the header toward the end is not the title of the book. You skim the page. It’s a story. Which you have already read. Online. For free.

You find the beginning of that story and check the number on the previous page: 248. So this “book” is almost 40 pages even shorter than the brevity that was already pissing you off.

It’s not a book. It’s a frickin’ novella.

You have no problem with novellas per se, but for $6.99, there better be three of them bound together!

Or do one of those $2.99 things that were all the rage a couple years ago, which were basically just like this, only didn’t leave you researching how to make a voodoo doll for a publishing house because at $2.99, you didn’t feel so… what’s the word I’m looking for… oh yeah… assraped!

So you read the book that was 150 pages longer for the same price. And you read three other books from your TBR pile, all of which exceed 350 pages for their $6.99 cover price. You still haven’t read the book in question, and you’ve begun giving the evil eye to the publisher logo on the spine of every book, whereas you have never in the past paid any attention to that information and were baffled by readers who did because it’s all about the story, right?

It’s all about the story until the corporate machine exploits a loyal reader base because they’ll buy anything with that author’s name on it. It’s disrespectful to the reader and damaging to the author. (You know better, of course, but how many less savvy readers bought this pamphlet-disguised-as-a-book and think it was the author’s decision to rip them off because it’s the author’s name plastered all over the cover?) And even though you will remain a loyal reader of this author because you care more about some of the characters she’s created than certain members of your own family, some of your enthusiasm has dimmed because of the publisher’s actions.

And you are twice as determined that you will NEVER buy a hardcover romance novel because the publisher is no doubt unscrupulous enough to charge you upwards of $40 for a short story with a dust cover.

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Is the 2nd person POV freaking you out yet? It’s all part of my subliminal mind control. This is how you feel, yes? Yes, yes, it is. See, it says right there, it’s all about you.

Actually, I was so peeved when I wrote this, I believe I subconsciously removed myself from it to stave off the foaming-at-the-mouth ranting I was leaning toward at the time. (I share a house with an adolescent prone to hormonally fueled rages. I do NOT need to be adding any of my own drama, trust me.)

No.

No.

No, you did not just make that character look in a mirror and describe herself.

*sigh* Yeah, you did.

I have never read a book in which a character’s appearance was of such crucial significance that I couldn’t wait for it to come up naturally in the narrative. Her “thick, auburn mane” can be blowing wildly in the wind. He can have a premonition of dread when she turns her “heavily lashed eyes of guileless sapphire” upon him. There are a million ways to convey that information, some better than others, none as godawful as the hold-up-while-I-admire-my-reflection method.

(Have you noticed the dramatic increase in Reader Peeves lately? That happens when I’ve had things out on submission for a loooooooooooong time. The thought process is something like, “Hey, person with my manuscript on your desk, my writing might be crap, but you gotta give me credit for not doing stupid shit like this.” It doesn’t make me feel better—worse, actually, since the stupid shit in question made it into print while my uppity, superior ass languishes in anonymity—but I find it nicely rounds out the cycle of self-flagellation.)

When a book starts out really strong, sucks me right in and keeps me glued to the page, I get excited. Even as I’m intensely involved in the story, there’s a part of me pumping its fist and doing the Snoopy dance in the background because I found something good, and if it’s a series that already has subsequent books up for grabs… ah, bliss.

A book last week had an exciting start. Interesting character. Blood and guts. New take on old mythology. First in an established series. I was completely stoked.

And then a third of the way through… it unraveled into a string of illogic and convenient coincidence.

I don’t mind if a character makes a mistake or does something misguided or even downright stupid in the heat of the moment. It makes them more human. But there better be a good reason for it other than “I can’t make this next plot event happen unless my highly educated and presumably intelligent protagonist spontaneously loses a hundred IQ points here.”

I don’t mind coincidences. They can be especially powerful if they’re of the bad variety. But if you pull a blatant deus ex machina to bail a character out, that character better acknowledge it with a “dumb fucking luck” remark, it better be followed by a torrent of woe that makes the lucky break nothing but a cruel joke, and you better not keep using the same trick over and over again because the characters are incapable of staying alive without divine authorial intervention.

I’m all for a kickass heroine, but when she is smaller and younger and less experienced and physically and spiritually weaker than any of the big, strong men who are trained assassins but still got their asses handed to them by the bad guy’s bodyguards, you can’t seriously expect me to believe she takes baddie out all by herself, even if baddie conveniently misplaces his brain and even more conveniently has a sentimental fugue in the middle of the battle.

When a book starts out with a bang and then goes awry, it’s worse than if it was bad from page one. It’s like the difference between watching Wil E. Coyote fall off a cliff and going rock climbing with your best friend, reaching the top, giving him a congratulatory high five, and watching him fall off a cliff. With one, you know it’s going to be a train wreck all along. With the other, everything is going great until a tragic turn of events, and all you can do is watch helplessly while something you once cared for plummets to a grisly end.

Be consistent. Give me either a crappy book or a book that’s good all the way through. Don’t get me all excited and then do a bait-and-switch. That makes me grumpy, and when I get grumpy, I’m inclined to drive to the bookstore—not to buy your books, but to hide them behind Linux technical manuals and histories of Finland.

Lifted from March 20 Blogger entry

Ah, the ever-popular heroine who is dumpy and frumpy until she takes off her glasses and suddenly becomes the uber-hot object of every male character’s lustful fantasies.

No makeover. No change of clothes. Not even a shower. The metamorphosis from bore to babe required nothing more taxing than removing her specs.

Those must be some DAMN ugly glasses to overshadow not only her “cover girl” facial features but also her “generous cleavage,” her ass that is so extensively lauded I can’t select a single quote, and her “long, shapely legs.”

Get thyself to Lens Crafters, girl!

Not only that, but this heroine never seems to really need the glasses, since she can discard them to become a sexpot with no repercussions, such as squinting unattractively and tripping over furniture and ramming her car into oncoming traffic, so she appears to have been given glasses solely for the purpose of taking them off and revealing the startling beauty concealed behind the, um, clear plastic lenses.

Having been stuck with one form of corrective lenses or another since the age of six, that just pisses me off.

How about a myopic heroine who’s sexy with her glasses? Do any exist, or will I have to write one myself?