How to NOT Cut Adjectives

It's an oft-cited Rule of Writing that adjectives are bad, that overuse will lead to a godawful purpling of one's prose. Who needs an adjective when the right noun will do? Aren't these (along with adverbs) pretty much the most-often redundant part of speech? Cut them! we cry. Take a cut-throat razor and flense that fat from the bloated corpse of your dead and rotting prose! And this is not entirely bad advice, not by any means.

Being a thrawn cocksucker, however, and a cocksure motherfucker whose grave shall read, "Fuck that shit!" I thought I'd smack that advice upside its vapid little head with a baseball bat, dump this petty axiom of the mediocre out a top floor window and offer you a completely contrary lesson. Yeah, that's right. Today's lesson in the craft of writing is how to not cut adjectives. Let's take a random example of adjective overuse, sourced from some corner of the interwebs:

"Stepping out into the bright sunshine amidst the delicate singing of the birds, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the brave challenge that lay ahead of her."

Now if we were to prune this ruthlessly of all the adjectives, what we'd get is this:

"Stepping out into the sunshine amidst the singing of the birds, she sensed a stirring in her spirit that left her open to the excitement of the challenge that lay ahead of her."

Yeah, whatever. It's not as overwrought as the original, but it's hardly deathless prose. I say we can fix that sentence a whole lot better, and I say we can do so without lowering the adjective count by a single word. Surely it can't be done! I hear you say, There's fricking five adjectives in there! Surely some of them just gotta go!

Pfft! says I. Piece of piss.

Let's start by applying the first principle of decent prose: clarity. Is the sunshine "amidst" the birdsong? Can light be physically "amidst" sound? Does that even make sense? Don't be silly, you say. It's her that's "amidst" the sound. As she steps out? I say. Surely she's stepping out into the birdsong just as much as she's stepping out into the sunshine, entering them both at the exact same point. The birdsong isn't swirling around her such that it follows her out the fucking door. So:

"Stepping out into the bright sunshine and the delicate singing of the birds, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the brave challenge that lay ahead of her."

But, wait! Let's apply economy too! Why are we calling it "singing of the birds" when there's the perfectly good "birdsong," as I just referred to it above? So:

"Stepping out into the bright sunshine and the delicate birdsong, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the brave challenge that lay ahead of her."

Not that much better yet, eh? But, look! Now there's a logical pairing of sight and sound, a parallel emphasised by the compound construction of "sun-shine" and "bird-song," which makes it a logical balance to have the second adjective.

Still, they're both redundant. When is sunshine not bright? When is birdsong not delicate? (The cawing of crows or gulls is not song. Song is musical. If we're talking birdsong, we're talking canaries, nightingales and other such ickle tweety-birds.) To be purposeful, the adjectives here must conjure the additional import of the object in the narrative, what it is about them that makes these instances distinct. Here, it's clearly as much the affective experience of the ephemera, the degree to which and the way in which they impact on the character as she steps out into them. The right adjectives could conjure that and not be redundant:

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the brave challenge that lay ahead of her."

While we're at it though, we might as well change that "brave." A challenge isn't brave; the person that responds to it is. If they have to be brave to respond to it, that means it's formidable:

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the formidable challenge that lay ahead of her."

OK, so where were we? Well, now it's only the second half of the sentence that goes purple. With the first half tightened, we can just about accept "passionate stirring," but when we hit "mysterious excitement," we throw up a little in our mouths, right? But we don't have quite the same redundancy in that vomit-point pairing. Not all excitement involves a sense of mystery. It's only when we have a sense of mystery together with a sense of excitement that... oh, wait.

Hang on.

What we're trying to conjure here is a composite affect, right? It's an affect with two dimensions, so the writer has picked one and shaded it with the other. But is the character open to the "mysterious excitement" or to the "exciting mystery"? Do those flipped phrasings really signify anything different, I mean? Cause if we have two affects, and one is not essentially a subordinate quality of the other, if their relationship could be flipped, then we can just have her open to both, duh. I'm going to apply the principle of specificity here though, cause the reason an adjective has been slapped on "excitement" is that "excitement" is a bit generic in and of itself. Since we want something as precise as mystery to pair with it, I'm going to switch excitiment to "thrill":

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mystery and thrill of the formidable challenge that lay ahead of her."

