LolliAdverbs

Word to that Page of Cups.

Also... Romances that have no bearing on the plot and are pointless and unbelievable. Those always bring me out of a story.

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Modify yourself.

RebelGoddess

I don't know if these have been mentioned, but if they are I think they're worth mentioning again, LOL.

1. Many grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes.

So often a publisher is trying to rush out a book and the editing suffers. I hate that SO much. Unless it's a book I'm dying to read I drop it right away.

2. Cliches on every page.

It is utterly annoying when a writer uses cliches all the time. After so many "her heart shattered like a mirror" or "It was a dark and stormy night"s my brain starts to hurt.

Racheal

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PageOfCups

Like The Hermione/Ron that got rushed through int the last couple of Harry Potter books that was there one page and not there the next. I hate it when authors do that.

Jocelyn

I recently read Prey by Michael Crichton. There was a scene in which 4 or 5 characters were trapped in a shed and a swarm of intelligent micro-organisms were closing in on them. It was very tense and it was clear that not everyone might make it out alive. In order to confuse the swarm, they all had to move in unison as a group. Then, Mr. Crichton, referring to one of the main characters, wrote "Anne would say later that we looked like we were doing a crazy dance." (I'm paraphrasing.) That pissed me off, because that told me immediately that Anne was definitely going to survive, so my tension and concern for her was now eliminated. What was the payoff for such an inocuous sentence that tipped his hand? Grrrrrr.

Remedy

Jocelyn, I completely agree with you. I've seen that happen a few times, and it's so unfortunate. I actually saw one book start out with the main character dying; I couldn't care about the rest of the book, because I knew he wasn't going to die for another two hundred pages or so. His adventures became pointless for me.

I have a rather long list of things that annoy me, but I'll try to just post the most obvious ones.

1.) Perfect characters. They're brilliant, beautiful, have a wonderful family, do wonderful work on their career, never manage to die even if faced with situations where they bloody well should.

2.) Repetitive plot lines. It might be good for one book, but if it gets to the point where I can predict everything that will happen in one author's books before I'm done with the first page, it's a problem. One series in particular did this, and it was such a let down; there was so much potential, but she just kept using the same plot with different character names.

3.) Ending questions with periods. "Why would she do that." I've seen that so many times, and I still don't get it; that's a question. It requires a question mark, yes?

4.) Typos with quotation marks. I realize it's just a simple error, but it always catches me, and I stay snagged on it for awhile. The end of a quote may not have one (which seems to be the most common), or the beginning might not, but either way, it really distracts me.

5.) Inconsistencies. That's a fairly obvious one.

6.) Saying something absolutely can't happen, and then it happens. I read one book where the whole thing was about this female character who couldn't have a baby. She just couldn't (medical reasons). Then, miraculously, she falls in love with a male character, and she gets pregnant just by having sex (which she finds out at the very end)! It made the entire book a waste.

papertears

Avoid Victor Hugo...or read the abridged versions.

buyjupiter03

When a writer doesn't edit well. For example: "Uncel was a hairless homopod, a mixture of mammalian and insecoid features with a small head, bulbous eyes, and no bodily hair." (Timeweb, Brian Herbert).

That was the second instance of that description in the first hundred pages. The first time I set it aside for a week. Now I've set it aside again, because it really irked me. It's not all that great of a story anywho (so far) and the characters are a bit flat.

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papertears

I really get annoyed when I buy a good book, get home start reading it, get really into it only to find out that pages 317-456 are just missing. I'm left hanging because some machine fekked up.

I might have missed it in this thread, but it really got my panties in a wad when JKR released that statement about Dumbledore being homosexual after she'd completed that part of the story. It doesn't matter to me that she's a best selling author. That is the kind of thing that you let your readers figure out--and if they don't, well ignorance is bliss for them. In her case, perhaps she should have alluded to it better if she felt so insecure about it being obvious enough to make a statement so long after. By the way, it has nothing to do with the homosexuality, she could have made the statement about basically anything and it would have pissed me off the same way.

Finally, I really hate it when one of my favorite authors sells out. This happened recently with a sci-fi author who had a YA book from back in the early 90s that was made into a movie with at least one attractive actor. Now instead of continuing the original series, he's started a new series based off the movie version of his book that was nothing like his original book. He had a great sci-fi story going, and now he's writing a series based off a movie that wasn't a huge hit. He even admits he's not doing it for the money. I don't get it. Out of respect for how much I liked the first novel and its sequel I won't use any names, but bummer.

slayerofangels

I hate when I can predict most of what's going to happen by page twenty.

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For Sale: One soul. Mint condition, never been used.

"In another life i'd be drenched in sweat with you but it's this life darlin', and in this life we make do." ~The Guillemots

PageOfCups

*cough*Harry Potter 6*cough*

slayerofangels

Or book one of the swan's war trilogy...

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For Sale: One soul. Mint condition, never been used.

"In another life i'd be drenched in sweat with you but it's this life darlin', and in this life we make do." ~The Guillemots

Remedy

You didn't even have to get to page twenty for that one...

PageOfCups

True. It always amazes me when someone says they had no clue what was going to happen in that book.

seigfried007

Windiness and purple poetry are commonly found peeves of mine. "Windiness" is Stephen King's 400 pages of nothing and 20 pages of action at the very end. It's very common in fantasy (which is one fo the many reasons I don't read much).

"Purple" I'm using to describe more of the silly "this is so lovely" stuff. It's all the scenery (mostly visual only descriptions and typically very little smell, touch, etc). It's what generally happens in fantasy when anything lovely is found--pages of gag-a-licious prettiness.

Anytime an author has an obsession with a specific type of character and it's obvious while reading that he wants to be who/what he's writing. I'm thinking of R.A. Salvatore when I write this but I know there's lots of other authors at least as guilty of this nasty.

Most of my pet peeves are found in Salvatore's A Demon Awakens (I discovered new ones while reading this piece), which I read because a friend asked me to with the ever-present promise that it was "just the greatest work of fantasy ever". I hate it. It has plot puppets galore, a craptastic romance (who has sex in the snow?), a hero I would have loved to flay alive (and an even-more-unsympathetic love interest I wanted to kill with skinny balloons), more plot puppets, pointless bad guys who couldn't think for themselves if their meager lives depended on it (and it's proved because their lives depended on it)... It's almost everything I hate in fantasy.

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PageOfCups

Polar bears?