Exchange of Realities

Welcome back to the dissection of the two pages of Silk and Steel scanned by vandonovan of LiveJournal. (Who apparently decided to read the whole book; one must salute that kind of bravery.) Last time, you got a mere taste of the horror; this time, we’re getting into the really painful stuff. King Spikenard is still watching this Bronwyn person stand naked; I would guess that the only reason she isn’t freezing right now is that the intensity of his regard as demonstrated by these two pages of loving description could probably boil water on its own.

“Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon.” Really. And you expect us to know how the moon smells. If we had the kind of budget that would let us find out, we’d be buying better books than this. That’s not even getting into the fact that the scent probably wouldn’t change by phase. Nice try. “The scent of fresh snow.” Possible. But at the same time?

“Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow.” They chirped too loudly, spent most of the time shivering, and flew away when I tried to get a good look at them. “They were the birds’ shadows; they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons.” Let me interrupt this snarkfest to bring you a short lesson. A metaphor is a comparison of two unlike objects without using like or as. Just two. It is not a comparison of one object with six different objects that have next to nothing in common. And it has to make sense. Eyes like mirrors makes sense, I’ll admit, but it’s cliché. Dark birds in fresh snow I can see. Legends on old charts—they were illegible, washed out and worn with age? Antique armor: They required a lot of maintenance, rusted easily, and took half an hour to put on? The tears of dragons—is that anything like crocodile tears?

“Her brows were a raptor’s sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of scythes.” Do I need to say anything further? “Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory.” I’ll forgive this one. Once. “Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips.” The least nonsensical picture I’m getting out of this is her running around with her hand in her mouth, biting down on her wrist and trying to stifle her gag reflex. Or maybe she misunderstood the point of dentures and was using them as jewelry? Perhaps, realizing she needed to impress someone with a bracelet of teeth, she searched for such trophies, but the only ones she could find were her own, and when she didn’t need the bracelet the best place to keep it was in her mouth? (The rattling is obnoxious, but at least you know it’s there, right? And it explains why she hasn’t said anything about this oglefest yet.)

“Her tongue was amber.” That can’t be healthy. “Her tongue was a ferret, an anemone, a fox caught in the teeth of a tiger.” Leaving aside Shizuyo’s indignation at being compared to a Mary Sue’s tongue, or the fact that it’s unspecified whether we’re talking about anemone-the-sea-creature or anemone-the-flower, none of these make sense, they definitely don’t work at the same time, and two of them make me wonder if she’s going to have to take off her “bracelet” to cough up a hairball.

“Her shoulders were clay in the potter’s kiln. Her shoulders were fieldstones; they were the white, square stones of which walls are made. They were windows covered with steam. They were porcelain. They were opal and moonstone.” At least they’re all white… except the first, which might be red. Or brown. And in that second sentence, do you get the feeling you’re getting talked down to? The last thing we need right now is condescension. “Her neck was the foam that curls from the prow of a ship, it was a sheaf of alfalfa or barley, it was the lonely dance of the pearl-grey shark.” In other words, it lasts about five minutes, rustles in the wind, and it’ll kill you in a frenzy if you bleed near it. Stay away from your manuscript!

“Her legs were quills. They were bundles of wicker, they were candelabra; the muscles were summer lightning, that flickered like a passing thought; they were captured eels or a cable on a windless.” ….Too easy. “Her thighs were geese, pythons, schooners.” Does this sound like one of those riverbank problems to you? You can’t leave the python on the same side as the goose because it’ll eat it, and the schooner will crush the python. Why the goose can’t just fly across the river I hesitate to guess—but I digress. “They were cypress or banyan; her thighs were a forge, they were shears; her thighs were sandstone, they were the sandstone buttresses of a cathedral, they were silk or cobwebs.” Sing it with me: one of these thighs is different; one of these thighs does not belong….

“Her calves were sweet with the sap of elders, her feet were bleached bone, her feet were driftwood. Her feet were springs, marmosets or locusts; her toes were snails, they were snails with shells of tears.” I’m not sure having feet compared to hard, dead substances is really that complimentary, but if he says so. The broken parallelism, with one calf-metaphor and two feet-metaphors doesn’t quite work. It’s like a game of Set; either they should all match, or they should all be different. Now… springs, marmosets or locusts. This ‘or’ thing is problematic; can even the narrator, who presumably knows this stuff, not make up his mind? (Wait a minute, this is the guy who has ferrets, amber, anemones and foxes in tigers’ mouths at the same time. It is too much to hope.) And they don’t work, much though I love the image of her feet descending in a buzzing swarm and laying waste to every piece of green material within reach. And snails… what, do her toes suddenly have little antennae? Why tears? What are we doing here?

Another thing to note, just in general, is this sentence structure. Her x was y, z, and q. They were alpha and beta, they were… there’s a little concept writers learn called “Not beginning too many sentences in a row with the same word.” Now, according to my scorecard, in these three paragraphs alone, we have fourteen sentences that begin with “Her”, seven sentences that begin with “They”, and one single solitary “The” that begins a sentence fragment, and with the exception of the poor lonely “the”, all of them have identical sentence structures. For someone with such an inventive vocabulary, you wouldn’t think that alternation would be too big a stretch, now, would you?

For the more visually oriented, I present Exhibit B: a video demonstration of the images conjured up by the last two posts’ worth of quoted text, put together by Kayay on livejournal. It is a thing of beauty, that truly encompasses the wtf that is this piece.

Will probably have more tomorrow.