Go learn yourself something

Well, the deadline for submissions on the paragraph critiques from ilona_andrews (who wrote the Kate Daniels series that started with Magic Bites) has passed, but! She's got the first few critiques of received submissions here and here.

These are truly educational, and useful for any writer who wants to know - on a prose level - why things work and don't work. She covers a lot of topics that I still struggle with, including how to work in descriptions without taking away from the action.

I am definitely bookmarking these and any paragraph critiques she does in the future, because for any writer, at any level, they're useful.

In No-Shit-Sherlock News: Pain is Painful.

A good post about how pain and trauma are not romantic, but rather boring and also painful. All you writers, listen up and take notes. Because this is important.

Good writers are going to have occasion to traumatize their characters, either on or off screen. Learning how to manage that in your writing so it doesn't breed distrust in your readers (and yes, bad portrayals of pain and trauma inevitably will break the trust of the reader) is vital.

This goes back to one of the elements of Urban Fantasy that I'm quite fed up with. Using trauma as a character flaw or quirk doesn't cut it. It rings false for me in 99% of the books I read.

I have such a hard time articulating why. I still haven't dredged up the right words to explain why it is that when I see these things on a page in front of me, I totally unplug. I can't explain what sets off the Bullshit Detector, but it's there. It's real. It affects my reading choices.

I think it amounts to a feeling of being insulted that someone expects me to believe that pain is beautiful. People who think that either have the wrong definition of beauty or the wrong definition of pain. Possibly both. And I wonder if those who say those things have experienced either.