Dan Brown and general persiflage

[erastes]

Well, I finished Dan Brown's Deception Point in about 2 hours in total. This is because he is so bad - so VERY bad - that you can literally flip through the book reading only a few lines on each page, some pages missed out altogether.?~

His obsession about describing EVERYTHING is so so nauseating.

I tell you, I wish I could write as badly and be as successful.  I need to find a really shocking premise expounded by someone else and write a predictable thriller about it.

I suppose predictable is a bit unfair. After all, when the heroine is stranded on an iceburg, which then calved into the sea (the artic... where the survival rate would have been about 2 minutes) I really wouldn't expect there to be a submarine within 2 miles radius and when she started tapping SOS out with her ice pick, I wouldn't have expected anyone to hear....

The bit where I was REALLY wanted to jump up and down on the book and set it on fire was towards the end.  He set up this premise where the heroine sent some vital documents to her father's office.  He wrote nearly a whole chapter on this - how she did it, how she (oh so cleverly) tricked the Black Ops force to remove the dampening field on the area so the signal would go out - how she hoped that the machine would redial.. and every few minutes he'd remind us that she was sending it to her FATHER'S office.

Then - at the beginning of the next chapter, as the villain finds out what she's done, he walks towards her and she thinks something like: "She knew that he would know what she'd done, that she'd sent the fax. To her father's office"

It's like he thinks that the act of turning the page will have wiped our memories or something. 

The other thing is that I get no mental pictures as he writes. At all. He flipped from Washington to the Arctic (named because the Greek for bears is Arktos and there are no bears in the anarctic, which is ante-arktos or something OMG I learned something from the horrid Brown) then off to New Jersey, and back to Washington - and I never got a sense of how things looked, felt, smelled, tasted, sounded.  As a descriptive writer he absolutely sucks - he just vomits forth fact after fact and doesn't involve the reader in what's happening.

I know. I shouldn't read this crap. But I do think that reading the bad stuff is almost as educational as reading the beautiful stuff. And frankly, it's more inspirational.  When I read my peers like Lee Rowan and rwday and evremonde and dubaiyan and gehayi and so so many others I think "fuck - why do I bother?" (and that's not false modesty or fishing for compliments, erastes is having trouble getting into his stride, whereas underlucius found pretty writing much easier.) but then when I read Dan Brown or others as bad it gives me heart and determination to continue and to improve and to learn.

And the reason I read Dan Brown first from the library books I have is that I have The Gallows Thief by Cornwell next, and I'm hoping that will be a completely different experience.

I'm watching "Rambo" - I've never seen it before. Amazing how a big film like that slips past one's radar.  It's a lot better than I thought it would be. It would be improved by some gay subtext, but then again, what wouldn't?