*Blows off Dust*

So... migrating all my original content over here for now from Tumblr, because if Tumblr can't be trusted to host images without randomly flagging them, there's literally zero point to it.

I'll be looking into setting up a Wordpress for my sims stuff (I'm Scribal Goddess - have been forever) for the image hosting and using this as my fic archive, meaning that there will probably be some crossposting here, since certain fics are more illustrated.

I'm Quill_of_Thoth at AO3, not that that has much of a community aspect, so that's where my fanfic is safe.

Edits of Argon: A field guide to identifying and killing purple prose

 As a veteran of MANY online discussions of books – sporking, critiques, writing groups, what have you – I see a lot of people who seem to think that ‘purple prose’ refers to any time anyone uses a word that is at all descriptive or uncommon. I see the accusation leveled at technical terms, at descriptions, and at people who just happen to have a vocabulary, or who made an effort to use words that aren’t common in modern writing, but which were perfectly normal in a historical setting.

So I’ve chosen to find the most egregious example of purple prose in the internet’s collective consciousness and go through it to illustrate exactly what purple prose is: using vocabulary without actually caring what it means, specifically to take out the reader’s kneecaps.

I give you: Quill’s line edits of The Eye of Argon, by Jim Theis.

The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren[sic] land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire.

The first sentence is just a warm-up, people. Let me pick out two words that are causing confusion right away.

Climes: Think of this word as short for “climate.” Because that is the entire definition according to dictionary.com. However, it’s plural, and it’s a phrase that seems to be endemic to poetry and works written or set in the 18th and 19th century.

Racked: As spelled, this means “hung up on a rack,” like shirts at a store, but Theis means Wracked, as in “storm wracked coast.” It denotes damage and destruction that is extremely incongruous with dust, and the entire rest of the opening scene, were the weather is doing absolutely nothing.

I would honestly cut… most of these sentences and condense to the action, personally, but let’s say I want to rewrite this because I need the word count.

The weather-beaten trail wound ahead through the barren, dusty land, as it did through most of the Norgolian Empire.

I kept every detail that was accurate, and removed the phrases that sounded like a social studies report on the Norgolian empire: climate, dusty and barren, major export, sensationalism…
 

( More edits )