Bad Bad Words

Sometimes words are just not my friends.

Today I wrote this sentence:

"They were evil, wrapped in the candy coated shell of those purporting to be human but were in fact, carrion inside, more blackly corrupt than any politician."

Who writes such crap? Oh, I guess I do. Candy coated? Puh-leeez. Blackly corrupt? I should be hit with a copy of Strunk and White.

I was going to delete but then I thought - that's 27 words toward today's count, I'll have to highlight that for revision later.

Things got a little better after that - but I still wrestled with them today.

What bad, bad words did you write today? Feel free to post and add as the month goes on. Maybe the ML's will pick a winner for the worst sentence at the end of the month....

Things were moving along nicely until I got to the end of this little number:

Come in, Dr. Swansong! the jovial head engineer of biosystems invited Teragus as they passed around a jug of vintage Cabaret Sauvignon. It was the aroma of Sonoma ...

What am I--writing bad, bad, poetry? Arggh. I could head on over to my on-line thesaurus, but I have a word count goal to make ... maybe exposing this horror to my Naperwrimo buddies will exorcise this demon released by the minions of literary abandon --grrr.

...Cabaret? You mean Cabernet? ;) That's about on par with the time I spent five minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with "intoxifying." XD

Quote:Hed heard all about omens of death, but this was the first time he had ever encouthered one that was so clear and unmistakeable.

Yep, you read that right: encouthered. XD

Yeah, that!
The part of the brain that writes doesn't seem connected to the part that spells. ;)

I realized at one point that I was detailing a conference call. Like I would for a meeting recap. And that was absolute dreck. And that's when I had a huge storming fight with my novel and we broke up for a day.

But like Taylor Swift, I managed to getting back together with it. So today, we're guarded, cautionary buddies. More like tentative friends. But fool me once, novel...shame on you. Fool me twice...?

We had word war after word war at the library today. I wrote approximately five times as many bad sentences as usual. Will I delete them? Not until December.

Sorry I missed it!

I'm afraid when I delete my bad sentences, all I'll be left with is a 3k short story. There's a Journey anthology for ya - "What's Left After NaNo Revisions". I nominate Cee-Bee to edit!

Your Taylor Swift reference was beautiful and much appreciated.

I've done some bad writing, but nothing truly HORRIFYING yet... although there's one line of dialogue that, AS I wrote it, I thought, "SERIOUSLY? I'm putting THIS in a novel for kids and young adults? Yeah, like THAT'S gonna get published. I'll have to cut--NO! NO CUTTING!" So I made a mental note to replace the last few words with ellipses and started the next paragraph with "Troy didn't hear the rest of the sentence." All better!

I can't remember what the line was about now, but I noticed a line two days ago that had the word just in it three times.
Yuck.

I go through it in December and replace all occurrences of just with nothing. Because it's just not needed 95% of the time.
But for now, I just leave it.
:)

Bad Bad Steve!

Well now, you are just too silly. Really. Honestly.

At this point I have one entire scene that if not cut completely after NaNo, will be severely shortened. It's just awful -- but I'm not going to subject you to it. It's bad enough that I know it's there and see it taunting me every time I open up my writing.

Adverbs. Fancy dialogue tags. All of last year Ive worked to eliminate them from my writing. And they're baaaaccck...
It feels so good! A few of my worst offenses:

We should swim, she suggests.
Too many sharks, I retort.

Or
Shes not my concubine, Teragus denied hotly.

Or
You might try to explain what it is that they are looking at, Lyra interjected.

Or
It does, Teragus said reluctantly. I can show you. It activates a transport.

Or
Doesnt look like much, Teragus commented.

I love my dialogue tags, and this is first draft, so they stay. Take that, Inner Critic!

Larkk wrote:

You might try to explain what it is that they are looking at, Lyra interjected.

You didn't tell me you were writing a book about middle management? :)

KatherineWriting wrote:

Larkk wrote:

You might try to explain what it is that they are looking at, Lyra interjected.

You didn't tell me you were writing a book about middle management? :)

It needs more corporate jargon if that's the case! They need to touch base and have a dialogue with one another, because at the end of the day if we don't all have our ducks in a row, we're just not thinking outside of the box.

(please. no corporate jargon. it makes the kittens cry.)

Sapphire wrote:
(please. no corporate jargon. it makes the kittens cry.)

The kittens cry at a snap of the fingers. The kittens need to toughen up.
Unless the tears are really from laughing too much.
Then it's all right.

I wrote this:

Quote:"I can always rent a space for him," Rebecca told him. "With my military discount it's actually not that expensive. Even if it was, it's not like I'm using the money, anyway."

And cringed at how it makes my character sound like an absolute prick.

And this is what happens when your brain's train of thought forks and then crashes together all within the span of a sentence:

Quote:Rebecca asked one of the rookers on duty about her bird and found her bird, Spirit, was presently out being exercised.