They walked arm-foot in arm-foot down the path

[MaggieD]

This just tickles me. Briefly, this guy's an author who has trouble describing hands. Here are some of his attempts:

Admitting that he has “absolutely no idea how other authors do it,” novelist Edward Milligan, 46, told reporters Tuesday that he’s just no good at all when it comes to describing people’s hands in his writing.
“I’m fine with most details, but for some reason hands completely and utterly elude me,” said Milligan, who recently described a character’s hands as “dangling around like big, meaty spiders.”

Milligan, whose novella Grand Rapids was reportedly rejected by publishers due partly to a passage in which the protagonist’s hand “trundled and shimmered on the top section of his wrist,”

he is especially bad at delineating human fingers, which the writer once portrayed as “flabby pink-tan logs, but a bendy kind of log.”

“I’ve also tried to avoid doing hand descriptions altogether, but you can only put a few amputees in your stories before people start to notice.” [:rofl]

“I just want to say that a character has, you know, these big...twisty things next to her wrists,” he added. “See? I can’t do it. I ****ing suck at it.”

They moved closer now, and their shadows stretched across the sand, twin silhouettes cut from the same canvas. She laid her finger hub across his tentative, dandelion hands and then slowly let that glorious gripping machine tighten like a mighty vise until at last she could feel that their spirits, too, were entwined, just like their touching-organs were, except emotionally instead of physically.

“I enjoy Edward’s writing, but it’s true the hands can really take you out of it,” said reader Evan Forster, 39, who mentioned he was jarred by a sentence calling someone’s hands “bony ball-sticks that grab hard.” “I don’t think he’s doing it on purpose, because everything else seems normal. It doesn’t make sense when he tries to gets around it by saying that people’s hands are ‘hand-like in their stature and bearing.’ What does that even mean?”
“Then he tries to shoehorn in something like a guy who’s always moving his hands so fast no one can see what they look like,” Forster added. “It’s clear what he’s doing.”

‘What seemed like a thousand tiny hands (though in truth there were only two) extended from his arms. They were sparsely knuckled, punctuated only by the occasional thumb or forefinger jutting up like a lighthouse from a handy sea,’” said Milligan, quoting from a draft of the second chapter of his novel. “God, that’s ****ing terrible. It doesn’t even sound like I’m talking about hands.”

​Whackadoodle? They name is Edward Milligan.


​Can this be for real?

 

[GottaGo]

Sometimes I get quite the jolly from reading some author's descriptions of body parts.

Some add too much detail for visual interest, like the above. If I had read those lines somewhere, I would have likely spewed my beverage out my nose..... :lamo