This is a quick rant because I’ve got little to say beyond HOLY HELL am I tired of this. ENOUGH WITH THE EMOTIONS IN THE EYEBALLS. PLEASE.
It must be terribly interesting to be an opthamologist in romance land considering the flickers of emotion all these people in romance novels have harbored in their eyeballs. You think they look into people’s eyes and think, “Damn. This one’s a hot mess.” Maybe they have psychologists on call.
Seriously. Can we stop with the flicker of fear, the fleeting hint of desire, the flash of rage? COME ON. Couldn’t a hero have tension between his eyebrows, a wrinkle near his eyes that indicated rage that smooths out before she gets a good look? Something other than an emotion floating in his eyeballs that she gets a glimpse of?
Shorthand bugs the crap out of me, and I wish there wasn’t so much of it. There are other ways to demonstrate and indicate emotion. I refuse to believe romance authors are secretly opthamologists with those looking-at-the-retina machines and that the retina is some sort of emotional telegraph.
Have you noticed this? Or did you see that flash of impatient fury in my eyes before I hid it behind a debonair arch of my brow and wonder what I was angry about?
My hazel eyes dimmed with fear that someone on this board is judging my Golden Heart entry. The normal sparkle dulled to the sad yellow of a taxidermy tiger’s cheap glass orbs after I realized I will never have the nerve to send Smart Bitches a book to review.
Right. Now you’ve all given me one more word to put on my “find/replace” list along with just, too, up, down, -ing … eye. (I know for a fact I wrote my hero has tortured eyes. Ack.)
Ooh, ooh, do “bit off” and “ground out” next! Julia Quinn is the worst for those, but I’m currently reading one by another author — bad sign that I can remember neither title nor writer — where the hero, within the span of a single page, “ground out,” “bit off,” “bit out,” “snapped,” and, for good measure, “glared.”
(My verification word is said26. “Said,” ha. No one simply says when there’s biting off to do.)
My mother told me I had “sable” hair once, but she reads lots of romance novels of the Olde Schoole. And, actually, it’s the best way to describe brown-almost-black with no red or blonde highlights. I reckon, heh.
I also have grey-blue eyes (nope, they’re not true blue, nor true grey), but I think being a dyed-in-the-wool lesbo luckily saves me from Romance Heroinehood. 🙂
Well in dogs, we call that color seal. So you could have seal hair, which invokes thoughts of blubber and flippers. HTH!
Hey Trix, if you want to be Romance Heroine, you go right ahead and be one. EVERYONE gets to be the Heroine of their own romance! And if you want to call your hair Sable, that’s okay by me too (but I probably WILL roll my plain blue eyeballs when you do! Heh.)
(My hair is a spectacularly ordinary shade of middling brown that I like to call “hair colored”. Not as exciting as sable, raven, titian, auburn, golden, silver, and other Romanciverse hair colors, but it keeps my head warm. Probably the fact that I have hair colored hair and blue eyes is one of the reasons that exotique Romance hair and eyes macht mir miffed.)
I say again, if I ever, ever, ever mean “eyeballs” in a romance, I will say “eyeballs.” OTOH, if I say “eyes” I mean the eyeballs, irises, pupils, lids and maybe even brows. The whole package. So, yes, there is a lot of emotion given away by the eyes. Their movement. Tension around them. Pupil dilation. Length of stare. Sorry, I can’t agree with you here. Unless, of course, I talk of the tremendous rage in his sclera.
This post ruined some of my reading time this past week! Ha! Makes me pause when I read emotional eye scenes! *snort*
I do realize that it conveys a lot of emotions without writing out the related thoughts….
Yes dear broads I am right there with you. About the eye color thingie—silver eyes, grey with flecks of gold, white with navy blue rims—let’s just go for it and have dark red eyes! Pls this drives me so nuts. Does anyone have a real pic of someone with silver/grey eyes??? xxoocf
I’m with Jessica. This never bothered me, until I read this post. Then, I was reading “Spider’s Bite” by Jennifer Estep (which has some great food scenes in it, by the way) and in at least three places she had a character’s eyes “flash from (emotion one) to (emotion two) to (emotion three) and sometimes (emotion four) in the space of a minute.” And she always closed a scene with it.
And it drove. me. CRAZY.