From Christmas until the anniversary of my dad's death (Feb. 6, 2003), I can't write squat. After that, it slowly returns. Last year, it bothered me. This year, I realized what was going on fairly quickly, and didn't even bother to try or worry. I was fairly sure it would wear off, and it does.

eta...

It seems to linger a bit 'til our birthdays have passed (early March).

How does crap writing like that make the bloody best-seller list? HOW?!?

I told you all, didn't I, about the paperback I picked up in a funk in the middle of January? The hero's "eyes were the color of a dark gray sky." Ummmm, I wonder what color a dark gray sky is?? That was page 2.

Yesterday I picked up a Vonda McIntyre novel, read the first page (which, being the first page, was actually only half a page) and found two similar instances of verbal clumsiness. So, I put it down again. Sometimes I can get past that kind of problem and get into the story, but sometimes I just can't.

I'm a fan of adverbs. There is a whole song about adverbs, you know. It's the L-Y song. Sample verse: You walk into a darkened room, / and sitting there in the gloom / is a TIGER. How do you say goodbye? (Answer: immediately.)

Angels and Demons sucked soi hard I was a complete bitch and wrote at Amazon that I would avoid Dan Brown's work like it had anthrax inside. And that my mother bought it for a quarter and she still overpaid.

Oh, man. I'm trying to read it, and the topic could be very very interesting in the hands of a skilled writer (I'd love to see Deb or Connie take on the Illuminati), but it's SO BAD.

I'd love to see Deb or Connie take on the Illuminati

She lumped me in with Deb. I love Teppy.

The Illuminati are way cool, and the whole Holy Grail Holy Blood thing was my favorite conspiracy until it got fashionable. I've got all sorts of books about the Knights Templars and the cult of Mary Magdalene and the Illuminati. I'm not persuaded by any of the conclusions of the books, but I admit there are some intriguing possibilities in the evidence.

I use them, rather a lot, in dialogue. Not attached to a said, but within a speech pattern, for specific characters

I think when writing books are anti-adverb, what they tend to mean is to get rid of all the "said thuslies." Not the places where it's a character tic, as Deb describes, or used otherwise used to good effect.

And I do think "Dan said" or "Thom said" is helpful, not after every single sentence, but when a passage is like this --

"I can't go to your sister's wedding with you," he said.
"You have to, you promised," she said.
"I never. If I did, I lied."
"You're impossible."
"But that's why you love me."
"Who said anything about love?"
"I seem to remember certain murmurs to that effect."
"Well, if I said that I lied."
"Now who's impossible?"
"Still you, sorry."
"If I am, you are too."
"Am not."
"Are too."
"Am not am not am not."
"Are too are too are too, infinity."

And on and on and on, I need *something,* or else I'm going to start needing to count back to figure out who's calling who impossible. And if I have to do that, you've lost me, at least for the scene.

I tend to use a lot of dialogue tags for this reason.

I'm going to start needing to count back to figure out who's calling who impossible

The unabridged "Count of Monte Cristo" I have does this a lot, a full page of snappy dialogue with no attribution. I got off-track and was getting very confused about who was the closet Bonapartist and who was the anal-retentive, self-serving Royalist until I counted back.

Lack of balance is the real problem with writers guides. It's why I adore "Telling Lies" so much. His philosophy pretty much is, "Are you telling a good story? Are people eager to find out what happens next? Then don't worry about it."

Lyra, you may find amusing the case of Manuel Puig, who wrote several novels entirely in dialogue. He never specified who was talking, and never described what they were doing; you could only tell something had happened when one of the speakers mentioned it. You got to know these people solely by their words to each other.

It's an incredibly wonky, difficult thing to read, I should say. Wicked avant-garde, sometimes exciting, but difficult to read. (And Spanish editing marks don't even use quotes for dialogue, so it even looked odd on the page.)

I'd love to see Deb or Connie take on the Illuminati

The trilogy - Wilson and Shea's Illuminati trilogy, that is - is a corking fun read in my world. They really do it right, and what's more, they hit the horror behind the concept with precisely the two things that makes it bearable: sex, and humour.

Nutty, I sometimes wonder if that particular school of verbal clumsiness is literally a matter of a writer making it to point B, but either not bothering or else being incapable of point C: checking their own imagery. I mean, descriptives are not only valid, they're needed, but must they be so damned pinpoint? That's something I'm careful about, mostly because, for me, as Mama Sensualist, I want the physical descriptive to have the hint of poetry or music about it. And I want it portmanteau: making the reader sort through several images that may come up behind their own eyes.

So, "His eyes were the colour of a dark grey sky" makes me snort. "His eyes were the colour of the sky on a stormy day", though, brings up multiple images: stormy day along the Mediterranean, where it's shot with indigo and a kind of angry scarlet? Stormy day on the Great Plains, Big Sky country, with all those steely moments and moving clouds? Stormy on the western shore of Kauai, where the horizon is basically forever and you can't pinpoint where the colours begin to bleed together?

As a reader, I want that mystery in my own head. I want to be forced to sort through the images.

Lyra, this is why I break things with action. That dialogue block you quoted? Would lose me by line five, with or without "he said" or "she said". For me, it's just two people talking. There's no context; there's no setting. What are they doing? Is he a finger-tapper? Is she fidgeting, or playing with her jewelry? Are they meeting each other's eyes?

There's nothing in big blocks of pure dialogue to illuminate these people for me. I can't visualise them, and as a result, I don't care about them and the dialogue turns into an irritating blur, and I end up not reading the rest.

you may find amusing the case of Manuel Puig, who wrote several novels entirely in dialogue. He never specified who was talking, and never described what they were doing; you could only tell something had happened when one of the speakers mentioned it. You got to know these people solely by their words to each other.

That sounds kind of neat, but I suspect I couldn't make it through five pages of that without throwing it across the room in irritation.