Annoying things: looking at an inoffensive little scene that gives an outsider’s view on your heroine and her views and has some nice description in it, and realising that the reader already knows about the heroine’s outlook on life by now and that there was a snippet of physical description of her only a couple of pages earlier, and that the scene is just slowing down the pace and needs to go, so that one of the other characters can hurry up and have a bewildering first contact encounter.
It’s probably for the best, anyway: there are enough people out there who have been burned by lyrical descriptions of heroines with all the personality of a plate of hair, and who, confronted with a description that comes down to ‘tall redhead with a long nose, pale freckled muscly legs and arms and a big backside’ would get as far as ‘tall redhead’ and give up in exasperation. 😉
In other news, I was looking at the Arvon Foundation site today (no, I’m not going on a course, a friend of mine is) and was mildly baffled by how many courses they do in ‘Starting To Write’. I suppose there must be a lot of call for them, since the Arvon Foundation know better about their own market base than I do, but I’ve never found starting to write was the problem. It’s a bit like finding out there are well-respected and oversubscribed courses out there in ‘Starting To Breathe’.
Ankaret Wells 