Words That Go Bump in the Night: Does anyone even care about reviews?

 Full disclosure:  I obtained the Kindle edition of The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast by Sophie Love on 8 May 2021 when it was offered free on Amazon.  I do not know the author nor have I ever communicated with her about this book or any other matter.  I am an author of historical romance, contemporary romantic suspense, and assorted non-fiction.

I have no way of knowing how many copies of any given author-published book are actually sold or at what price.  Whether Sophie Love made a profit on this book is her business. How much she paid FreeBooksy.com to promote it is also her business.  (That's where I got the link to the free Kindle edition.)  How many reviews the book got from that promotion and the ratings on Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites is also her business.

As of today, Monday, 28 June 2021, the book has 1450 ratings on Goodreads for an average of 4.0 stars.  The written reviews number 160.  The breakdown by ratings is as follows:

5-star -- 500

4-star -- 558

3-star -- 299

2-star -- 79

1-star -- 14

On Amazon, it has 2361 ratings for an average of 4.3 stars.

 

So here's my first mostly rhetorical question:

If 1357 people liked it -- that's three stars and above on GR -- why is the author still paying a promoter to give it away for free?

The obvious answer, of course, is that by giving away the first book in a six-book series, she will interest readers in buying the subsequent books.  They will love Book #1 so much that they will plunk out from $2.99 to $5.99 each for the sequels.  That answer may or may not be accurate.

 

Look at the huge drop-off in just the number of ratings for those sequels!  From 2361 Amazon ratings for the first book to just 180 for the second? The sixth book, Disaster and Dessert, has only been published for a few weeks -- 8 June 2021 -- and only has 21 ratings on Amazon (none of which contain reviews that passed Amazon's criteria to actually be shown) and 16 on Goodreads.  The only text review on GR is a 1-star, in which the reviewer cites continuing problems with typos.  One might wonder why the reader continues with the series if this is a situation that bothers her enough to include it in a review, but she's absolutely entitled to leave that review.

Which leads to the second mostly rhetorical question: Who pays more attention to reviews -- readers or self-publishing authors?

I learned a long time ago, long before Goodreads and Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing, that reviews are always suspect. They were questionable back in the days of Romantic Times and Rave Reviews and I knew that from first-hand experience.  Fast-forward from those 1980s and 1990s print reviews to the system-gaming swap groups and fiverr shills of the 2010s, and the writing should have been on the wall that no review is to be trusted on its face.  There were too many verified examples of fake reviews.

Do readers continue to trust them?  I have my doubts.

I don't choose books based on reviews.  Not ever.  I may go by the recommendation of a friend whose opinion I trust, but not by strangers' reviews.  Am I typical?  Probably not.

When I read reviews, I almost always start with the one- and two-star opinions.  In fact, I can't remember when I've ever started with the five-stars. From my earliest experience with Amazon reviews in 2012 and then Goodreads, I knew the five-star reviews were far more likely to be bogus than the one- and two-star criticisms.  To this day, I can read one-star reviews that overtly state they don't know where all the great reviews come from because the book in question is lousy.

I suspect, therefore, that few readers actually rely on published reviews when deciding what books to read.  They may look at the number of reviews and maybe even the rating, but the text review is far less important than genre and price.  Yes, price, because free is attractive to the voracious reader.  I personally download anywhere from five to twelve free Kindle books every single day, thanks to FreeBooksy.com.  (Don't ask when I'll read them.  That's for another blog post.)  When Kindle books by established, traditionally-published genre authors cost $12.99 and up, all that free stuff is mighty attractive.

Often a four or five or nine book series is available for free.  Even if the writing is utter garbage, it's reading material.  And for the non-discriminating reader, the person who just lies on the beach or curls up on the couch to while away a few hours in another place and/or time, quality may not be a priority.

Do (traditional) publishers care about reviews?  Oh, maybe, as long as they're good reviews that promote the book and drive sales.  Publishers are less interested in quality and more interested in quantity; their only concern is the bottom line.  Publishers -- and of course this includes self-publishing authors and small press independents -- do not appear to care if the reviews are honest.  

Can a reviewer collect free books from NetGalley and post the exact same five-star review, not changing a single word, not indicating anything about the book, multiple times and get away with it?  Sure, as long as she has a 4.99 average rating on Goodreads over approximately 5000 titles.  No one cares if she actually read the books or liked them.  As long as she puts down at five-star rating, it's all good.  Three, four, five books a day, every day, five stars here, five stars there.  It's all good.

So then comes the third somewhat rhetorical question: Do the authors care?

