Random quibbles about things I’ve read lately:
1. While I understand that the Glock company capitalizes the name of its pistols, seeing GLOCK in books makes me roll my eyes. It’s not an acronym — the pistol was created by Gaston Glock — just a marketing maneuver. Eh. *shrug*
2. I’m in the middle of reading a self-published gay romance set in the MLB. The author seems to have done a fair amount of research about baseball, but the team randomly switches between playing in NL and AL venues, which makes me wonder how much more research should have been done. (Gay romance rather than m/m because the book has no sex on the page.)
3. I’m still thinking about Nice. In the end, the similarity to Hello Kitty Must Die is no more than surface. In the end, I think I liked HKMD better. The alternating narration was interesting, but in the end Grace’s movement outside of standard gendered roles is aborted and she’s wedged back into the traditional HEA box, even if it is with an assassin. With her rage channeled into more socially acceptable venues presumably, guided by the better trained and better knowing Sam, married and planning a move to suburbia and two children.
4. Reading about hedge funds is so painfully dull. I’m rewarding myself: for every 10 pages of hedge fund reading, I get 10 pages of fiction. Now to figure out which new fiction to try.
ETA: 5. On P2P fiction, for one writer in particular, I have read several reviews written by readers who don’t know the books are P2P fan fiction. The general gist of their reviews is that the author did a lot of research (maybe) and established the characters firmly (uh, no, those are the characters from canon, the author didn’t build/create them) and that the plot worked but the romance got short shrift (well, that’s because the entire relationship’s backstory is understood by fandom, so the author never *had* to build a relationship for outside readers). I haven’t commented on the reviews; after doing so once, I realized that most new readers don’t want to know and resent you ruining their reading in retrospect.
#5: Ok, I’m massively curious on this one.
You are such a tease sometimes!
I have to wonder, when fanfic writers turn to writing original fiction, do they have a tendency to info dump to get all that dreary stuff that people should just know without having to be told out of the way?
I’ll email the author’s name. I didn’t name names because I don’t want to promote the books.
Re: #2 – Normally this kind of thing annoys me no end – but did the author write it in such a way that you could explain it away as Interleague play?
My favorite example of a sports romance gaffe was when an author had her Miami Dolphins player beating a NFC team to SEND THEM TO THE SUPERBOWL! Uh, no. Miami in AFC. Miami no see NFC team in the playoffs UNTIL the Superbowl. ::headdesk::
If I squint hard, I can pretend it’s interleague play. The team seems to be AL based on repeat play against Baltimore, although the DH is never mentioned. On different road trips or series, they (an expansion team) play the Mets, Marlins, and Diamondbacks.
That football mistake is just bad.
I’ve gotten to the end of the book, and now I just want to scratch my head. A rookie starter is called from the dugout to pitch in the bottom of the 9th inning with two batters out. With no warm up. And he fakes out the runners to catch the lead runner at home. It makes for drama but is so WRONG.
I just……
No.
Just no.
Oh, there’s more but I won’t horrify you with the details. The research just was abandoned, I guess, sacrificed for drama in the end. Shame.
The book could have used professional editing, I think. Or crit partners or betas who actually watch baseball regularly.
#1 – Marketers can use gimmicky capitalisation and punctuation all they want, I take pleasure in not indulging them. And more and more, neither will journalists (see: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/02/exclamation-mark )
Thanks for the link! (I couldn’t resist the !