Thunder and lightening
Thunder and lightening
Thunder and lightening everywhere.

Thunder and lightening
Thunder and lightening
They count them 2 by 2.

Rain rain rain rain
It’s raining everywhere.

Rain rain rain.

Olivia White, © 2008

“Moon!” she said.

She jabbed her index finger skyward and said “pop!”

And that is what happened to the moon.

Just south of the Plebar City there stands Rectum Valley, a dark shadow of a gorge, appearing almost removed from life itself. Hollow stumps of melon trees, standing smaller within their new gray textures, dot the land as the faint image of a path remains frozen in the ground.

I really don’t think I need to comment further. Valleys don’t stand. It’s that simple.

With so many possibilities to talk about, tonight let’s just focus on one word: cascade. Cascade implies a downward movement — waterfalls cascade, sunlight could cascade through the trees to the forest floor.

But Voigt is more creative than that:

The horse whippets, galloping along beneath them, strain in the melting light that beamed from cascading walls to glistening dome dwellings.”

and

“The horse whippets cascaded to a trot…”

Emphasis and ellipse added.

This first sentence seems to imply that the “melting light” really is melting the walls, which are, apparently, now falling down. I’m just not sure how else to take “cascading” as an adjective.

And I simply have no idea how anything can cascade to a trot. If the horses (again, Voigt is overly cleaver in naming things) were galloping I suppose they could cascade, i.e. slow, to a trot. However, earlier in that paragraph he tells us that the “horse whippets were slowing now.” This means that they increased speed, which goes against any connotation of cascade that I know.

Voigt has a similar problem with the word “glisten”. Everything seems to glisten in the novel — wet things, dry things, dark things, light things. There are simply too many misuses of the word in the first chapter and a half for me to go into them all. You’ll just have to trust me.

Welcome to my new Monday installment focusing on really bad writing.

Confession: I haven’t read the entire novel. I don’t know how one could and remain sane. Random sampling of pages is really enough to drive one quite mad. Heck, the “press release” is enough.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the opening line:

There was a chill in the air, which might have seemed natural if this were any normal world, but seeing as it isn’t, it’s not.

Still with me? Good. How about some more gems from that first paragraph:

You be your bottom delco not a single Plebar could remember when the trading of that precious metal became such an important part of their lives. Almost overnight the golden treasures became an institution. [...] Within those glowing flecks you could loose yourself – a delco for you thoughts, as the saying goes.

Wow, two golden chestnuts in one paragraph. This also points to one of the biggest problems with this novel: making up names for things. This is actually one of the toughest things about writing fantasy/science fiction. Authors want to make it “different” from the world we know, but go to silly lengths to accomplish it. For example, if a “delco” is gold, why not just call it gold? Later in the novel, Voigt introduces the Zigfrieds which are “furry cat-like creatures.” (I’m guessing that they’re white.)

One thing you didn’t get from this little introduction to the novel is Voigt’s truly unique us of punctuation, especially the ellipse. Used properly, an ellipse is three dots (…) or, if ending a sentence, a full stop plus three dots (. …). Voigt approaches the ellipse in a much more free-formed way, using anything from three to seven periods with random spacing. He also tosses them in at seemingly random intervals. Most often, from what I gather, he interjects them as a type of pause, which would be an acceptable use.

I will include more stellar moments in future installments of Monday’s Worst Writing — just wait until we get to the closing line. Until then.

Copy corrected Sept. 6, 2005

I’ve been working on it for a couple of hours now. I had some writers block. I had that opening line and an image for a later scene, but no idea of how to get from one to the other. I finally got started and have made some progress, but now I’ve got a quandary as to how I want to handle her particular gift. Something will work out.