Okay, that question goes beyond rhetorical and into facetious.

Authors, and particularly the self-publishing ones, only want five-star reviews.  They don't care how they get them, and they don't care if they're honest opinions or not.  They will buy them from fiverr and other shill outfits.  They will solicit them from friends and family.  They will establish sock puppet accounts on Goodreads -- less easily done on Amazon, but not impossible -- and rate their own books the best evah.  

They will insist that no one should ever rate a book -- especially their book -- negatively without reading the whole thing.  If the book is so bad the reader can't get past the second chapter, is the reader not allowed to say so? Apparently not.  Maybe it gets better in Chapter Five.  Or maybe not.  Regardless . . . .

No negative reviews.

They will insist that no one should ever post a one- or two-star review who hasn't also written a book, because only someone who knows the work that goes into writing can be justified in criticizing a fellow writer's work.  But they will also insist that no fellow writer should ever do anything but support a colleague.  So if you're a writer, you're only allowed to post positive, supportive reviews even if they're untrue.

No negative reviews.

Writers will say -- on Twitter, on Facebook, on Goodreads, on Amazon -- that they welcome constructive criticism.  Negative reviews are allowed (of other writers' work) if they contain suggestions for improvement.  Of course, the reviewer has no way of knowing if the author will pay attention to those suggestions.  And the writer has no idea if the reviewer is qualified to make those suggestions.  And then there are the readers: Do they want to take a chance that the author ignored the advice?  Do readers even know what's good writing advice and what isn't?

I know, I know, I know.  We've been down this road before.  At the end, we always come up against that great big huge gate where the reviewer is accused of being a gatekeeper -- or just a plain hater, or even a jealous hater -- and nothing is accomplished.  Turn around, go back the way you came, pick up another book that's got 1500 five-star ratings on Goodreads and hope for the best. If it's not the best, or not even good at all, don't say anything.  It's not allowed.

If you're one of those readers who has been discouraged from writing honest, critical reviews and who has increasingly turned to traditionally published books that tend to get more honest reviews or to old favorite comfort reads, do you ever wonder if there are new authors you might be missing?  Or do you weigh that loss against the risk of finding just another piece of crap?

Okay, that's not a rhetorical question.  It's legit.  Even though the odds against finding something good are rather high, there is always the slim chance of finding a good freebie.

But even less rhetorical is the question to the authors who aren't being read.  The authors who are being pressured to give away twenty thousand free copies of their books in the hope that someone will read them and give a good review and prompt other people to buy the book.  That question is, How do you feel when you see all the freebies going out and the five-star reviews coming in and you know the books are crap?

Which gets us back to the book mentioned in the opening disclosure.

I forced myself to read just about half of Sophie Love's The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast before I gave up in disgust.  The first two chapters were lively and interesting, and introduced the main character Marie, who is 39 going on 12.  Marie is locked in a dead-end job -- the book's description paints her as a successful dog groomer in Boston, but she's a down-trodden employee of the groomer -- and in a dead-end relationship. All the dead-endedness comes to a head, and Marie quits both job and boyfriend and takes off for Maine.  She inherits a seaside mansion from her great-aunt and decides to turn it into a bed and breakfast.  Three weeks later, she's up and running.  Sort of.

Marie has no clue what she's doing. Though she claims to have had this dream of running a B&B since childhood, she's never apparently done any research on how to do it. She sets up a website in half an afternoon or so and expects reservations to come pouring in immediately.

How is she taking payments?  What laws govern B&Bs in Maine?  Does she have insurance to cover liability if her guests get hurt?  What is she going to do for money?

Most readers won't notice any of this and won't care.

I noticed and I cared.

She starts major renovations on the house almost immediately; where is the money coming from? Her savings?  She had savings working as a dog groomer?  

Her contractor quits, or just fails to keep showing up, and Marie does nothing for several days until finally his assistant just starts doing the rest of the work.  The renovations in question are not one- or two-day jobs, yet she's planning to have guests in less than a month.

Oh, there's also a dog.  Named Boo.  Halfway through the book I don't know if he's a ghost ("Canine Casper") or not.

Halfway through the book, there's no murder, no breakfast. 

Halfway through the book, Marie gets her first paying customer and he does something to upset her to the point that she runs out of the house and heads for town, leaving this guy alone in her B&B.  I'm not sure if she runs to town or drives -- she has an ancient but reliable Saab (they stopped production in 2014) -- but she gushes out her tale of woe to her friend and no one suggests she go back to her business and, you know, take care of business.