So, now we have actually removed one adjective, by turning it back into the noun it's derived from. (Don't worry. It ain't over yet.) Still, even doing that, while I no longer gag at that point in the sentence, that "passionate stirring" remains... a bit bothersome. Again, it feels a bit redundant. If you sense a stirring in your spirit, that's obviously a matter of affect, of passion. If you're stirred, then said passion is by definition elevated, you are by definition feeling passionate. But you know what? I'm not going to cut that, because clearly the idea is to drive home just how stirred she is. In fact, I'm going to add an adjective. That's right, motherfuckers, add. Hey, we cut one, and the game here is to fix the sentence without just pruning modifiers, so to take us back up to the original total, I'm going to bring back one that got lost along the way--"brave."

I'm not just going to tack it on to a noun though. Fuck that shit. I'm going to show how the adjective need not be bound to the heteropartist orthodoxy in which it must always be paired with a noun, married to a different part of speech, subjugated, enslaved. Let our two little adjectives bond together in a same-part marriage, strike out together, proud and dauntless, passionate and brave!

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate and brave, that left her open to the mystery and thrill of the formidable challenge that lay ahead of her."

You want to cut things from this sentence? Three "X and Y" pairings in one sentence is a bit much, so let's make those adjectives snuggle even tighter, make them even more fierce, even more in-yer-face. Adjective Rights, motherfucker! Let's go for the bam! bam! effect of conjunction elision.

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate, brave, that left her open to the mystery and thrill of the formidable challenge that lay ahead of her."

Might as well prune a couple of other redundancies while we're at it. Let's bring the first pair a little closer together by dropping the second "the," and let's tighten up the last phrasing by dropping "that lay" and "of her":

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate, brave, that left her open to the mystery and thrill of the formidable challenge ahead."

Actually, fuck it, who needs the first "the"? And if it's the unknown potentials of the challenge that are getting her all excited, is it really a singular mystery, a singular thrill, or is it a fabulous, formless plethora of possibilities we're dealing with? So:

"Stepping out into glorious sunshine and tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate, brave, that left her open to the mysteries and thrills of the formidable challenge ahead."

And hey presto! We have a perfectly usable sentence that's shorter by some half dozen words, but with no fewer adjectives than we began with. Is it still a bit precious? Sure, but it's articulating a moment of rapture; what do you expect? The point is, the lyricism required to conjure the moment is not achieved simply by slapping an emotional button-pushing adjective onto every noun, painting everything: bright; delicate; passionate; mysterious; brave. (Puke.) In the original, this trowelling-on of vapid effusiveness only gives us prose that's crude, saccharine and false. But is the fault overuse of adjectives or simply misuse? The right choice of five adjectives and the right placement for them, and you can piss on the shallow piffle of bush-league gurus churning out the same trite mantras over and over again: don't overuse adjectives; don't overuse adjectives; don't overuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Yawn.

This is pedestrian bollocks:

"Stepping out into the sunshine amidst the singing of the birds, she sensed a stirring in her spirit that left her open to the excitement of the challenge that lay ahead of her."

This is actual narrative prose:

"Stepping out into glorious sunshine and tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate, brave, that left her open to the mysteries and thrills of the formidable challenge ahead."

And I tell you what... I could add a sixth adjective in there and it would still work--work better arguably. Yeah, you heard me, baby, brazen in my braggadocio. One hundred internets if you can guess what and where, answers in the comments below, prize to whoever gets closest.

Come on, motherfuckers. Show me your adjectival audacity.

Bring it on.

Fanfiction

So Diana Gabaldon kicked off a stushie with a post about her dislike for fanfiction. People got terribly irate in the comments apparently, enough that George R. R. Martin weighed in on with his take on it -- similarly opposed in principle. Unfortunately, he based part of his case on a comparison between Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft that Nick Mamatas pointed out was utterly wrong-headed. Other writers, pro and fan alike, have naturally picked up on the kerfuffle and propagated it across the interwebs.

Me, I blathered about this yonks ago, but what the fuck, let's give it another bash.

