Words in Review: Picture Perfect Murder and Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, Page 1

Full disclosure:  I obtained a Kindle copy of Picture Perfect Murder by Jenna St. James when it was offered free on Amazon.  I borrowed a Kindle copy of Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke via Amazon Prime.  I do not know the authors nor have I ever communicated with them in any way about their books or any other subject.  I am a traditionally published author of historical romances, and self-published in contemporary romantic suspense and miscellaneous non-fiction.

Further disclosure:  I read both books in their entirety.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder was originally published by Kensington in 2000 as the first book in the series of cozy mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Hannah Swenson.  The digital edition is dated 2019 but contains no indication as far as having been revised and is also published by Kensington.

Picture Perfect Murder is copyrighted 2015 and published by the author, Jenna St. James.  This is the first book in the Ryli Sinclair cozy mystery series.

Both books have high ratings on Goodreads, as these screenshots from 22 April 2021 show.

 

 

The Fluke book may have negatively benefited from being older and added to Goodreads at the site's beginning, circa 2007, when critical reviews were less likely to be pulled down by thin-skinned authors. The over-all rating for this traditionally published book is only 3.70, where St. James' effort, though published by the author, received 4.24.

It is a sad truth that after September 2013, Goodreads became much less friendly to critical reviewers, especially those who might not have read the whole book or were basing their criticism on something the author had done outside the actual writing of the book.  This action on the part of Goodreads was precipitated by the almost-publication of a book by a young self-publishing author who got some negative reviews even though her book had not been officially published.  Readers flocked to her book to give it five-star ratings -- even though they couldn't have read it because it wasn't published -- in sympathy to the negative reviews she received.  This ultimately evolved into what became known as the Great Purge of 2013, when certain critical reviewers were banned from the platform. . . and critical reviews brought risks to the reviewers.

The message had been sent that Goodreads, as an arm of Amazon, was in the business of selling books, and bad reviews don't sell as many books as good ones.

Setting aside, then, the ratings on Goodreads as potential gauges of writing quality, how do these two books compare?

Picture Perfect Murder is pretty terrible.  Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder isn't a whole lot better.

Of course, that is only my opinion, and I am only one person, one reader, one writer.

Reviews are for readers.  If you've read any of my writing on reviewing, you  know how adamant I am that reviews are not for writers, that writers would do well to never read their reviews and do better to never confront their reviewers.  But writers, especially the self-publishing authors, often claim that they have an interest in those reviews beyond just wanting to know if someone liked or disliked their book.  Whether they feel entitled to it or not, they want those reviews to provide feedback, to help them improve, to tell them what it was that made a reviewer not love their book.

Most readers aren't in a position to do that, and they should never feel obligated to do so.  As I have said often enough, a reader may not even be qualified to render the kind of advice the writer wants.  Sometimes the reader may be entirely wrong in their criticism, whether it's about grammar and punctuation, factual research, story structure, or anything else.  If the writer herself isn't sufficiently knowledgeable, she may take that advice and make what's already correct about her book incorrect.

Writers who want feedback on their work should ideally get that feedback before the book is published, so that the product reaching the reading public is the very best it can be.  For the writer who goes the traditional route, the publisher will presumably fix all the problems since they have a substantial investment in making sure readers don't find problems.

The self-publishing author, however, has only herself to rely on.  If she can afford a professional editor, that may help, but not all those who bill themselves as professional editors really are.  Some of them are no better qualified to edit than the authors themselves.  How is an author to know who to trust?  If the author's own skills aren't top-notch, she may indeed not know.

In a few words, it's a crap shoot.

I can't "fix" every book that falls short.  I can't turn every manuscript into a best-seller.  Nor am I even proposing to try.  But I think what I can do is offer the kind of feedback some writers may be looking for through a detailed analysis of books I personally have found to be seriously lacking in quality.

It's one thing to review a book and say "The characters weren't relatable."  What does that really mean?  That's the kind of question I hope to answer, with specific examples from the books.

In previous posts, I've mentioned some of the reference materials I've relied on in my own writing career.  The ultimate goal of everything is to create a written work in which the written words disappear, leaving the reader immersed in the world of the novel. Though it's not reasonable to expect any novel to be absolutely perfect, every writer should still strive for perfection -- the invisible novel.

The very first step to making your author-published digital novel invisible is to format it correctly. 

If your very first page is divided into block paragraphs -- no indent, extra space between paragraphs -- I as a reader know you don't even know what a book is supposed to look like.  Writers read, and real writers know what real books look like.  That means indented paragraphs; save those extra blank lines to indicate a transition of time or place.

I mention this here because it is the nature of copying and pasting from Kindle pages that they automatically delete all paragraphing, regardless of format.  For ease in reading small snippets, I've put the quoted sections into block paragraphs, but this should never be done in the actual published version of the book.

 

So, how is it that Picture Perfect Murder and Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder fell so far short of perfection? 

Let's start with a look at the very beginning, the opening page of Picture Perfect Murder.

I hate looking at dead bodies. And believe me, I’ve seen a lot of them in my twenty-eight years. There’s nothing that can prepare you for that first glimpse of death.

In college, I worked part time at Jaworski Funeral Home. It was one of those small, family-owned businesses. They were great about working around my class schedule. They were even better about including me as family. A few holiday dinners and family gatherings later, and Ryli Jo Sinclair had become an honorary Jaworski.

For four years I did everything from flower arranging to consoling families. I didn’t deal with the actual prepping of the dead body. But still, a dead body was a dead body as far as I was concerned.

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Locations 50-56). Kindle Edition. 

So, what's happening?  We're in the viewpoint of a first-person narrator, one Ryli Jo Sinclair, and she's . . . thinking. We don't know where she is or what she's doing or why she's thinking about not liking dead bodies.  Instead of getting right into the action of the story, author St. James indulges in some of Ryli's background.  While this information might become important later on, it's not important now.  There's nothing going on that would make it important.

The mere mention of a dead body in the opening paragraph sets up some anticipation, but the author doesn't follow up on it.  In fact, the next paragraphs provide contradiction to the opening: If Ryli spent four years working for a funeral home, why didn't she get accustomed to dead bodies?

You may be stepping back and saying, "But it's only three paragraphs!"  And that is absolutely correct.  However, if the author is already, in the first three paragraphs of the book, resorting to non-essential character reflection, it doesn't bode well for the rest of the book.  (Spoiler: Holiday dinners with the Jaworski family are never mentioned again.)

Let's look at the opening to Chocolate-Chip Cookie Murder.

Hannah Swensen slipped into the old leather bomber jacket that she’d rescued from the Helping Hands thrift store and reached down to pick up the huge orange tomcat that was rubbing against her ankles. “Okay, Moishe. You can have one refill, but that’s it until tonight.”

As she carried Moishe into the kitchen and set him down by his food bowl, Hannah remembered the day he’d set up camp outside her condo door. He’d looked positively disreputable, covered with matted fur and grime, and she’d immediately taken him in. Who else would adopt a twenty-five-pound, half-blind cat with a torn ear? Hannah had named him Moishe, and though he certainly wouldn’t have won any prizes at the Lake Eden Cat Fanciers’ Club, there had been an instant bond between them.

Fluke, Joanne. Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen series Book 1) (p. 11). Kensington Books. Kindle Edition. 

Because this book is told from a third-person point of view, we aren't quite as directly in Hannah's thoughts, but neither are we out of them.  And just as in Picture Perfect Murder, the opening gives background information that may or may not be important later on.  Hannah is remembering, rather than doing.

If Ryli opens with a reference to a dead body, Hannah opens with nothing.  We don't know what she's doing or where she's going, and there's not the slightest hint of a mystery.

For contrast, let's look at the opening to Martha Grimes' The Man with a Load of Mischief, the first of the Richard Jury mysteries as published in 1981.

Outside the Jack and Hammer, a dog growled.

Inside, his view of the High Street obstructed by the window at his shoulder, Melrose Plant sat in the curve of the bay drinking Old Peculier and reading Rimbaud.

The dog growled deep in its throat and started barking again, something it had been doing intermittently for the last fifteen minutes.

Sun streaming through the cerulean blue and deep green of the tulip-design of the leaded panes threw rainbow colors across his table as Melrose Plant rose up to peer over the reverse letters advertising Hardy’s Crown. The dog sitting in the snow outside the public house was a scruffy Jack Russell belonging to Miss Crisp, who ran the secondhand-furniture shop across the street.

Grimes, Martha (2013-03-26). The Man with a Load of Mischief (Richard Jury Mysteries Book 1) (Kindle Locations 55-60). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

What's different about this opening?  Melrose Plant isn't thinking.  He's doing.  And he's doing something in response to an action over which he has no control, the dog's barking.  He doesn't know what the dog's barking means, but it has aroused his curiosity enough that he has gotten out of his seat and gone to look out the window.

Instead of merely the describing the window as having colored glass in a tulip design, Grimes makes the sun streaming through that glass an active force in the scene.  Though it's not a particularly mysterious or murderous scene, the participants are active, and it's much easier to imagine this scene visually -- cinematographically -- than the opening to either Picture Perfect Murder or Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder.

The reader knows these three books are murder mysteries; they aren't unidentified manuscripts being read cold.  The reader therefore comes to the opening with an expectation that regardless how the book starts, there's going to be at least one murder and someone is going to solve it.  Is it absolutely necessary, you ask, that the murder take place on page 1?  Or that it be referred to on page 1?  

No, it's not.  But what is necessary is that the author begin as she means to go.  If the author resorts to character introspection or retrospection before there's even been any action, does she plan to continue in that manner?

As Shelly Lowenkopf points out in his 1982 article "Creating the Rejection-Resistant Novel," many beginning writers -- and maybe some more experienced ones, too! -- often include in their opening pages "bits and pieces of background and detail the author needs to know in order to back off and let the characters tell the story.  More often than not the reader doesn't care about these bits of trivia and resents being told them."

Yes, the author needs to know how Hannah acquired her cat.  The author needs to know Ryli worked part time for the funeral home.  The reader doesn't need to know this, at least not yet.  Will the reader mind being told the Jaworskis made Ryli feel like a member of the family?  Will the reader resent being told Hannah and her cat had bonded instantly?  Probably not.

However, if that background information is important to the plot, it ought to come out as a result of the plot's unfolding rather than the reader just being handed those details out of the blue.  It's especially annoying in the St. James book because a reader who has been tuned in to the Jaworski story that ends up going nowhere may end up disappointed at not knowing the relevance!

In contrast, the opening to the Grimes book gives the reader a lot of needed information with no introspection.

1.  The dog is growling outside the Jack and Hammer.  Even though we don't yet know exactly what "the Jack and Hammer" is, we know it's the "inside."

2.  Melrose Plant, despite the non-gendered name, is "he."  Even though we may not know what Old Peculier is, we know it's a beverage of some kind because Melrose Plant is drinking it.  We may not know who or what Rimbaud is, but it's somehow connected to reading material, because Melrose Plant is reading it.

3.  The dog growls and barks again.

4.  Sunlight is streaming through the window, letting us know it's daytime.

5.  The dog is sitting in the snow -- it's winter -- outside the public house. Now the reader knows the Jack and Hammer is a pub.

As screenwriter Josh Olson has written:

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.

(By the way, here’s a simple way to find out if you’re a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you’re not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

Many, and perhaps most, readers aren't going to be as analytical as I am.  Many, and perhaps most, readers will read for pleasure and skip over the flubs and errors and inconsistencies that drive other readers bonkers.  It's possible for a writer to get away with this kind of writing in the age of digital publishing because there are far fewer gatekeepers.  Low-priced or free ebooks will almost always find a few readers, and unless the books are really outstandingly terrible, the authors can count on establishing at least a bit of a following.

That level of success may be sufficient for many, and perhaps most, self-publishing authors.  The collection of hundreds -- even thousands -- of glowing five-star ratings and reviews may also be sufficient.  On the other hand, if you really want to improve your writing so you can establish a following of readers who will pay more than the bare minimum -- or only read your books if they're free -- maybe give some of this criticism a thought or two.

After all, that's what you said you wanted

Reading the words, not just seeing them

I almost never watch television. When I do, it's a cable news channel and I listen more than watch.  I'm also almost always doing something in addition to listening to the program.  Sometimes I'm reading or writing a blog post or editing photos for my Etsy shop or sewing or making jewelry.  The idea of sitting and watching television and doing nothing else is almost beyond my comprehension.

Movies are the same.  I don't "go to the movies."  That's a concept even more outrageous to me than watching television.  To sit in the dark and do nothing but passively watch other people doing things on the screen, and be surrounded by a bunch of strangers?  Nope, it's just not for me.

Reading is different. Reading requires me to participate in creating the action.  There are words on the page, but there are no sights, no sounds, no hot or cold or windy or rainy.  No smell of freshly baked bread or new-mown hay or exotic perfume.  My brain has to supply all those things; I have to complete what the author has begun.  Ours is a collaboration, or at least it should be.

Tonight I tried to read one of the many (hundreds?) of free Kindle books I've recently acquired.  This was a boxed set of four "cozy mysteries" packaged under the title Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery 4-Book Bundle by Deany Ray.  The copyright date is 2016, but there's no other publication information in the books' front matter nor on the Amazon listing.  I'm going to assume, safely or not, that Deany Ray publishes her own books.

Whether or not she has an editor of any kind is questionable.

I will at least credit Deany with making the first of the four books look like a real book.  Paragraphs are indented without extra spaces between them.  

Beyond that, I don't have much good to say about the eight pages I was able to read before giving up.  My eye muscles can't take that much rolling.

After reading those eight pages, then reading them again two more times, I couldn't make much sense of the story, but I did get a sense of how someone could write something like that.  I've seen this before many times over the years and I've tried to explain to the writers what's wrong with it, but I never understood why they didn't get it.  I think now, finally, I do.

They are writers who don't read, or if they do, they watch more television and/or movies than they read -- and they've been doing it longer.

The bottom line is that they don't know how to read.  They see the words, they know what the words mean, but they don't know how to convert those words into mental images and sensations, into tastes and smells and textures. Therefore, when they write, they just put down words that don't -- that can't -- create the experience a reader wants.

Let me explain.  Or at least try to.

This is the opening paragraph from Barbara Bretton's 1986 contemporary romance The Edge of Forever.  I have never read it, though I have the digital edition on my Kindle.

Joe Alessio stood on the top step of St. John's Episcopal, poised for escape. All around him, New England was ablaze with color, the great rush of splendor before the winterkill. It would be easy to pretend he was a tourist, come to northern New Hampshire for a little leaf-peeping R&R, but the heavy wooden doors of the old church weren’t thick enough to keep the minister's words from spilling out and bringing reality with them. 

“. . . so I tell you that Anna Kennedy isn’t really gone . . . “

Bretton, Barbara. The Edge of Forever: A Classic Romance - Book 4 . Free Spirit Press. Kindle Edition.

Here's what Ms. Bretton -- whom I met a couple times at RWA conferences more than 20 years ago and that's about it -- has shown the reader already.

Joe Alessio is standing outside a church and he doesn't want to be there.  He wants to escape.  It's autumn and the trees of New England are changing color.  Joe lives here or at least he used to, because he's not a tourist.  Whoever Anna Kennedy is, or was, the reality of her death is something Joe would like to be able to deny but can't.

A reader who is accustomed to reading doesn't even think about this; it's taken for granted because that's the way readers read and the way writers write.

The reader is also brought into a situation that's fraught with emotion.  There's been a death, and even before we get to the next paragraph, we already have a taste (pun intended) of Joe's feelings.  Maybe he's glad that this Anna Kennedy is gone, but I don't think so.  He wanted to escape, remember?  That's probably a metaphor for wishing to escape the reality mentioned at the end of the paragraph.

As a reader, I'm already intrigued.  Who is/was Anna Kennedy?  What does Joe feel about her?  Why didn't he go into the church, or why has he already left it while the minister is still speaking?

What's crucial here is that each sentence builds directly on what the previous sentences have started.  The focus is on Joe Alessio, standing on the church steps but wanting to run, surrounded by New England autumn, hearing the minister's words that he doesn't want to hear.

It's very much like the opening scene of a movie, but the reader has to do the camera work.  Tight in on Joe, then pulling back to show the church, then the trees in their fall foliage, finally the minister's voice.

This is showing, not telling.

Two paragraphs, no more.

Now let's look at the opening two paragraphs of Deany Ray's first book of the boxed set, A Sweet Chunk of Madness.

The sun blazed through my beige drapes as I opened my eyes and directed them to the alarm clock on my nightstand. Ten to seven. Ten more minutes of sleep until the alarm went off. Only I was so excited to bake the recipe of sour cream rhubarb coffee cake that I jumped out of bed, almost knocking the lamp on the nightstand.

After a quick shower and a quick look in the mirror, I put on my favorite pair of jeans and the light blue t-shirt I worked in and headed off into town.

Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.

At this point, the reader knows not even a fraction about what's going on that she knows after reading two paragraphs of the Bretton book.  No setting, no emotion, no tension.  We know the color of the drapes and the character's t-shirt. We don't even know what she sees in the mirror.

Am I being unfair?  Why?  Barbara Bretton did it; why should Deany Ray be held to a lower standard?  Is it because the two books are in a different genre?  Does Deany get a pass because her book is free?

Here's the next paragraph of Deany's book.

My name is Becky Chambers and I live in Ouna Bay. After my parents died in a car crash, I took on their pastry store-slash-coffee shop. Well, actually, my aunt and uncle took on the business since I was only five years old when the crash happened. When I was twenty, they moved to Florida and I continued to run the café, which came only natural to me, since I spent almost every free minute there.

Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.

Besides the fact that this is rather lackluster writing style, the information doesn't show the reader anything.  There's nothing in this paragraph to help the reader visualize the scene or any action.  Why is it important that the reader know now, right away, on page one, that Becky's parents died in a car crash when she was five?  Why is it important for the reader to know, right now, on page one, that Becky's aunt and uncle moved to Florida when she was twenty?  

Where is Ouna Bay?

Why should I care?

I gave Deany Ray, Becky Chambers, and everyone in Ouna Bay eight full pages to hook me into the story. It never happened.  

Deany Ray is telling me things, things bout Ouna Bay and about Becky and about her friend Rosalie, but there's no story happening.  Not until page eight, when the newspaper vendor Dev informs Becky that some man asked for directions to her café, is there even a hint of anything the tiniest bit mysterious.

“Oh, before I forget. There was a man here earlier asking about your café,” Dev said. 

That caught my attention and I looked up. 

“A man asked about my café?”

Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 8). Kindle Edition.

If you're a reader who is accustomed to automatically creating the action of the story in your imagination, page eight is way too late.  Remember how much drama Barbara Bretton was able to pack into her opening two paragraphs?

When I wrote in an earlier post about Christopher Vogler's book The Writer's Journey, I also mentioned an article published in the February 1982 edition of The Writer magazine.  Written by Shelly Lowenkopf, "Creating a Rejection-Resistant Novel" explains what needs to go into a novel's first three pages to grab the reader's -- editor's, agent's -- attention.  In today's publishing environment of free digital downloads. that applies to consumers as well.

 "Start with important action," Lowenkopf advises. "Involve someone of consequence in an event of consequence or with a threat of significant impact."

Setting aside the measurement of just how much is "three pages," after eight pages of Deany Ray's book, nothing has happened. I know a few things about Becky -- her friend Rosalie is forgetful and Becky buys lots of magazines and someone is jealous of Becky's brownies -- but so what?

Deany Ray hasn't made me care what happens next.  Maybe Becky is going to go through her day and nothing worse will befall her than she mismeasures the sugar for her cake. 

I want more than that.  I want a hint that there's going to be more, and I want it at the beginning, not somewhere after eight pages.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I'm the same generation as Barbara Bretton, and we grew up reading books rather than watching television all day.  Maybe the problem is ours.  And that may very well be true, because books like Deany Ray's A Sweet Chunk of Madness  seem to get a lot of five-star ratings on Goodreads and Amazon.

Here's the stats block as of 9 April 2021 from Goodreads: 

 The book has 140 ratings, of which 98 are five- and four-stars.  Only four readers rated it one-star, and only one of them left a review.

Are all the other readers lying?  I don't think so.  What I do think is that they read the words but don't take the time or make the effort to put those words into  a viable context.

A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended a book that she considered one of the best she had read in a while. The Kindle edition was free, so I "bought" the book and tried to read it.  On something like the first or second page there was a glaring error, the kind of mistake where one character is standing to another's left and then without moving they're to that character's right, or some such.  It was so noticeable that I went back and reread it several times, trying to figure out how it could not be the writer's mistake but instead be mine.  It wasn't.

So I asked my friend if she had noticed the error. Oh, no, she didn't notice, but she said she never pays attention to things like that.  She "just reads." 

Maybe that's how everyone reads, and I'm the odd person out.  But then there's that single one-star review on Goodreads:  "This read like a fanfic, and not the good kind," reader Annemarie wrote.  She described the writing as "clunky," and I have to agree.

What does that mean?  In the case of A Sweet Chunk of Madness it means the writing doesn't flow.  The individual sentences are all right, but as Goodreader Annemarie writes, the text had ". . . sentences awkwardly put together to make longer ones."  

In good writing, one sentence leads seamlessly into the next.  In the opening paragraph from Barbara Bretton, the first sentence is about Joe Alessio.  The next one is about what's around Joe.  The next is about what Joe is doing there, and then about what he's hearing.  Each sentence carries on what the previous sentence started.

That's almost completely missing from Deany Ray's writing.  The sun and the beige drapes don't enhance our understanding of Becky's waking ten minutes before the alarm.  She's excited about baking, then she's in the shower, then she's heading into town . . . and then she's telling us about her past.  

And then we get details about her café and Ouna Bay.  Those details make no sense at all.

The Blue Bay Café was situated in the middle of Ouna Bay, attracting the town natives as much as the summer tourists. Ouna Bay is located near Lake Erie and it borders the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. The view of the beautiful bay and the small but charming harbor in the distance can be savored from the two wooden tables by the window. Those tables are the most coveted in the entire café.

Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.  

Wait a minute.  Is Ouna Bay an actual bay, as in a part of a body of water, or is that just the name of the town?  Oh, it's "located near Lake Erie," so I'm going to guess it's a town not actually on the lake shore but inland some short distance.  But mountains? What mountains?  And sea?  What sea?  Lake Erie is one of the Great Lakes, a body of fresh water hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.  There are no mountains along the lake.  And how does the border the mountains on one side and the sea on the other?  Wouldn't they border the town?

I'm getting confused.  A second reading doesn't help much.

If Ouna Bay is a town located "near" Lake Erie, how can this little café have a view of "the bay" and a "charming harbor" in the distance?  Is the harbor in the bay?

Does Deany Ray even know what these words really mean?

If the café isn't right on the waterfront, it's not likely to be able to afford a view of the waterfront. This is optics, or physics, or topography, or something.

A reader who takes in the words on the page and turns them into a mental vision is going to be stumped trying to translate these sentences into a "scene."  On the other hand, a reader who just sees words and doesn't want to or need to make them into a coherent whole may be able to enjoy this kind of book just fine.  Kinda like Jabberwocky.

One of the criticisms leveled at Chris Vogler's The Writer's Journey is that it lays out such a rigid template that film makers -- more than creators of books or other forms of Story -- are unable to experiment with other narratives, and that this is why Hollywood keeps remaking the same tired stories over and over and over.  What happens, however, when a writer strays from the tried and true template?  Do we get the wow factor in a "new" template?  Or do we get incomprehensible drivel that doesn't satisfy anyone?

The new writer has far more freedom to experiment than the new producer playing with someone else's millions of dollars.  Just as we have conventions of grammar and spelling to make our writing comprehensible for all readers, so we have conventions of plotting and characterization to make all Stories comprehensible to all readers.  If the new writer wants to ignore those conventions, they're allowed to.  They can make up their own spelling, their own alphabet, their own syntax.  But then they have to deal with the audience that doesn't get it.  

When a reader embarks on the adventure of reading a book, she does so with certain expectations, but each individual reader has her own expectations.  The author who assumes (!) all readers have the same expectations runs a risk of disappointing some, and perhaps most, of those readers whose expectations are . . . different.

Whether the differences are intentional or just the result of incompetence, Deany Ray's stories in Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set just didn't meet my expectations.  I gave them a chance; I'm not going to read any more.