Thursday, October 27, 2011

Stylin'

As I said a couple months back, I'm not sure what the point is in giving writing advice anymore.  Who actually cares about the writing, just tell the story and hope readers find you. 

Writers used to have a style.  But not so much anymore.  Does style get in the way of getting the job done?  Yeah I think so.  If you think of style as crafting the piece with care and attention, that slows you down.  Does anyone think of an ebook as beautifully written?  Are the Harry Potter books beautifully written?  Twilight?  Any mystery series?

Sweeps got its first review this week.  Someone liked it 4 stars (thank you whoever you are) but said it looked weird on her Nook.  I have a Nook.  It doesn't look weird on mine.  What's "weird" mean?

This is actually a more helpful conversation to have than talking about constructing character even if she did think Dorsey Rees was flat.  I can't explain that any more than I can explain how the book looked weird on her Nook.  So maybe none of it is a helpful conversation except that unlike legacy publishing the author and the reader are potentially in more of a relationship.  Now readers can either leave reviews or email you.  Writing a letter in c/o the publisher was quite a bit of work and generally didn't happen.  All that is the old days.

If authors can be held accountable to readers, I would like to see readers held more accountable to authors.  If they have an issue or complaint, they should be specific (and polite!).  Hit and run attacks are the province of drunk trolls. 

Anyway, yesterday, altho you have to scroll down so the timeline is all messed up, I posted an image of a burdock thing taken with my new lens.  Here's the same image but I bumped the luminance way up in Lightroom.  That smooths everything out and removes detail.  Sometimes you wind up with a more interesting image which is what I think this is.




Yesterday I wrote a scene in Flash 2 I had been thinking about for a while and today I hope to get to another scene I've been going back and forth on for even longer.  As for style?  I write too much dialog some will say.
I'm not crazy about people thinking and I really hate description that has nothing to do with moving the story forward.

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