There is a code that I would like to comment upon.
Snuff: I have noticed that some authors use snuff in any story that has someone die. I feel that this is an incorrect usage. Snuff is when someone is killed as part of a sexual act. I would also include serial killers, etc. It does NOT, in my opinion, include people dying in a car crash, or a bank robbery.
What are your feelings
Snuff is when someone is killed as part of a sexual act.
Not necessarily as part of a sexual act. Even without a direct sexual act, if the killer is getting a sexual thrill out of it that would count as snuff in my book.
Some serial killer's would fall under this, some wouldn't.
Snuff is when someone
takes some finely ground tobacco and inhales it. (Or cocaine, that's just a different rush in the nasal cavities.)
That's as opposed to dip, which is more popular in the US than Europe, where you simply, as the commercial used to say, put a pinch between your cheek and gums.
Snuff: I have noticed that some authors use snuff in any story that has someone die. I feel that this is an incorrect usage.
Based on the SOL definition for the snuff story code, it is incorrect. The SOL definition is:
Killing being done during the act of sex. (Non-sexual murder is in violent)
So getting a sexual thrill from killing someone is not snuff, per the definition. I guess the definition isn't specific enough not to include two people having sex while killing someone else, but I doubt that was the intent.
Snuff: I have noticed that some authors use snuff in any story that has someone die. I feel that this is an incorrect usage.
Snuff is one of those codes that lowers you reader number so I wonder too why an author would add it when there's no 'real snuff'. I'm one of those that don't read stories with that code.
I absolutely avoid stories with a "Snuff" code.
I believe that "Snuff" also includes Murder after "sexual" acts upon the victim. Or for those Insane people for whom violence resulting in death "replaces" sex. I would complain Strenuously to the author, and if there was no response, to Lazeez about a story containing such without the Warning: Snuff!
I write stories with significant violence and death, and have read many stories with lots of, sometimes graphic, violence and death.
There is a "fine line" at least for me, between "sick" (or silly) violence in some "Mack Bolan" books, and a few westerns by an author whose name I can't recall but recognize when I see his copious books in stores. Scenes similar to "the 5.56mm tumbler shredded his flesh like a burrito stuffed into a La-Machine spraying blood and gore like modern art..."
During scenes depicting violence, or the aftermath of violence I often depict the horrid smells, voided bowels, stench of burnt flesh, and a realistic amount of blood. Sounds too. Violence may be necessary, or not; up close it is almost always terrible to witness. Most corpses are messy and undignified.
I try to get my readers to understand there are consequences for the participants and witnesses of the violence I depict. Not a "PG rated" "A-Team" (the TV show) where no one is ever killed, and no blood spilled.
I don't like stories that depict blood and gore to titillate "teenage boys" who've never seen actual violence and seem to feel it would be "fun"
Nothing I write can truly depict the violence I have seen. I know that many people have seen much worse.
Still, I hope to "educate" my readers, at least a bit, by some of the realities of combat and violence.
I try to depict my characters as being fatigued, miserable, often in an unpleasant climate, and that is before the violence begins.
Depictions of violence, similar to the blurred boundaries between "Art" and "smut" are difficult to define, but most people tend to recognize it when they see it.
I don't read them either, unless the description seems to indicate that it isn't really snuff.