So right now we have "Theirs was a fragile peace, upset by Fred and never fully righted."

Plei, that works. It might work even better (harking back to "upset" in the sense of it having more than one shade of meaning) if you take "righted" and make it be "put right."

Theirs was a fragile peace, upset by Fred and never fully put right or "...really put right".

edit: damned floating quotation marks....

Plei, that works. It might work even better (harking back to "upset" in the sense of it having more than one shade of meaning) if you take "righted" and make it be "put right."

Hee. Great minds.

I was going back and forth on it, though leaning in the direction of "put to rights".

We are Great Minds! Hear us roar!

I'm going to post a description I just wrote (not fanfic; from the new novel).

Just because I want a take on it.

This unpleasant blurb was accompanied by a reproduction of what looked to be a cheesy bit of Pre-Raphaelite pornographic art, showing a hideously malformed shape, swooping down upon a buxom sleeping woman with an improbable mane of curls and a faint anticipatory smile on her face.

And "put to rights", BTW, is about perfect.

I'd change it to something like:

This unpleasant blurb was accompanied by a reproduction of something I'm assuming is cheesy Pre-Raphaelite pornographic art. A hideously malformed shape swoops down upon a buxom sleeping woman with an improbable mane of curls cascading from her head and a faintly anticipatory smile plastered on her face.

There's a bit too much there, Deena, for me stylistically, anyway; the key of the picture is that faint anticipatory smile, which is why they think it's porn, and the fact that it's that coy sort of Vic faux porn would be watered down a bit by giving the woman herself too much importance, which is what would happen if I got too detailed about the curls. The text with the picture is a dictionary definition of "incubus".

Mostly, though, wasn't looking for edits (waaaay early in the process for that). Wanted to see if it brought up a nice clear picture of the cheesy Vic stuff.... Also, not present tense or first person voice. Narration; this series of novels is straight narration.

edit: hey! it double-posted....

Oh, well, then, I guess I should say something about why... as in, cascading curls but no mention of where they are, anticipatory smile with face; so I was going for the parallel.

The "I" had me cringing when I wrote it, so I have no good excuse for that one.

The rest was changed, mostly, to delete "a bit of" because I tend to try to remove extraneous words since I've been told I'm far too wordy in my writing.

I think I was annexing it. Oops.

Oh, hmm, cheesy vic for me (adding because you edited) includes mal-formed cherubs, too dark, the pre-raphaelite curls, the smile, the lounging.

I didn't think vic, when I read it. That may be because it's out of context or it could be just me, which has been known to happen. I'm not exactly subtle girl.

And, you clearly stating the definition that went with it went right past my head.

edited (and again) because somehow half the post disappeared.