In a blog article I posted yesterday, I mentioned a novel I had recently found in the laundry room of my apartment building. It was called Ask For It (http://www.amazon.com/Ask-For-Georgian-Sylvia-Day/dp/1469277689), and its author was Sylvia Day.
Last night, I still had the book in my room. I'd already browsed through it enough to land on a few of the steamy sex scenes, but I was curious as to whether or not it actually held together as a story. (I know, I know, curiousity killed the cat.) So I started to read it from the very beginning.
Wow! I couldn't even get past the first page, the writing was so wretchedly bad. The first character made a statement, and then just to make sure we had heard him, he said almost exactly the same thing again. Talk about a good example of why some professional writers need editors! FYI, I returned the book to the laundry room where I had found it.
Maybe "Sylvia" didn't think her readers had read it the first time. Or maybe she was in such a hurry to get to the steamy scenes in the book that she didn't bother proofreading her own writing in the non-sexual sections of the book.
I put the name Sylvia in quote marks, because it doesn't necessarily follow from the fact that that's the name on the book cover was Sylvia Day that a woman named Sylvia Day actually wrote the book.
When I was living in Chicago, I met a black man named Robert. (He never did tell me his last name.) He was a nice enough guy, and we would sometimes spend hours talking with one another. One night, he told me that he made his money partly by writing steamy popular romances aimed at women. He said that he wrote those books under a female pseudonym.
I can't say that I blamed him. I wouldn't want my real name to be publicly associated with such literary crap. (I never actually read one of his books, so maybe it was better than Ask For It. But he honestly told me that he could churn that stuff out with ease, because it was written according to a formula he had mastered. Generally speaking, fiction which is written according to a formula is rarely worthy of an award.)
Robert was an intelligent guy, but he always wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses he held together with tape, because he couldn't even afford to buy a new pair of glasses after he broke the pair he owned. When you come across a piece of literary garbage like Ask For It, remember that the person writing that book may have been a poor-as-dirt black man just trying to bring in enough money to pay the rent, and cut the poor guy some slack.
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