Sexy Lamps and Other Pet Peeves
I’m in the middle of a 500-page fantasy book I wish I’d never picked up but can’t put down because my pride won’t let me (you can’t just start a book and not finish). It’s made me cranky, so here are a few of my science fiction / fantasy pet peeves. Two hundred more pages to go…
The strong female character.
No matter how strong she is, she still needs a personality. Otherwise, the novel turns into sexy-lamp-fights-monsters, especially if she’s always being saved by…
The alpha male romantic interest.
He’s a jerk, he’s good with a sword, and he’s fast becoming the male equivalent of a sexy lamp. Unless you have a special way of making this trope deeper, I would steer clear. Assholes aren’t unique—in real life or fantasy.
And she can’t fix the way he talks to her… unless she just duct tapes his mouth shut, which at a certain point the reader is sorely tempted to do.
Cyclical chapters.
The book may start off strong, but somewhere in the middle, it turns into a cycle of fight monster—get wounded—get saved, then repeat with no real progress. Wounding your character is great (for you, not them), but it can’t happen every other chapter.
Telling instead of showing.
The protagonist thinks that all that’s left of her is her rage, and the reader is starting to agree because we’ve been told, over and over, how angry she is.
Breaking physical laws.
I don’t care how much of an alpha your romantic interest is: if he’s swimming in that armor, he’s not swimming, he’s fish food.
Note, this lesson is strictly do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do. Pretty sure one and three have cropped up in my own drafts… Monsters beware my sexy lamp.