March Monthly Post

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is the March community post for allbingo. What were your bingo activities during February? What are your plans for March?

For February we had:
Valentines Bingo hosted by ysabetwordsmith
Celebrate love in all its forms.

For March we will have:
Food Fest Bingo by fadedwings 
Celebrate all things food, beverage, and cooking related.
Posting will be March 1-31.

Comments

Re: Plans

[ysabetwordsmith]

Most modern novels are bloated. The typical range is now somewhere around 70,000-120,000 words. I go by the Nebula definition that the minimum size for a novel is at least 40,000 words. So the size has doubled or tripled, and in my observation, you're not getting 2-3 times the story, it's just padding in most of them. Older stories were tighter.

If people want to show a wider range of what's going on, it's more effective to break that up. Tell it from different characters' viewpoints in different stories. Don't try to cram it all together.

Re: Plans

[dialecticdreamer]

Amen to that! One of the things that I hated about the last two HP books is that they had chapters of nothing but useless side tracks that any intelligent reader IMMEDIATELY knew were irrelevant or meant to seem like red herrings. But, one of the decisions made when JKR tried to "age the series with the readers" is that each book got longer, when what it needed was much better editing, especially after #4.

But look at how much money she made and it's obvious why other publishers are copying the pattern. (Mortal Instruments series, Umbrella Academy, others.)

Re: Plans

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Amen to that! One of the things that I hated about the last two HP books is that they had chapters of nothing but useless side tracks that any intelligent reader IMMEDIATELY knew were irrelevant or meant to seem like red herrings. <<

I didn't even get that far. I think I lost interest somewhere in book 3 or 4. The first book was brilliant, an obvious classic, but after the refoulement at the end of it I concluded that the whole of Rowling-Britain ought to be flushed down the loo, so that made it a lot harder to enjoy anything. When the characters aren't likable, the story almost never is. Though I confess that I watched Dark Matter for its sheer brutal honesty about how throwing people together and calling them a "team" when they're not is going to cause a gigantic clusterfuck.

>> But, one of the decisions made when JKR tried to "age the series with the readers" is that each book got longer, when what it needed was much better editing, especially after #4.<<

She didn't really age the series. With a few extremely limited exceptions like the introduction of dating, the characters don't move through a chronological progression of increasingly complex life challenges. It's the same challenges over and over again, which makes them basically pointless. Voldemort was right there in Book 1. Nobody put any real thought or work into what they were going to do after Hogwarts, beyond lip service and vague daydreams. They didn't have time; the mayhem took up all the energy they should have been putting into adolescence. In this regard, fanfic has handled those issues much better.

But I will agree it needed much better editing. Almost everything does nowadays. They fired most of the proofreaders and the editors who curated lines. Now publishers are putting out mostly the same crap, and if you want anything good, you have to hunt through mountains of fanfic or crowdfunding, which means shucking a lot of oysters to find a few pearls. :/

Re: Plans

[dialecticdreamer]

So much fanfic is abandoned partway through that it's hard to commit to the first screen, even.

Re: Plans

[ysabetwordsmith]

AO3 accounts for that by telling you whether a work is finished or unfinished. The functional dingbats form a 2x2 square to the left of each work. Look in the lower right corner. If you see a checkmark on green then the work is complete; if you see a no-sign on red then it is incomplete.