Bad writing, bad editing

[stacer]

So I'm reading a Forgotten Realms novel to review, and it's just so badly written. And edited. Seems that the guy that wrote this novel, Ed Greenwood, is the guy the came up with Forgotten Realms? Correct me if I'm wrong. So there might be a bit of celebrity-writer editing going on here, the hands-off approach.

But it's so bad it's practically comical. Take the following paragraph, for example. This could have won the recent "It was a dark and stormy night" award (Bram somebody? forget who the guy is they named it after).

It came down like a -- well, like a toppling suit of armor that had been badly wired together and home to nests of mice for some seasons and therefore free to come apart and missily spew its contents in a bouncing, clanging chaos that carried the franticallly cursing merchant down the last flight of stairs, windmilling his arms for balance and frightening the sleepy door-steward (who'd snatched down a vicious battleaxe to defend himself and found it so heavy that he'd almost fallen over) hastily aside.

Yes, that paragraph was all one sentence.

[Spriggan]

Ya, Ed Greenwood is a game designer.  Don't know if he designed the Forgotten realms setting himself, but he's been around for a while.  You're probaly right on the hands off approach.

[fuzzyoctopus]

Good grief....

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Oi.  

[Fellfrosch]

The RPG segment I had to edit for their employment test was, while not quite that bad, still abysmally bad. It made me wonder if I even wanted to work in a place where I had to spend my time reading ill-conceived fanboy tripe all day, but then I went to my current job the next morning and remembered that yes, in comparison, I did.

[stacer]

Perhaps it wouldn't be such tripe if you worked for them. You might, at least, be able to split such garbage into two sentences.

[42]

I'm stunned. Makes me wonder if the book was edited by the author.

Ed Greenwood does have celebrity statis in the RPG world.

[Master Xaio]

I'm surprised.  In general, Ed Greenwood is a good author, and I've enjoyed all of his books that I've read.  Mebbe it was his off season...

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

maybe he just doesnt' care anymore.

[Entsuropi]

Maybe he just wanted to see whether Wizards would dare refuse him, no matter what drivel he wrote.

[EUOL]

Maybe they just rushed the edit.  You'd be surprised the things that us stupid authors sometimes write when it's early in the morning and we're not thinking very much about our grammar.

[stacer]

My feeling as I go through the book is that this was a first-draft submission--that the author never went back and reworked things that weren't working. Even if it wasn't edited all that carefully, the writing is just so *bad*, and the characterization leaves *so* much to be desired. I've never read any of his other books so I have nothing to compare it with except better books, and it isn't standing up to scrutiny.