Things you wish authors would stop doing?

Sounds like the name of a cheesy romance author's chihuahua.

 

And again, other than these ludicrously overworked names, a really great, inventive book with some refreshingly risky narrative elements that I really enjoyed.

 

He does love him some onomatopoeia (wow, I just realized that word has the root Poeisis!) and other games with words and their sounds. I think that's why Xanth seems to be contracted from PeirXANTHony. The one I still remember with a cringe to this day is a Cat Ass Trophy.

 

I kinda over engineered the only human character in my WIP,
I will confess (but I don't think I over thought it too much.)
Delainey Vivian Englevweiss
Granted I was on the spot since it was to finish the missing
persons subplot.

 

I could handle it, except—do you really need the V and the W—both?

 

That was typo.
There shouldn't have been the extra 'V'.

 

One thing I hate when authors do is never put out the next book in a series you love, or when they finally do it sucks. There was an author—need to look up his name (it's David R. Palmer, can't believe I forgot that!) who wrote for a sci-fi digest called Analog (I think it was Analog—it's been a looong time). The first story was called Emergence and I dug the hell out of it. It got expanded into a novel and many years later he wrote a sequel called Tracking. I did catch the short story version of it but there was continual talk that it was also going to be expanded into a novel and I kept checking but apparently it never materialized. Man, it's been years since I checked last, I think it's time for another dose of disappointment.

Just checked his Wikipedia page and got reminded that Tracking was actually a novel that was serialized in 3 installments in Analog. So if it were to be published in novel form it wouldn't be much different. The reason I was hoping it would come out as a book is I kept recommending it to people and they'd need to buy 3 back issues of Analog to read it, or subscribe online.

Then there was a sci-fi book called Red Limit Freeway by John DeChancie (I do still remember that one). The book was obviously set up for a sequel, and I kept checking. Finally after like a decade the sequel came out but was totally different and nowhere near as good. I think the author evolved in a direction I didn't care for.

 

Wow, surprise surprise! Tracking did finally come out as a novel about 6 months ago! Only an 11 year wait.

D'oh! Just saw this in an Amazon comment: "Been looking for YEARS for this book and it came up in my recommended list! AND author's notes explained hiatus AND more books coming!!!"

... More books coming? In the series, or just from Palmer? Hmmm... damn, now that what I've waited so long for has happened it just leads on to more waiting...

 

The War Against the Chtorr series by David Gerrold (yes, the dude who invented tribbles).

It petered out in book 4, half of which was quite literally pages from his world-building folder every other chapter. It should have been a trilogy, tied up and cinched off, but instead he let the gas tank run dry with the last book a dissapointment and the last three books he promised, well... the first was published in 1983, so...

 

That's why, when I'm writing a series, I write the entire thing back-to-back before I release any of it. I hate being left hanging by a writer so I refuse to do it to anyone else.

 

Bharåbourghagh glanced at Peggy and delicately corrected, "It's pronounced like Lisa. Why does everyone always get it wrong?"

I don't know, "Lisa". Maybe because you spelled it with two B's and not one but two gh's and what that hell is that circle on the A doing?

In short, don't give me "cat walked over the keyboard" and then tell me it's "Lisa". If it's Lisa, then ffs, write Lisa.

 

Book 2 of Palmer's Threshold is supposedly written but he hasn't had time to publish it yet. That did have some of the above mentioned fantasy naming issues, but it was a great deal of fun.

 

This is an unforgivably bad take.

And you doubled down on it...

 

I don't like it when you're reading something and it feels like the author is messaging (implicitly or explicitly) how you should feel about a situation or a character. Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere comes to mind (soon to be a TV series, on Hulu, I think). I otherwise enjoyed the book but the messaging was off-putting and distracting.

 

Nope. Even if the character explained it's pronounced Lisa, every time I see that one in my mind it's a fart. Maybe a wet one.

But everyone understands ghoti is pronounced "fish", right? No, seriously—

• GH as in Enough
• O as in Women
• TI as in Emotion

—Fish. Obviously. What else could it be?

 

I hope that scratch and sniff novels never become a thing.

 

^ quick—delete that before some hack publisher sees it!!

 

I am sure somebody has at least thought about it since the invention
of scratch and sniff.
A long time ago, you could go and see a movie with 'smell-o-vision'.
Think that was back in the '70s, and it didn't go over so well.

 

It actually comes up quite a bit in these writerly forums.

Person - "So, my character's name is written as Bharåbourghagh, but it's pronounced Lisa. What should I do?"

Me - "Just write L-I-S-A."

Person - "No, it must be spelled that way because reasons and the reader must pronounce it correctly."

Me - "... teach the reader whatever language is making Bharåbourghagh into Lisa...?"

Person - "I can see you're not being serious."

Me - "My dude, you write Bharåbourghagh and demand that the reader reads Lisa, and I'm the one not taking things seriously? You give no reasoning other than that face you're making that I guess is supposed to tell me that it's plainly obvious that very bad things will happen if these rules are not abided. Just for fun, what bad things are going to happen?"

Person - "You're a dick..."

Me - "Wait, don't walk away! Seriously, like the reader won't understand your story bad, or like Godzilla will teleport into your living room bad? Because I can understand the Godzilla thing."

 

Maybe it sounds like Lisa when your at the bottom of pool of mercury?

But, yeah I agree a name should be pronounced how it looks in text.

 

Characters that are bad just because they like doing bad things and hurting people. There are people like that around, yes, but do they really need to appear in every story?

I'm not sure if another pet peeve of mine fits, but here goes: I get sooo tired of reading action like

Apologies for the uninspired action, but I hope my problem is clear. It's POV. The example is completely devoid of POV. I can't say who the POV character is (or if there should be one). To read action like that in the middle of an otherwise well-written story with a consistent POV... it puts me off the whole thing. And it happens like that in far too many stories.

ETA: I even know why this stuff happens: It's because the writer gets scared that in action, the reader won't know who is doing what. i.e. the writer is trying to be clear. Instead the opposite happens and he confuses/pisses off the reader (me).

 

Yep. I put that one in a larger bucket labeled Writers Abandoning Their Narrative Mode.

 

Slartibartfast and Zaphod Beeblebrox?