Spectral Exile - Review

The original post title was "Spectral Exile AKA A Marty Sue). If you read the opening 800 words or so of Spectral Exile, you'll see what I mean when I call it a Marty Sue. (I can't really call it a Mary Sue for obvious gender reasons.) I've since learned the correct term is Gary Stu.

Some random thoughts on the worst story I've read in a long, long, long, long, long, long time:

Just for fun I did a count of certain words that Nicky likes to use: gruesome - 5 occurrences, observer - 7 occurrences, blood - 15 occurrences (yikes!), horror - 20 occurrences (double yikes!). Someone buy Nicky a thesaurus. Oh, wait. That might make his writing even more incoherent.

Number of different POV's in one story: Um...I lost count.

Largest number of different POV's in one paragraph: Two

Most redundant sentence: ""What the hell is happening,” one of the patrons watched, wondering what the hell was going on." And I'm not even going to mention the incorrect punctuation of the dialogue. This would have been even funnier if it had read: ""What the hell is happening,” one of the patrons watched, wondering what the hell was happening."

Best example of how using several words where one would do just makes Nicky look stupid: "...but they said she was sick from extreme cold exposure." -- Say it with me: hy-po-ther-mi-a

Best example of "huh?": "The cameraman was covered in blood from ducking the projectile mug" -- They were throwing cups of blood? (actually they weren't, so this makes no sense)

Best example of the schmuck not knowing how things are done in the real world: "...[the EMT] screams, “try to find a phone so we can call dispatch." Sheesh, Nicky seems to have ridden in enough ambulances to know that first responders -- including EMT's, paramedics, etc -- carry radios.

Best example of a completely fucked up sentence: The EMT was wrapping her head would and carried her over to the stretcher then told her to go lay down. 1) For verbs, we have "was wrapping", "carried", and "told". Not exactly parallel construction. 2) Spell check fails Nicky again. This is why you have to know enough to spell check your stories yourself, Nicky, rather than relying on the computer. And don't even get me started on how useless Word's grammar checker is. 3) Why did the EMT bother to lay her down in one place if he wanted her to lay elsewhere? Why not just put her elsewhere?

Examples of Nicky's idea of noun/pronoun agreement (there were MANY more examples of this):

"I guess it is always true that when a horror writer steps out, they’ve become an observer of the strange and haunting."

"I started to see them freak out even more when they noticed one of the patrons had their hand chopped off as the door closed on them."


And Nicky thinks he doesn't need Strunk & White...