lliira

I wrote about half a post and then the cat jumped on my keyboard and hit the backspace key and the post went bye-bye. It was absolutely brilliant, too, it would have changed the world. Well, okay, maybe it just had a couple clever lines. Still, those clever lines are gone now. So now there will be no cleverness here. Just griping.

In the last line of chapter 2, Bella informed us that she dreamed about Edward. The first line of chapter 3 starts with that dream.

In my dream it was very dark, and what dim light there was seemed to be radiating from Edward's skin. (68)

That sentence has three being verbs in it for no reason. I swear Stephenie Meyer rewrites her sentences to have more passive voice. No, I will not allow that sentence. How about this instead:

The sole dim light in the darkness of my dream seemed to radiate from Edward's skin.

Meh. I think it needs to be more than one sentence. A lot more. Also, we were just informed in the last sentence that this would be a dream, we don't need to be told so again. We can figure it out from context. And this is a half-assed description of Bella's dream. It is another example of Meyer giving us a small glimpse of Bella's psyche, but not going into any depth. Another re-write:

Blackness engulfed me. I saw a dim light in the distance. I fumbled toward it, drawn to the glow. Finally, I came to its source: Edward. His skin radiated light, the only relief from the darkness of this blank place.

That was painful. Dear gods and little fishes, this is a ridiculous, cheesy dream. I say that as someone who usually likes both cheese and dreams in novels. Do you think you could be any more obvious about this, Meyer? Edward is the only light in Bella's world. Everything else is blackness. Already. This is the weirdest foreshadowing I've ever seen. This dream belongs later, not here, when Bella and Edward haven't had one pleasant interaction.

Bella then chases Edward through the darkness and can't catch him and blah blah you've heard this all before. This dream is boring. When you write a dream, you can throw your character into any situation you choose. Chasing Edward through blank darkness is all you've got?

In the same paragraph in which she tells us about the dream, Bella informs us:

After that, he was in my dreams nearly every night, but always on the periphery, never in reach.

I think that belongs in another paragraph. Actually let's send it to Mars. Don't just infodump this -- the reader is not Bella's psychiatrist.

After the paragraph about the dream, we get this:

The month that followed the accident was uneasy, tense, and, at first, embarrassing.

Poor month. I wonder what made it so uneasy and tense. Maybe Bella calling it embarrassing bothered it. The month should go to a good massage therapist. At least it gets its own paragraph.

Seriously, Meyer, why did you write that line? Are you trolling us? Or is that silly infodump intentional?

I am flabbergasted by how bad this is. I -- I think I need some time. I'll come back to Bella's misery at school later.