Tigzy wrote:Oooh - ouch! New very minor blogger Abe over at FTB has announced the release of his literary endeavor: http://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2 ... available/ - and he kindly offers us an excerpt:
Anyone even vaguely familiar with writing and reading creative fiction can see the problem here - the prose suffers from too much repetition. In the first paragraph we get 'building' and 'buildings', three instances of 'stairs' across two short paragraphs, and a pretty exhaustive use of 'door' in the third paragraph. Shit like this makes for clumsy prose and prevents the reader from being fully immersed in the story.He had once climbed the stairs of the Empire State Building, and that didn’t take half the time he was spending on these. Anthony was also fairly certain that he knew of no buildings with black marble stairs of such great width. He couldn’t see the walls on either side of him now, just darkness.
Wisps of pale green mist gathered around him, glowing faintly without lending any light to their surroundings. Anthony paused to look back. The stairs behind him were a well of darkness out of which reached faint tendrils of the luminous fog.
After what seemed like hours, he reached a door. It was unquestionably a door. Anthony was utterly certain that it was a door, but he couldn’t tell if it was a normal roof exit door, or a huge wooden door with wrought-iron hinges, or a house door, or a gate. It seemed to be all doors at once. Not flickering exactly, but not remaining in one guise either. Anthony realized that all the doors he had ever seen in his life were merely imitations or reflections of this door. Leaving such a door closed was not an option. Mouth dry and hands sweating, he opened it and stepped through.
This is the kind of stuff you'd expect from a total newb at the craft, but according to Abe, 'This is the culmination of years of writing, learning, and re-writing' :o Dude has to be shitting us. Amazingly enough, it's not a vanity project, but has been released by what appears to be a genuine third-party publisher - albeit a (very) indie one, if the quality of their covers are anything to go by.
Still, it's not as bad as Greg Laden's infamously ludicrous effort. Ye gods, that was some funny shite:
Now quietly departed from Amazon, it seems. Oh well.She was discontinuity personified when she walked into that dark and dingy tavern, this den of mean scruffy men with beards. She was very white, except her hair which was off white, and of medium height and somewhat stocky build with very large head. She was clad in an enigmatically loud pastel pants suit, wore eye glasses that could have doubled as the marquee for a casino on the Las vegas strip, and sported a hairdo that went all the way to the top, and money. You couldn't literally see the money, but you could tell it was there...
It is an insult to publishing to say that this terrible book was published or that "Wandering in the Woods Press" is a publisher. It is a woman who turned the terrible manuscript into an .epub for Amazon and spent five minutes making sure the formatting was acceptable for the Amazon filters before cashing this dummy's check.
http://archive.is/2IEUq
Wandering the Woods Press is where you go when you are too stupid to google "How do I turn my doc into an epub" and too bad a writer to realize that your prose is irredeemable shit. Unlike a real publisher, this FTB newbie paid for the services, which is not what happens when you attract the attention of a real publisher.
