I have just received the most perfectly awful writing in my email box in thie history of the world.

Seriously. S/he (I suspect a she) has the first name of Francesq (that is not a typo). This thing is a serious candidate for the Bulwer-Lytton contest, except s/he probably thinks it's wonderful.

Never heard of the person, so I suspect s/he got a list of writers from somewhere and sent a mass mailing.

It's HORRIBLE. Snippets (since the email is an "enclosing first two chapters, I would appreciate encouraging your friends to read it and buy it, I figure this is safe):

Snippet One. Tell not show, much?

Izzy was a twenty-seven year old youth born in Rupit, a small mountain town in the interior of Catalonia. Its steep, narrow streets have always helped defend the town from an excessive invasion of wheeled vehicles. This privileged situation has helped maintain the town's tranquillity and keep out annoying and unnecessary traffic. Things happened slowly in the sweet silence of that little mountain town. Izzy loved its pure air and birdsong.

At the time this story begins, Rupit, in spite of its small size, enjoyed a great deal of cultural activity. The moving spirits behind this were Izzy and a young married couple, Isidro and Maria. All three of them had been schoolmates and had remained close friends ever since. Isidro and Maria were the owners of the village bakery as well as fervent theater fans. The couple wanted to get Izzy involved in founding a little theater group, but they had another motive as well: they wanted to encourage Izzy out of his timidity and they thought working in the theater would be good therapy for him. But precisely because of his timidity Izzy refused to become an actor. His two friends were not put off by his refusal. They continued to insist that he would make a good actor. In an attempt to draw him out of his self-absorption, they tried to convince him that he had the attractive good looks of an actor and that he shouldn't let that go to waste. But Izzy's embarrassment was stronger than his friends' arguments to the contrary.

(I swear, I'm not making this up. This stuff was in my email. It gets, um, better. Ultimate tell not show, coming right up):

Izzy was a lad of medium height, stocky enough to be noticeably oafish in his movements. His chestnut hair was light and wavy, like wheat in a summer field, a lock of which hung over his large, green eyes that sparkled with their own light from within. The lad was the silent type. His silence and timidity shrouded him in an air of mystery which made him even more remarkable when he was with other people.

I like the lock of summer wheat hanging over his large, green eyes that sparkled with their own light from within.

But then again, the lad was the silent type.

This is sooooooooooooo bad.

I like the lock of summer wheat hanging over his large, green eyes that sparkled with their own light from within.

Good. Cause I was about to say, it's not entirely awful. But yeah. Serious case of tell-not-show there. Need a scene! A scene, people!

Tell me it just learned English on Thursday. The worst part is, she(?) won't want advice. I gave a woman like that a mercy-beta once and she complained I didn't respect her vision. Not true. I respected it like my own ability to throw javelins.

It's certainly very bad, Deb. The competition for the worst writing is fierce, though. Some friends used to do dramatic readings from a particularly bad book that I think was called The Clones. The line I remember is, "He bit her neck, which screamed."

I've read much, much worse. At least it's more or less grammatical.....

ETA which is not to say it isn't as bad as you say. I'm just a bit scarred by contest judging experiences that I really can't go into any details about on a public forum, not to mention the Holocaust denier in my community college writing class a few years ago, etc....

But do you want to rec it to al your friends? So that love can return to all our lives?

Still shuddering, over here.

And I am feeling no tendency at all toward mercy. I only posted snippets of this thing, and it's beyond horrible. S/he sent it to me and asked me to recommend it to all my friends, so that looooooove can return to our lives.

It's called "Stars Over the Desert". And the first chapter is called "Shattered Joy".

Brrrrrrrrrrr.

Oh, I didn't post anything near all of what it sent me. The ratafia-making contest on the mountainside, for instance, which has jackshit to do with the story - I left that part out. And all the lecturing about how the theatre group winds up rehearsing in a little room behind Maria's and Isidro's bakery.

But of course, Izzy's rather oafish, or so we're told (not shown).

or so we're told (not shown)

But does Izzy ever actually act oafish in the snippets, or are we just supposed to take the author's word for it? Does he behave contrary to the author's description?

Does he behave contrary to the author's description?

He doesn't behave in any way at all. Everything is through the author.

It's so very bad.

edit: and in researching this, it turns out the perpetrator is a he, the translator (from Catalan) is a he, and the bio on the author reads as follows:

Day by day he fritters away his vital juices as a government bureaucrat, which brings little light to his life. For a Spaniard raised on the Mediterranean, lack of light is slow death. The author escapes this dire reality by writing fiction.

Ugh. Maybe it was better in Catalan? If so, the translator should be flogged. If not, the writer should be flogged.

Arrrrggh, Deb. I'm so sorry. Burn it, dance around its funeral pyre with a warding spell so that no other such doorstops come your way.

Oh. email. Never mind. You'd have to print it out, and that would be a waste of dead trees. Wouldn't want you to burn your computer.

Still. Some sort of burial-and-no-ressurection ceremony seems in order.