With a little qualifier that I'll come to, Gabaldon is right on all three counts, as I see it, when she says, " I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters." This doesn't mean I agree with the fanfic-haters though, simply that if you pay attention to what she's saying, it's hardly a big deal. (I'm ignoring the point-by-point argument where she addresses what comes across as something of a Straw Fanficcer, to be honest, because... yeah, whatever.)

So...

1. She can't be wrong about her own response; she's just reporting her reaction. That may not be palatable to fanficcers, but them's the breaks; some writers are just going to see any derivative work based on their creative output as... like a bad disco remix of "T.V. Eye" sung by Madonna. Deal with it. She is entitled to spew bile at the stinky turd you left on her doorstep as a present. If your writing is shit, don't expect her to be all "Gosh! For me?!" She is entitled to spew bile at the stinky fromage you left on her doorstep. If your writing is cheesy, many will like it, but her writerly stomach may turn at the gut-wrenching Gorgonzola stench of a Mary Sue. She's even entitled to spew bile at the stinky perfume you left on her doorstep. Your writing might be kinda sweet, delicately nuanced, quite lovely to many, but if it's based on hers all she's gonna smell is the stuff you've done to it that's just plain wrong, far as she's concerned. So you took a professional perfumier's scent, watered it down and chucked in a ton of vanilla extract. If it gives her the boak, that's tough titty.

2. She's not wrong that it's illegal; that's the actual law. Again, that may not be palatable to fanficcers, but again, them's the breaks. Published fanfictions are derivative works that infringe copyright legislation unless a) permission has been granted by the original writer or, assuming a US context, b) the reuse is sufficiently transformative that it counts as fair use, for values of transformative and fair use that are defined by the courts. Is there a grey area here? Not much of one. Parody is generally considered fair use, but homage is not. Fanfiction is not considered sufficiently transformative because it's basically unlicensed tie-in/spin-off fiction. Doesn't matter if you're selling the work or slapping it up on an interwebs forum. Doesn't matter if you carefully credit the original writer. Doesn't matter if you're not directly plagiarising the text but just using ideas -- characters and settings -- that "can't be copyrighted." If you're publishing a derivative work without permission, you're breaking the law. Don't fool yourself.

3. To say that she thinks it's immoral is a perfectly accurate report of her own ethical judgement. That "thinks" is contrasted with the emphasised "know" precisely to highlight the fact that this is a personal and subjective evaluation: that fanfiction is illegal is a fact; that it's immoral is her opinion. You might well disagree that opinion, but her expressing it is... well, the kinda thing writers do on their blogs. Go figure. Of course, this is where my qualifier comes in, because as far as I'm concerned she really ought to have said "unethical" rather than "immoral" for that subjective judgement, because "immoral" has a somewhat absolutist ring to it. And it's really about societal judgements rather than individual ones.

See, far as I'm concerned, mores are factual -- societal conventions of what's right and what's wrong, dicta that can be objectively verified as being part of the consensus or not part of the consensus. While the ethics of fanfic might be a matter of individual opinion, the morality of fanfic is a question of whether the culture-at-large accepts it or not. The question of whether it's "immoral" or not isn't a matter of whether it's really right or wrong, so much as it's a matter of what society's mores say about it. The reality? The culture-at-large is divided, with one community holding to mores in which fanfic is fine and dandy, one community holding to mores in which it's deeply transgressive. Outside those communities, the culture-at-large... kinda doesn't have much of an opinion on it at all.

So, OK then, how to navigate that conflict of mores? If she thinks it's unethical, and you think it's ethical, is there any way to break it apart and negotiate the minefield without everyone blowing up?

Well, first things first: to be honest, if she doesn't welcome fanfiction of her work, I'm inclined to think she can only be right about its ethical dubiety... when it comes to fanfiction of her work, that is... mostly. I mean, it's her call what is done with her fiction, including the characters and setting. The work is made public on the proviso that it remains her call (within the limits of fair use,) with the contract between the artist and audience set out in the copyright notice and the legislation it refers to. To publish an unlicensed derivative work is to breach that contract, and breaching an agreed contract like that is just plain old-fashioned bad form. That's a no-brainer, surely. I agree to do X as long as you agree not to do Y. I do X. You go ahead and do Y anyway. That makes you a prick.

