Random Quote:
-
Details, Details…
Obviously I am too critical of what I read. I followed LAWKI with books I chose for pure escapism, Sail by James Patterson & Howard Roughan and now Spy by Ted Bell.
I really like the Alex Cross novels by Patterson. I wonder how much writing he really does on the books he co-authors. It seems he is more of a brand now. All the way through Sail part of my brain kept saying, “This is stupid!” while another part reminded me, “It’s supposed to be.” I need to read things just for fun and after LAWKI anything is an improvement. So I finished Sail and chalked it up to my need for an easy summer read.
Now I’m almost half-way through Spy. Novels often require a suspension of disbelief. Super heroes need super villains and what would be the point if the fate of the entire world did not hang in the balance? So, okay, I’ll accept that a terrorist group has spent years building a huge military complex in the rain forest of South America virtually undetected. Honestly I can let that go much more easily than little things like this: A sheriff breaks up a bar fight on a Sunday afternoon. The next Sunday he is again called to service and thinks, “It had been nine days since the incident at the Wagon Wheel.” Nine days? Damn, that’s a long work week!
And this: Two characters playing gin rummy. One plays a winning hand with “three queens, three jacks, and a royal straight.” He explains that he only drew three cards, “the third queen, the ace of diamonds, and the jack of spades filling in a lovely straight.” Scoring in gin rummy requires sets of cards all with the same face value or runs of cards in sequence (a straight) all in the same suit. So he needed to have all four queens and all four jacks in his hand and the straight would have had to be in diamonds (to use the ace), not spades. If that weren’t bad enough, his opponent was caught with, “two kings, two jacks, pair of nines, pair of sevens….” That puts six jacks on the table. Haven’t the author and editor ever played this game?
So while terrorists amass south of the border, these are the things that get under my skin….
Posted on July 11th, 2009 3 comments3 responses to “Details, Details…”
-
anyone July 11th, 2009 at 15:26
File this under “you don’t care” but. . .
When I was younger, my mother decided that I would keep her in the manner to which she was accustomed by writing sleazy fiction, so when I was nine, she had me watch All My Children and keep a character log so I could learn about dialogue, characterization, and plot. The following summer she got me hooked on Sidney Sheldon novels, which in retrospect were too sleazy for a ten-year-old (actually, that might explain a few things) but after five novels I started noticing that he re-used the same conceits, phrases, and descriptions from book to book. By book nine, The Master of the Game, I was sick of “her voice was like a whiplash” and I wrote him a letter chastising him for overusing the simile.
HE WROTE BACK!!! And thanked me for being so observant. And chastised my mother for letting me read what he himself called “dreck.”
I learned more from that than anything else he wrote.
Martha Stewart, however, has never responded to my criticism of her writing style, so screw her.
Did you keep the letter from Sheldon? ~Tim
-
anyone July 12th, 2009 at 20:29
Yup. I have everything from childhood, including some other equally bizarre artifacts. I used to write fan mail/critiques to LOTS of authors. Part of what has made me a well-balanced adult.
-
First..I love Sydney Sheldon!! and “Master of the Game” and “Windmills of the Gods”. Second.. I love Alex Cross novels by James Patterson. I don’t care for the others. I must not be a very astute reader because I rarely pick up on mistakes until someone points it out.
-
Publications
-
Flash in the Pan free E-Chap on
Barnes & Noble
Smashwords - Valentia on Pow Fast Flash Fiction
- Reach on Vox Poetica
- Words on a Wire on Vox Poetica
RSS Feeds
-
| 
| 
Goodreads
-
my 'currently-reading' shelf:
