What fresh hell is this?

Okay, I have a Betan Survey captain who's allergic to Beta, a Pilot Officer who's in love with wormholes, an exobiologist in love with the Pilot Officer, and a hermaphrodite engineer who thinks it's Dorothy Parker. And Tumnus the Faun. Now all I have to do is write the thing.

I also have a John/Sherlock + cat sequel to "Improbability" yanking at me, along with a plot bunny for a Lewis/Sherlock crossover (not going to call it Lewlock, you can't make me), an essay about "Life Born of Fire," some thoughts about writing tics, and a rediscovered old fic to edit. And George is constantly whining at me to leave all these other people alone and get back to work on him (I wonder why the others elect George to do the nagging, and then I think about it and stop wondering). Darling boy, I am building you an audience.

First, though, I have a kid going off to college tomorrow who needs help packing, and a lot of seedlings to transplant. So that's me settled.

"This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."

Long and lyrical

Okay, might as well cover the writing tic now since I've been collecting examples. I have lots of things I overuse and/or use over and over in writing (after talking about it here, I actually used the light-on-liquid thing in "And Love Itself Have Rest," and anyone who wants to count the number of "more sharply than he/she intended"s in my output may feel free to). But one that's actually been pretty effective is what I call the long and lyrical sentence. These frequently come at the end of stories, chapters, significant paragraphs, etc., but they can occur anywhere. I thought about this because I used one at the end of "Improbability":

The horizon whirls; the plain is ablaze with flowers; the river is close enough to touch, and they are laughing, laughing, and the world is improbably beautiful.

and it was strangely familiar, and all the others I've used popped into my head, and I was not sure whether to be embarrassed or not; forgive me, for I know not what I do, except when I do it on purpose. There you are: lots of commas and a few semicolons for good measure, or even colons, and probably some repetition and something that sounds like a literary reference even if it's frequently not. And a fair amount of attention to the right words, and quite often a calling back to imagery used earlier (the landscape bits are not accidental. And landscapes are another writing tic of mine). So it's not lazy writing, though it would get me thrown out of a good many schools of thought. It's just a good way to set up a rhythm that gets attention, I guess, and I enjoy doing it a lot, but I'm sure it goes over the top quite often. *shrugs*

( more examples )

So, what things do you do in writing over and over, and do you want to whap yourself in the face with a snowball or are you going to keep doing them? Or maybe that was "and" instead of "or." :)