Excuses can be made for ignorance, of course, (hence the "mostly") but not for willfully oblivious entitlement; that's also bad form. If you didn't realise you weren't supposed to do Y, you're not a prick. If I go all frowny and tell you, "Dude, you can't just do Y like that; it's recognised as bad form to the extent that it's written into the law," a response of "No, it's not; it's a legal grey area and you have no right to expect that of me," is kinda prickish again. The more defensive smokescreens you throw up, the more it comes across as an obstinate rejection of the writer's viewpoint, reeking of self-interest and disdain.

Put it this way: Any work of fiction is a service that's offered with terms and conditions. By default, as the law stands now, when you use any such service you're agreeing not to publish a derivative work based on it without permission, unless your reuse is sufficiently transformative. You're agreeing not to set up your own purely imitative service, unless the creator says you can. Not properly getting this because you don't understand the ins and outs of copyright, you might blithely break the agreement, set up an imitative service and, in doing so, break the law and piss off the original creator. But hey, you didn't realise, you even did it out of love, so it would be kinda churlish to decry you as a horrible person, right?

Some creators might even take it in the spirit it's intended -- as an act of tribute, a homage. Some will turn a blind eye as long as it's not done commercially. Some may even appreciate and encourage it. That's their prerogative, their permission to grant, by silent acquiescence or explicit acceptance. But that agreement is not a given. It's not the rule but the exception to the rule, and there's enough writers out there in the Gabaldon/Martin camp kicking up stinks about the legality that really you have to be pretty naive for it to go over your head for any period of time. And if you respond with bald-faced denials, that's just refusing to recognise the agreement at all, refusing to recognise, in fact, the creators right to offer that service on those terms and conditions.

Now, bear in mind, I don't include myself in the Gabaldon/Martin camp. You can throw all the justifications for fanfic at me and I'll probably just agree with them. But where pro writers are down on fanfiction, often it comes from a legitimate concern with the ultimate effects of their work as it has been reused in your fanfic. The whole "my characters are my children" line is a little precious for my liking, but even taking a less personal approach, characters and settings are powerful tools, and a writer doesn't have to let those carefully crafted tools be put to uses they don't approve of. You are not simply entitled to reuse the service they've provided you in a service you provide to others because of this. You might do something they find profoundly objectionable, and by providing you with the tools to do it, that makes them feel partly responsible.

If someone did some sort of inverse slash with my own Jack and Puck characters -- co-opting them into a personal fantasy and straight-ironing them in the process, turning them hetero -- this might well annoy the fuck out of me. Co-opt my queer fiction to a heteronormative agenda and damn right I'm going to be pissed off. Weave a right-wing subtext through it and of course I'm going to get grouchy. As a certified Sodomite, attuned to homophobic undercurrents, I'm intently aware of subtext in narratives, how superficially fun and fluffy entertainment can carry the dodgiest of messages. Racism and misogynism can be hard not to code into narrative. It's only a small step from a tongue-in-cheek anarcho-terrorist who Blows Shit Up without thinking things through to a narrative that glorifies "righteous" violence without the author thinking things through. Point is, I feel a social responsibility not to propagate unethical messages, and that extends to not wanting my characters and settings to be vehicles for them in the hands of others.

It's a moot point with my work, right enough. I'm not likely to have to worry about that any time soon. And, hey, if I haven't addressed any of the arguments made in support of fanfiction, it's largely because I don't actually dispute most of them. I just thought I'd fire my own two cents into the kerfuffle.

