A difference of descriptive opinion

Literary agent Janet Reid has posted a paragraph on her blog that she seems to think is illustrative of good descriptive writing. She’s moderating her comments, so while there are currently 10 comments from people who agree that this is a “perfect” and “beautiful” descriptive paragraph, my dissenting comment has failed to be displayed. And the fact is, I think this paragraph is a stinker.

So I’d like to have an un-moderated discussion of this paragraph.

“Legacy” zombies give Clone Wars new life

Hooray! This week, Clone Wars decided to be a cartoon again (albeit a rather scary one). And not only was it not a WWII-era bloodfest, it actually featured genuinely heroic moments. Double hooray!

The “Legacy of Terror” set up: Jedi Luminara is captured by zombie aliens and Jedis Skywalker and Kenobi take a platoon of clones into the spooky caves to save her.

New tools of the trade

Okay, I know that this tool isn’t exactly “new,” but bear with me.

Once upon a time, I would write a book as a Word file on my home computer, and then back-up that file to a USB drive that I carried around in my pocket. This served two functions: I had a back-up copy in case of a Windows-related natural disaster, and I could pop my USB into any computer at any time to carry on writing when I wasn’t home.

But it is time to move on!

Loving your writing

I don’t generally love my works in progress. By the time I begin actually writing a new book, all the romance has gone out of the thing.

The romance is in the imagination, the creation, the invention, the pure theory of writing. The joy is in dreaming up all manners of delightful nonsense: building characters and plots and settings. And then discovering all the happy accidents where your characters and plots and settings just fall into place in more ways than you originally planned, all to make your story just that much more brilliant.

But then you have to actually write the thing, and that’s where all the fun just evaporates and the work begins.

Clone Wars: “Factory” turns out more of the same

I’ve got my eye on Star Wars: Clone Wars now because I’m concerned about it wobbling between being an action show for adults and being a cartoon for children. Either would be fine; both would not.

“Weapons Factory” is a moral improvement over last week’s “Point Rain.” The heroes have resumed being concerned with each others’ well-being and generally acting in a good manner.

But, I have a bee in my bonnet.

A modest e-book proposal: Build a library

I’ve had a mild brainstorm about the e-book / digital rights management / collapse-of-publishing-as-we-know-it issue currently simmering in the publishing industry. My thought is this:

Currently, we are thinking about e-books in very physical terms. We buy them, place them on our e-readers, and then carry them around with us. Thus, our books are as fragile as our e-readers, and very awkward (read: impossible) to share/lend.

Instead, we should be thinking about e-books in terms of simple digital content storage and management. An e-book should should live in a personal e-library, secure out on the Internet, where you (and your friends) can access it remotely.

Too many characters

There’s no such thing! You can never have too many characters, in my book (pun intended). Maybe Tolstoy had it right, you really need a cast of hundreds to make a book come alive!

Well, maybe not. This is a difficult point for me. My books tend to focus on dialog and action, and run a little thin on description and introspection, so to fill a 100,000-word manuscript I need a lot of people talking and acting. But this introduces some problems.