Daniel’s Reviews > Vinny Gets a Life > Status Update

Uh oh.

Reading m/m hockey romance turned me into a fan of the sport. So now the only two team sports I understand are hockey and baseball.

I don't think it matters in the slightest, at least not so far. Contrary to my youthful expectations, most sports related stories I've read/watched are actually just relationship/people stories and the specifics of the actual sport are no more important than the pattern on the wallpaper in some character's kitchen and I have decades of practice of pushing my eyes over useless description in books. I feel like there's a bit more detail about what's going on with the team/games here, but not nearly enough to put me off.

Speaking of which, her writing style is interesting to me for both the lack of description and a sort of voice/pov style that I suspect violates all kinds of "thou shalt nots" from writing advice givers but in practice works really well, at least for me.

I need to do a somewhat more analytical read of one of these when I'm not distracted by enjoying it and figure out exactly what she's doing.

Daniel wrote: "Speaking of which, her writing style is interesting to me for both the lack of description and a sort of voice/pov style that I suspect violates all kinds of "thou shalt nots" from writing advice givers but in practice works really well, at least for me."

Same. I really, really connect with her writing.

"I need to do a somewhat more analytical read of one of these when I'm not distracted by enjoying it and figure out exactly what she's doing."

I look forward to hearing what you figure out. :) Something I realized after reading a half dozen or so of her works is that she's a master of managing POV. When you're in the head of one of her characters, you see/notice/register only what he sees/notices/registers — which means there's a hell of lot of subtext, a lot going on that the reader needs to grok on their own. So many authors are sloppy about POV, cheating in order to directly feed the reader information that they can't figure out any other way to convey.

Yeah, and the lack of description makes sense in deep third, somebody's not going to pay attention to the appearance of their day to day, but some of the stuff she leaves out is interesting too. The conversation with his mother, which I think 99.999% of authors would have made a huge deal out of, just kind of skipped over.