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Roz Gibson just happened to post this yesterday on her Livejournal. It is an excellent illustration of both the type of books that get self-published by people who are determined to become published authors no matter what anyone says, and of books that I will not review.

This may seem to contradict one review I wrote that was published recently; of "The Face in the Mirror" and "Chained Reflections" by T. R. Brown. That is because, despite his horrible spelling and sentence structure, the very furry story was surprisingly interesting and well-plotted. I felt that it was worth recommending, despite its apparent worth of only making fun of. Amazon.com's CreateSpace will publish anything (and get it listed on Amazon.com) that it is paid to.

"Sometimes I'll do this game with a friend, where I send him a list of books I'm considering reading, and he picks out which one to read first. I do try to send him a list of books I actually would read, but I usually throw in one or two off-the-wall titles that I normally wouldn't get, but I'd be willing to read if he picked them.

Well, one of the 'joke' titles I sent this last round he picked, so I dutifully tried to read it. ( A book about a killer bigfoot) This book was so bad that I did something I'd never done before-- get a refund from Amazon. What made this book so awful wasn't really the plot, which wasn't any dumber than some other books I've read, but the utter lack of grammar, punctuation and spelling. The people I correspond with who have English as a second language write like Hemingway compared to this person. I felt like I was reading something produced by a retarded dyslexic.

Some gems from the book:

Constantly spelling "pus" as "puss." No, the bigfoot does not have cats coming out of his bullet holes.

Doesn't seem to know how to use an apostrophe correctly. "He asked the God's to protect them." and "Holy crap she thought it had to be the lost hunters! Dropping the binocular's she raced to the door and down the stairs, calling out to the man."

Bizarre sentence structure: "Although Mari looked pretty tough. He wondered when the chips were down and he was pretty certain they were down as they were going to get if she was going to hold up."

and

"As they made their way up to the tower Mari unlocked the door all the while dropping her gear on the platform in preparation to raise the ladder."

And thus we find out why God created editors and proofreaders."

Fred Patten

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