Heh. Got it, Jilli, and we have twice backflung, and all is of the wellness.

The Drabble, it burns like hygiene!

His ice-blue eyes burned with the barely-contained rage of his barbarian heritage as he pressed the cold steel blade, nicked by a thousand bloody battles, against the soft city-man's flabby throat. His grim visage snarled, tiger-like, and each muscle clenched, bulging with fury unbound by the weak laws of the lowland civilizations. Cravenly trembling, the innkeeper cowered before him, damp hands wringing anxiously.

"Too much of your piss-weak city ale have I drunk, and yet not enough that your low-lander tricks can deceive me!"

Cromagh fiercely shook his lion-like black mane from his burning eyes.

"Where is your cursed privy, dog?"

One word over. Pah! I defy your soft literary conventions!

Joe, I think you read too much Robert E. Howard growing up. You could take over for him.

suhNERK! Joe, you know what's scary? Pretty much all fantasy reads like that to me. I can't tell straight from parody anymore. And that was a brilliant drabble; add some naked dancing girls and unveiled antifeminism, and you've got Gor.

Grrrrr, Gor. Thag smash Gor.

At last, contest results! And really, they're not half bad.

I was tied for 14th out of 35 entries in my category, which sounds terrible (OK, it really sounds merely mediocre, but I have high expectations of myself), but the scores are very bunchy at the top. The highest score was 149/150, and I got 141.5. (Each entry had three judges, and they dropped the lowest and averaged the other two.) In the best hero category, I was tied for 3rd with 19/20, but only the first place entry from each category advanced to the finals.

This is the contest where I rewrote my first chapter from scratch over the course of a week, had a few people look at it the next week, and then sent it out. It's been revised since, I think for the better, so it'll be interesting to see how I do in the two contests I entered with it post-revision. I got consistently high scores on all areas, but especially characterization, setting, and style. I got very few comments (as seems to be the way with high-scoring entries), but I'm getting an ego boost from:

This is a very well written entry. You've created strong characters and set up compelling conflicts. Best of luck!

You did an excellent job creating Jack. He's strong yet sensitive to the needs of others. I fell in love with him quite easily. Well done!

The writing is vivid, alive, and fresh.

I'm definitely intrigued. The synopsis reveals a depth of story arc unusual for this time period.

I'm looking forward to seeing this in print.

It's not quite what I hoped for when I entered, but I think I'll preen a bit nonetheless.

Wow, Susan. That sounds great! Those are all really good comments, and several in areas where you've felt you've been strong. So good on you! This should be good affirmation. And that's great about the 3rd in hero creation -- you've really been pleased with your writing of Jack, so that's great to hear back that you really are on the right track with him.

pulling brain out of seventeenth century

Susan, excellent!

back to pass-pages

Oh, my. THis is so very much on topic for this week's drabble category...

Back in February, I got an email from someone shilling their self-published, badly-translated novel. Remember? I wrote a locked post about it in my livejournal.

Reposting from February, in all its glory: Really Bad Writing!

- - -

I got an email this morning, looks like a blind mass solicitation, from someone shilling their new novel. Its "thesis is that people in both the east and west must change their ways or love for one's fellow man will die." But, wait! There's hope; s/he attaches the first two chapters, and "If you buy it and like it, I would appreciate it if you would recommend it to your friends and maybe then love can return to our lives."

Snippets. Be warned, this could easily be a clinic on how to tell, not show:

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 love the summer wheat dangling over his large, green eyes that sparkled with their own light from within. Oh, that lad...!)

Izzy's timidity was especially noticeable when he was in the company of young ladies. In his twenty-seventh year he had not yet considered the question of marriage. Nor was there any visible sign that he had even thought about it. That set his family to worrying. In order to remedy the problem, the family got together without Izzy's knowledge and decided that they had to find him a girlfriend, with the malicious intent of getting him married. After a brief search the family came up with their choice: Mariona Bages from the house of Saberut. She was thirty-two years old.

(But wait - our hero must flee, and who shall blame him?)

Mariona lived in permanent contradiction with her image as a free-thinking liberal. Thus in order to reaffirm her position to herself and to anyone else who might be watching, she demolished all the socially acceptable barriers to good behavior. The first barrier to fall was that of the flesh. As a consequence, she created her own self-image, probably the one she wanted others to see. So it was no secret that she had toyed with all the boys in town as well as those in the surrounding countryside. Her fame had spread far beyond the county. She was known as a "modern woman," open and deep to the point where she would give it away to the first man in sight.

(Well, obviously, he mustn't marry her - run, Izzy, run!)

Izzy was shaken when he learned of his family's plans for him. He didn't think he would be able to put up with that shrewish fleshpot for the rest of his life, so he asked his family very seriously to leave him alone so he could keep his head sharp and free. But his family had their own ideas about that. They had chosen this specific woman for two reasons: first, to get Izzy married off and settled down. Second, because they believed as did the rest of the town that the Saberuts were first-class people and that if they could marry into that family, they too would somehow become first-class people. Izzy's ambitious family wasn't at all worried about sacrificing their son by marrying him off to the rather floozy Mariona as long as by doing so they themselves managed to rise in social status.

(continued...)

( continues...)

(Our hero Grows Up:)

Izzy didn't give it a second thought. He firmly declared that he wasn't interested in her. His family countered all his protests with force and conviction. They all ganged up on him and relentlessly hammered their idea home until poor Izzy, who had considered himself a happy man before all this, could take no more of their pressure. He anguished over their plans for his future to the point where he made a transcendental decision: against his will and his future happiness, he decided his only way out was to escape from his beloved Rupit. So he packed a suitcase and walked out the front door of his house just like someone going for a walk, but toting a suitcase. Before leaving town, he stopped to say goodbye to his friends Isidro and Maria. "I'm not coming back until I find the woman of my dreams and that's a problem I have to settle all by myself," he told them. After saying goodbye Izzy left town, his happiness riven with a crack from top to bottom. And thus began his introduction to the wide, wide world around him.

Self-published, I presume. And Bulwer-Lytton Award, anyone?