I was having a heck of a time reading this one book. The story was sort of interesting, but it dragged and dragged and dragged and dragged…

Well, no wonder. The writing was overloaded with repetition — pages and pages of the same phrases used over and over. I thought, well, this is a multiple viewpoint story. Maybe it’s just this one character’s voice.

For the heck of it I read paragraph by paragraph through three consecutive chapters that had different POVs. Gee whomping whillikers. After analyzing those chapters, even skillful use of repetition makes me wince.

For your reading pleasure, here are the relevant chapter bits: (more . . .)

One day my little friend Sydney caught a bird and left its bleeding carcass at the back steps. (She loves me, oh yes she does.) It lay there for several hours before I found it, and by that time the blood had soaked into the concrete.

I washed the spot with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner, and still the bloodstain remains. You can see how the cleaner killed the lichen and bleached the area immediately around the stain.

(The lichen is a welcome guest, by the way, and grows on the vertical sides of the steps and in broad patches on the patio itself. It will eventually eat through the concrete, but I enjoy watching it change through the seasons. The lichen gets a little furrier during the winter, flakier in the summer.)

Why on earth did I file this under Writing? Research, of course. You never know when you might need to know what a pool of blood — and that bird had an amazing amount of blood for a critter so small — does to concrete.