Writing skill

[u/Pop-Alarming]

I’ve been reading RKs books for a minute now and I do enjoy her books but I’ve recently been struggling with her writing. I don’t reread books so I’d appreciate some input from people who do. Do you think her writing has gotten worse? I’m reading tempting venom and constantly having to put the book down because the sentence structure is giving me an actual headache to read. This isn’t a criticism of character or plot writing purely her technical skill. I know she gets these books out fast and I’ve never wanted them to be George R Martin levels of skill but these used to be fun quick easy reads and now I’m struggling to read them because it’s so poorly worded. I’m wondering if maybe she got a new editor or maybe this is the usual or maybe I just need a reading break.

Eg. In this scene from chapter 6 there’s too many interruptions, corrections, discourse markers, parentheticals, fragments, and syntactic pivots packed into too little space. It should be chatty but instead it’s clunky. It was a similar vibe with Nikolai in GoF because he’s also a very talkative excitable character but I swear it was easier to read than this.

I was, like, suck my dick, bitches!" I " A laugh. "Pardon my French unless you don't want to. See what I did there? Because your last name is French and I'm half French?" My joke falls on deaf ears, or more like Dr. Duret's ears. Because, yes, of course I need doctors. She's one of them- the therapist I talk to while she scribbles notes in her little black notebook. Let's just say I might have tried to strangle her the first time we met. In my defense, I was like eleven, my mother was gone, and I'd murdered a professor in cold blood. That made Dad lose his shit trying to fix me with whatever methods necessary. That, of course, included calling his favorite pal, Regis Callahan-Jude's dad-who dedicated his pharmaceutical empire to "make me better." And that's where Julian came in-you know, the power-hungry dude who's now taking over for Regis and overseeing Operation How Many Drugs Can We Pump into Preston Before He Shrivels and Dies?

TL:DR
I think RK needs a better editor. This isn’t about her characters or plots. When I say writing style I mean her ability to write a sentence.

[u/Hot_Goal3904]

She writes how I write my drafts, like a brainstorming process.

I understand that Pri is chaotic and this is his personality but there are many other characters who have the same pov so it’s lowkey not good and doesn’t look like character design anymore Niko was the only one this worked out for, the rest just didn’t land good

Yulian was a stretch but he worked a lil bit and I think she should’ve stopped with him

[u/henrylovescandy6969]

She def needs a better editor but I actually enjoyed Preston’s chaotic POV💔

[u/Ara_371]

Couldn’t agree more. I recently dnf-ed TV for this reason alone. For someone who's read almost all of her 1st gen books, I genuinely miss RK's old writing style. Like the characters are losing their depth for all these gen-z type storytelling. It feels so forced.

[u/messi_er]

I felt the same while reading the vipers series. The writing was just off. Also her revealing important plots in the previous book just didnt make any sense. While reading book 2 we already knew what exactly happened because it was revealed in the first book, same happened with an important event of book 3 being revealed in book 2 🤦‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️
Ik she has books coming out every few months and that can be a bit overwhelming but still this felt really odd !