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Author Habits That Annoy You

OK, first off, you're making a BIG leap by assuming I was only talking about same sex relationships. And I don't appreciate the implication.
It's not an implication. Slash is, by definition, a relationship between same-sex characters. Or if you want to get nitpicky, between two men (separate from femslash, which is the same but between two women). You said "slash", so there's no other way to understand it, because there's no other definition for that term. If you simply mean that you don't like any pairing that wasn't seen explicitly in the show, that's another thing. But there are hundreds of novels with non-canon romances. In fact, if a novel wants to do anything significant in terms of romance, it's almost always with a non-canon character.

And the thing about subtext is precisely that is in the eye of the beholder. You may not see subtext, but it's obvious that thousand other people do. So it can never be "in direct opposition" to anything. Not in the same way as saying, for example, "Orions have red skin" or "Khan was born in the 16th century", which can be directly verified and is not open to interpretation.
 
I think I only have one pet peeve, and I'm not even sure it happens all that much anyway. It probably just happened one time decades ago and I'm still sore about it. ;)


If there are multiple new characters in the book, please do not give them all crazy hard to read/spell names that are similar to each other. I absolutely understand why they would if they're all from the same new species, but it still makes reading about them less pleasurable.

It's tricky though, because the scene where someone says, "X'theniqh-Tarfflen? ...I think I'll call you Lenny." is often awful.
 
I think I only have one pet peeve, and I'm not even sure it happens all that much anyway. It probably just happened one time decades ago and I'm still sore about it. ;)


If there are multiple new characters in the book, please do not give them all crazy hard to read/spell names that are similar to each other. I absolutely understand why they would if they're all from the same new species, but it still makes reading about them less pleasurable.

It's tricky though, because the scene where someone says, "X'theniqh-Tarfflen? ...I think I'll call you Lenny." is often awful.
Like in that one Doctor Who Episode, where she decided to call the alien just "Tim Shaw"? I mean - sure, that can be tough, but on the other hand, I remember, that I read the Star Trek "Typhon Pact" novel "Fire" and asked myself: "How on earth do I pronounce the Gorn-Names? Something like Z'shezhira?"
 
Is Chief O'Brien an alien? Was D'Artagnan an alien? Apostrophes are used in a number of Earth names. I'll never understand the perception that they're some kind of unnatural way of conveying alienness. If anything, I think they might well be more common in "alien" names, by analogy with how non-Western languages are transliterated. The glottal stop in Arabic is represented by an apostrophe (which is where Marc Okrand borrowed it from for Klingonese), and the older Wade-Giles romanization scheme for Mandarin Chinese used apostrophes heavily to differentiate variances in pronunication, e.g. between "ch'i" (qi) and "chi" (ji) or "t'ang" (tang) and "tang" (dang).

Like I said, it's really more of a minor peeve than any serious thing - I have an apostrophe in my own name, so I'm not saying it's just the appearance of apostrophes. It just sometimes feels like an overuse that just really stands out for me, particularly on the occasions I'm trying to sound them out and settle on a pronunciation, trying to figure out the emphasis.

Either way, it's just a thing that feels really noticeable in his writing over others, that kinda feels like a shorthand use as a marker of aliens that just stands out with how often it happens with him specifically. Others do it, but it gets really noticeable, something he does a lot more than others, with his writing in specific.
 
If there are multiple new characters in the book, please do not give them all crazy hard to read/spell names that are similar to each other. I absolutely understand why they would if they're all from the same new species, but it still makes reading about them less pleasurable.

Honestly, this is not just an alien thing, nor even just a science fiction thing. Speaking as an editor, I remain amazed that so many authors (even ones who should know better) think nothing of putting Jim, John, Jack, and James in the same book. Or Linda, Lisa, Lydia, and Leena. :)
 
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Honestly, this is not just an alien thing, or even a science fiction thing. Speaking as an editor, I remain amazed that so many authors (even ones who should know better) think nothing of putting Jim, John, Jack, and James in the same book. Or Linda, Lisa, and Leena. :)

In the spec novel manuscript I've been working on lately, I've had to change a number of characters' first names because I realized I'd already used them for other characters in the same book or series, or because they were too similar phonetically (e.g. Melanie and Melissa). I've been startled to realize how many names I've been reusing without realizing it.

I felt like apologizing to the team at GraphicAudio when I realized that my Tangent Knights audio trilogy had characters named Erika, Enid, Echo, and Eiji. At least I never had more than two of them in the same scene, I think.
 
