Yukikaze linked not!drabbles, "High Turnover Rate"

"Battle Fairy Yukikaze" is a space-military SF series about these poor schmoes who have to defend an alien planet ("Fairy") from the machines of a terrifyingly incomprehensible alien civilization, lest the aliens use it as a stepping stone to Earth. I've been reading petronia's novel summaries. I also downloaded the anime, but got the fifth (and final - it's an OAV) episode fansubbed in Russian by mistake.

Nooooooooo! Some not!drabbles, while I wait thirty hours for the last episode in English.

( Variations on a theme )

I sort of want to do another series on the alien-ness of JAM, but I'm prevented by having NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON in the anime half the time. *crosses fingers that the last episode will clear some things up*

Bookblogging/Writing Critique

I was going to wait until I'd at least made it halfway through The Apprentice by Lewis Libby before I blogged about it, but I don't think I can make it that far. This book is really bad. Not that I hadn't known it would be -- the author is Scooter Libby. (Yes, that Scooter Libby.)

Plot: a raging blizzard forces half a dozen travelers (I refuse to call them "wayfairers," Libby uses that word six times in the first six pages) to spend the night together at a small mountain inn. Suspicion! Intrigue! In other words, it's a locked-room mystery. (Also, it's set in 1903 Japan. I mention this fact last (and in parentheses) because if I hadn't read the back of the book, I wouldn't have been able to tell the setting was Japan until halfway through the first chapter, and then only from the names.)

The Apprentice is absolutely horrifying. At first I thought I'd have a good time laughing at Scooter Libby's expense, and the writing is bad enough to be funny. It's terrifying, though, because I recognize the style. Scooter Libby writes...like me. (Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!)

He does! Or maybe I write like him, I'm not sure which would be worse. The resemblance really is amazingly creepy. Below the cut are some excerpts, so that you can see what I mean. I'm going to explain what I think is wrong with them, because this will hopefully keep me from making the same mistakes.

( Read more... )

General problems with the prose are:
1) sense of temporal disconnect. I don't know what's going on until the sentence after it happens. Alternately, I'm told a fact as if it's already something I know, even though this is my first time hearing it.
2) details included without any thought of how they are adding to the atmosphere. Libby can obviously picture the scene, and his details are specific if somewhat confusing, but he describes physical things without cluing the reader in to their emotional or other significance. There are quite a few emotions that go along with figures struggling into an inn from a storm: isolation, annoyance, relief at having avoided death by exposure. Just describing the scene is not enough. Libby doesn't have to go overboard with the exposition, but more consistently isolating (I think that's what he's going for here) adjectives would definitely help, as would his sticking to details that enforce isolation.
3) Similarly, a laugh or a shrug can mean more than one thing, and Libby should do a better job of informing us which one it is. If Libby told us enough about the characters that we could figure out the meaning of their actions based on their personalities, that would be one thing, but he doesn't and we can't. (That's why this story reminds me of fanfiction! Although there is also the part where it is supposedly set in 1903 Japan *cough*.)

Put most simply, the fact that there is a lot of detail in this story does not make it any easier to understand what is going on.