veralfar:

Huh.  I do not remember this part at all (which shows how impressed I was, huh?), but this criticism seems a mite insensitive and ignorant.  I have genuinely been upset enough to be temporarily unaware of my body.  This condition is far from strange or uncommon.  Psychosis induced by stress really does happen.  Loss of self-awareness can be a simple blackout, which is what I suspect has happened to me on a couple occasions.  Considering that one of my parents abused me to an extent at which I ran outside to cry and vomit on more than one occasion, it interests me that I have not lost awareness more than a couple times.

Some pain is simply of a quality which some minds cannot handle.  It is deeply personal.

I’m not trying to disparage your experiences. I’m not saying that a blackout like Bella’s is impossible but Meyer had done poorly in executing it and making it believable.

How to explain?

Put it this way: If you were watching this scene in a movie, you’ll see Bella’s character going through the motions of shaking, vibrating, trembling, being all hysterical. You won’t be able to read her actual thoughts (not literally) but you’ll be able to ascertain based on what you see that her mind’s going to pieces and that this is a terrible, terrible moment for the character.

Now in prose, all voices have limitations. The first person voice’s limitation is that it is looking at the scene from the character’s point-of-view. Think about that for a second. If the character is going through such stress and trauma that she didn’t realize she was trembling and shaking and all that good stuff, then how come she was still aware of what the other characters were saying?

You can argue that, well, the narrator has to tell the reader what’s going on, otherwise how will they know what’s happening? But that is precisely the point of Reasoning with Vampires. It’s either Meyer goes all out with her “I didn’t realize I was shaking” schtick and ignore everything else surrounding her character OR try to have a reasonable narrator who reports everything INCLUDING her hysterics and not make them sound so… uhm, ridiculous.

This has been a recurring theme on Reasoning with Vampires. Meyer seems to be selective in what her narrator can or cannot perceive.

(via miss-hatter)

Uh-oh.

Seems to me like it’s the dreaded editor’s curse. And she’s got it.

When you edit for a living or—in this lovely, brilliant lady’s case—for fun it’s almost impossible to turn off your inner editor. Everything you read—even signage—gets scrutinized and over analyzed. When I edited for a living about two years back I couldn’t read anything just for the sheer pleasure of it. It made reading a chore. And forget writing. I finish one sentence and look back at it and rewrite it ten times before I could let it go. This is fine, I guess, if you edit for a living. But writers, especially on the first draft, should not edit. They should just write.

It took thousands of starts and restarts before I shook the editor’s curse off. But even so, I get that nagging feeling that I should reread my sentences. 

Writers beware of this curse: too much editing and you stop being a writer. First thing’s first. Breakup with your inner editor. You write. And you finish what you’re writing. Then you make up with your inner editor. Then the make-up sex. 

Sorry. That last sentence seems awkward and corny. But I won’t edit it out. The writer has to win some times.

(Source: reasoningwithvampires)

Chapter 1 Page 2 - Art by Adji Garcia

Chapter 1 Page 1 - Art by Adji Garcia

A WTF! moment. Stephen Padilla is on his way.

Sorry. Still no comics. We’ll get there soon enough. I just couldn’t stop myself posting this though. I’ve been waiting for this movie TOO LONG!