I preserved my access to ebooks I legally bought, as I have a legal right to do

I get it, really. But it is verboten to discuss bypassing DRM here, so please don't do it. You could have asked your question about the ebook availability without bringing up that part at all.

No need to reply to this post, but just please refrain from bringing up that topic anymore. Thank you.
 
- There's one author whose ultra-pretentious comments about their work in the book Voyages of the Imagination persuaded me that I never want to ever read anything they wrote. Probably not the effect they were going for. :lol:
I did not expect Jeff Ayers to quote me at such length. He emailed me, I sat down on a Sunday evening with a beer, and wrote a response. I thought I was giving some background color, and when I saw how much he quoted I cringed. I'm not criticizing Jeff here, to be clear. He used what I gave him. I'm just a wordy bastard. Sorry!
 
I did not expect Jeff Ayers to quote me at such length. He emailed me, I sat down on a Sunday evening with a beer, and wrote a response. I thought I was giving some background color, and when I saw how much he quoted I cringed. I'm not criticizing Jeff here, to be clear. He used what I gave him. I'm just a wordy bastard. Sorry!
That's a touching story you wrote and I'm glad you gave it the background color it deserved, frankly.
 
I've mentioned this before, but the absolute one thing that drives me nuts and takes me completely out of the story is when authors feel the need to use the names of real-life Star Trek production personnel for their characters. This was most evident in the Kevin Ryan "Errand of Fury" trilogy. Besides the horrendous amount of typos, bad grammar and other mistakes that any editor worth his salt should have easily found, the trilogy was simply littered with characters named Okuda, Sternbach, Drexler, Roddenberry, Probert, Berman, Braga, etc. etc. etc.

Hey, Star Trek novel authors: Here's why it's such a stupid idea to do this; and hey, Star Trek novel editors: Here's why you should flag this shit every time you come across it. Authors think this is being all cutesy and easter-eggy, but what they're actually doing is shoehorning the image of that real-life person in the reader's head, no matter how unrealistic that real-life person should be representing that character. The characters' attributes, in my opinion, should be left to the readers' imaginations rather than just a misguided attempt to be clever.
 
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  • Too much focus on their uninteresting OC race. (Different if the alien is actually creative and unique.)
  • Major continuity errors
  • Bland OC crewmembers. When following the nine regulars through a book, we don't need another average American human crewmember taking page-time from more interesting characters.
I'll add more as I think of them.
 
I think in all my time reading a relatively limited amount of Trek fiction (more starting with the DS9 relaunch than prior to it), my only observations of this nature would be:
1) Peter David's "Before Dishonor" seemed to be an instance of a writer pushing things so far over the top that it just became sillly. I'd noticed this tendency towards "extreme writing" in some of his in other works, but he felt at his most unrestrained here. Though I should note I was also fine with the Janeway story.
2) There was a Titan novel that was told in what registered as an unusual style to me, and I struggled with that.
3) There was a TOS novel I read a long time ago that I thought just got weird and not in a good way. "The Final Nexus", perhaps? Something like that?
 
I've mentioned this before, but the absolute one thing that drives me nuts and takes me completely out of the story is when authors feel the need to use the names of real-life Star Trek production personnel for their characters.
Ugh. I have not encountered that (at least not knowingly) in ST but I have encountered analogous things in non-ST books and have fairly quickly put the book down. The author might as well write at the top of the page "Note: this is just a job for me." Although that might well be true, and I wouldn't fault a writer for *feeling* that way, I don't want it waved in my face. It pretty much destroys all suspension of disbelief.
 
I think in all my time reading a relatively limited amount of Trek fiction (more starting with the DS9 relaunch than prior to it), my only observations of this nature would be:
1) Peter David's "Before Dishonor" seemed to be an instance of a writer pushing things so far over the top that it just became sillly. I'd noticed this tendency towards "extreme writing" in some of his in other works, but he felt at his most unrestrained here. Though I should note I was also fine with the Janeway story.
2) There was a Titan novel that was told in what registered as an unusual style to me, and I struggled with that.
3) There was a TOS novel I read a long time ago that I thought just got weird and not in a good way. "The Final Nexus", perhaps? Something like that?
Eh, the only two situations, in which I thought Mr. David "overdid" it, was,
1) when he let Seven call the two starfleet-guards "Idiots", because that would be OOC.
2) the whole "Janeway doesn't listen to Seven"-plot, which made er be assimilated in the first place - plus: I thought, that the whole assimilation-process was too... easy, I think. At the end of the process, Janeway feels, like she's gotten "home". Meh.
The rest is completely fine.
I have nothing against Grim, I like the discussion if Pluto is a planet or not... it's quite the cool read.
 
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