Authorial Unintention

So there's a whole kerfuffle that's sprung up over the last few days about whether reviewers should or should not use the term "self-indulgent" to describe a book, here and here and here and here.
Personally, I'm not convinced that writing is an intrinsically self-indulgent act. Part of it is... there can be a real buzz from it when you're in the Zone, as I'd put it. But it's also, for me, a deeply paranoid affair that involves crises of faith, absolute blank spots and blind fury at your own inability to make the story do what it's supposed to. When you're in that hard graft period, slicing and dicing, cutting and splicing, it's not even remotely self-indulgent. You're not in love with your writing; you're at fucking war with it. I know other writers who talk in similar terms, who talk about having to fall out of love with a story in order to rewrite it to what it should be, or who simply shake their heads and give despairing moans when you ask them how the novel's doing. It's not all peaches and cream. When you're not in the Zone, you're in the Crucible.
Sometimes you have to give the story its head. Sometimes you have to rein it in. To me that's just a banal platitude, a given. And I think there is a use of the term "self-indulgence" which basically boils down to "this story needed to be reined in and it wasn't". To me, saying something was "self-indulgent" translates as "it needed more ruthless rewriting, better editing to expunge redundancies of plot, character, setting and / or style, to tighten it up". It's saying that the writer spent too much time in the Zone, too much time giving the story its head, and riding it wildly, letting it take them wherever it would and just enjoying the ride; and not enough time and energy on turning on that story, hacking and slashing at it, pruning it into shape, giving it a good tight plot, coherent character dynamics, optimum description of setting, thematic integrity and ergonomic prose. If you can appreciate a novel for being tight, you can criticise it for not being tight. I think that's fair comment.
However, there are different standards at play in SF/F just now, and what is tight in literary terms may not be seen as tight in genre terms -- and hell, it may not even be about literary versus genre. These days in SF/F a plot that's sprawling and inchoate when compared to a more roaring and driven pulp narrative may be held together by the sort of character-based substructure or realistic relationships more common to literary novels. Alternatively, it might be held together by Gothic/Romantic hyperdescription, pulpy worldbuilding to the max. I know, with VELLUM, I deliberately fuck with plot, character and setting in ways that makes for something hellishly inchoate in many respects. What holds it together, I think, I hope, is theme and style. It's a cubist novel. It's not meant to hold together in the same way.
Anywaym the point is, this is different strokes for different folks. I don't believe there's a Golden Ratio of plot, character, setting, theme and style. I don't believe that you can objectively criticise a writer for preferencing one element over another on the basis that they a) should have found the Golden Ratio, b) know they should have found the Golden Ratio, and c) wantonly and indiscriminately failed to find the Golden Ratio because they were to busy looking elsewhere. To me, this is one of the suspect implications of the term "self-indulgence", that underlying the failure of the book for the critic is an excess of one aspect of the book (emphasised in the process of giving the story its head) linked to a deficiency in another aspect of the book (neglected in the process of reining it in, rewriting, editing).
One problem with the critique is that it's unspecific. It doesn't distinguish whether the writer has let one character run away with the story, or let flowery prose mask shallow characterisation, or spent so much wordage on describing the world that the pace of the book slows down to utter turgidity. I want to know as a writer, if this book doesn't work, exactly why it doesn't work. As a writer those specifics act as feedback into further writing, or they give me something solid to disagree with. As an old hand of the Glasgow Writer's Circle, I'm used to taking criticism, but it's worthless if it's unspecific. I'd never think of telling someone submitting a story simply that it was "self-indulgent"; I might tell them that it read like unreconstructed wish-fullfilment, or that it was a really inventive background they obviously had a lot of fun playing with but they needed to go back and give it a plot, or that his character is great but since it's really just this character doing sod all, well, the story doesn't work for me. Or so on. Self-indulgent tells a writer nothing, though. What... so I should, uh, flagellate myself in penitence? Take every third word out of the story to make it more "restrained"?
A second problem related to the first is that this criticism is, I think, taste-dependant. I enjoyed Meiville's The Scar because I think the descriptive power holds together an otherwise sprawling and inchoate novel; it reminded me of Peake (and I had a very similar experience, hating the first 50 pages and then suddenly clicking into the pace and loving it). Others I know have absolutely hated it. So specifics are important for a reader. They need to know why and how the critic thinks this book is excessive in one respect to the detriment of another because, hey, that might be just what they're looking for. At the very least, it gives the reader a clear indication of why they might or might not like this book so they can make an informed judgement on whether it would be to their taste. Weirdly, contrarily, I think there's a value for my own book in getting reviews which warn readers up front about its... um... unconventional approach to plot and character, about how it may not fulfill certain expectations. Some of the readers who would be disappointed will not buy it, so less money for me; but that means they won't buy it, hate it, and proceed to tell the world how much they hate it. Other readers will see that same review and, knowing that their preferences don't match those of the critic, decide that, actually, they might well like a book that aforesaid critic utterly reviles and hence go out and buy it. Which would be nice.
But the biggest problem for me -- and again this relates to the above -- is that an accusation of "self-indulgence" is an application of, to coin a term, authorial unintention. To me, it implies that the aspect of the book perceived as overdone is a product of the Zone rather than the Crucible, that the author couldn't possibly have intended that aspect to have been overwhelming, ramped-up to the max, as a thematic necessity of the story they're trying to tell, as a conscious decision. They couldn't possibly have spent the majority of time ploughing through the book, building up that aspect and wishing they'd never started the bloody thing in the first plac. Instead, it's assumed, the author must have been so carried away in the pleasure of writing that particular aspect, so entranced by the sheer joy of being a clever clogs, so caught up in their love for what they were doing that they became a slovenly wastrel, squandering their potential tale in redundancies of [plot/character/setting/theme/style].
At best this is condescending. At worst it's an outright insult. To me, without specifics, a cry of "self-indulgence" could easily just indicate a shallow reading, where the critic has neglected to consider the possibility that there might well be a valid reason that aspect X, Y or Z is so predominant in the novel. Without specifics, I can't know that the critic has considered this possibility, searched for a purpose, a meaning, and failed to find it. Without specifics, I can't know that the critic isn't simply arrogantly assuming that with their Huge Gigantic Brains, well, obviously, if they can't see the point in the excess of [plot/character/setting/theme/style] on a cursory reading then it simply isn't there, and further assuming that it isn't there because the author is a shallow wank-merchant, diddling themselves and going ooh yeah when a firmer hand (*ahem*) would have kept them on the straight and narrow.
And it's that last reason that makes "self-indulgence" a problematic term for me, even if it can be explicated out into a valid critique -- that X aspect needed to be reined in because it overshadows Y, making the book read as if the author has been too busy having fun here to pay attention here. The real problem is that such shorthand usage is indistinguishable from the sort of commonplace philistine critique of "show-offery" applied to anything which dares to be difficult, to risk incomprehension and resentment on the part of the reader for the sake of ambition. The critic may well be right. The book may be deeply flawed, it's aesthetic balance way off, because the writer's just plain failed to pull off what they were trying to do. But the word "self-indulgent" doesn't communicate that any more than calling the writer a poncy git does. And as an accusation of a lack of self-awareness on the author's part, of selfishness and unfounded pride even, it's about as personal as that sort of name-calling.
IMHO.
UPDATE:
Noting Cheryl Morgan's and NineBelow's comments on this post, I should probably add the clarification that I don't neccessarily take "self-indulgence" as an insult (and incidentally, hereby promise I shall never throw a hissy fit even if such an accusation is leveled at me; nossir, I reserve hissy fits for right-wing homophobes that'll be truly freaked out by them) . No, it's more that I think it can be read not as a judgement of skill (which is how I'd classify talk about a writer's characterisation as "amateurish") but as a judgement of integrity. And without a qualitative pointer to what is textually being indulged (like, maybe we should say plot-indulgent, prose-indulgent, character-indulgent?) the statement can be read one way or the other.
Naturally, I'm being utterly selfish here and looking for what I can get out of a review, but I also think the reader has a choice to read "failure of this book" or "failure of this author" into the word. If that makes sense.
Of course, if the writer's response is "YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE GENIUS THAT IS ME YOU FOOLS I DID NOT WORK FOR TEN YEARS IN THIS BUSINESS WRITING DODGY VAMPIRE SLASH FICTION FOR SOME EDITOR TO COME ALONG AND TELL ME THAT I NEED TO TRIM A SENTENCE HERE AND THERE OH NO FOR I AM THE ALMIGHTY GODDESS OF VAMPIRE SLASH FICTION HOW DARE YOU QUESTION ME YOU PUNY MORTALS?", and then Jeff's Evil Monkey starts to eat their head, well, then the reviewer was probably right.