It's not just Marie who is, well, TSTL.  Her paying guest, Brendan Peck, is just as bad.  

“I’m a photojournalist on assignment to sort of… well… hold on. Let me start again. Because I only tell people I’m a photojournalist when I don’t want to embarrass myself.”

“So then what are you?”

Brendan sighed and said, “I’m a paranormal investigator. I’m on assignment for a television network

Love, Sophie. The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast (A Canine Casper Cozy Mystery—Book 1) (pp. 80-81). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. 

He's on assignment.  He's some kind of professional.  He has some kind of experience.  Or at least that's what I thought.

But then he gets video footage of something paranormal inside the B&B and he posts the video to Twitter.

“I know, I’m so sorry. I should have gotten your permission first.”

“You really should have,” she said. She wasn’t angry… not yet. She was more disappointed than anything else. “Did you post where it was taken?”

He frowned, his eyes still on the ghost on his laptop. “Yes. But I can delete it! No harm, right?”

Love, Sophie. The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast (A Canine Casper Cozy Mystery—Book 1) (p. 85). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. 

Of course, it's all going to work out in the end, isn't it?  None of his 31K followers will have seen it, other than the 26 or 27 who liked or retweeted it . . . .

That's when Marie runs out and leaves him there.  She runs into town -- I don't know how far it is and I'm not interested in looking it up -- to have lunch with her friend.  While they're eating, the reservations come pouring in.  Brendan's tweet has saved Marie's business!  The one she doesn't know how to operate!  The one she just literally ran away from!

That's when I gave up.

Those are the structural issues, and they're serious.  The stylistic issues are less serious, but they're not inconsequential.  At one point Marie reminisces about sliding down the balcony in the house when she was a child visiting her great-aunt who lived there.  No, one slides down a banister.  Marie constantly refers to the house as a "manor." Well, maybe it is, but there are other words, too, and just using manor over and over and over makes it stand out.  

These are fine details a good critique partner probably would have caught and fixed.  Or a good editor.  It's pretty obvious to this reader that Sophie Love had neither.

I can't leave a negative review on Amazon because I'm an author of romantic suspense/gothic romance.  I can't leave a review on Goodreads because I'm banned there -- for writing honest but negative reviews.

Mostly I write reviews for readers, because I believe readers deserve honesty.  They also deserve to know there are better books out there and they don't have to settle for crap.  Sometimes that means writing a review based on one page, which invokes all kinds of anger from the self-publishing authors.  The writing problems manifested on page one are almost never resolved later in the book.  Writing problems that manifest on page one are problems with the writer, and the writer doesn't change.

But now I'm also reviewing for writers.  For those writers who really do want to improve, who don't want to be relegated to giving away boxed sets of a dozen full-length novels or selling them for $0.99 on Amazon.  Maybe they're making a lot of money via page views on Kindle Unlimited, but if so, why are they giving the books away for virtually nothing?

The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast might actually have potential. I got notice that there's been an update just since I downloaded it six weeks ago, but of course I have no way of comparing the two versions because Amazon will erase the old one when it downloads the new one.

I'll continue to write reviews like this.  Read and follow them if you like.  Respond if you care to.  I won't tolerate abuse, and I won't edit for free.

The Same Words, Over and Over, or why you need to be your own best editor

Reviews are for readers.  Writers should be readers.

Of course, not all readers are writers, but a sojourn into the swamp that is author-published genre fiction quickly makes one believe that many writers are not readers.

I often ask myself what attraction does writing have for a person who doesn't read?  Is it the prospect of easy wealth?  Fame?  The easy wealth thing is easily (pun intended) dispelled: Writing a book isn't easy and too few writers achieve great wealth.  Fame?  How many really famous writers are there?

Maybe some of these non-reading writers have read a book or two, enjoyed it, and thought they could do the same.  If they don't understand the basic structure of fiction, the rules of writing, the elements of style (without capitals), it's not likely that they will enjoy much success in the way of wealth and/or fame.  Those skills have to be learned, and they have to be learned through reading until they become a part of who and what the writer is.  It's not enough to lean on your middle school classroom writing exercises.  They may have taught you the rudiments of grammar and punctuation, but the writing of successful popular fiction requires much more than knowing when to use a comma and when to use a semi-colon.

Nor is it enough to rely on an editor.  If you don't have the requisite skills yourself, you won't be able to recognize their lack when you hand your book over to someone who claims to be an editor.

It doesn't matter what the editor's credentials are.  They may be a retired English teacher or a multi-published author.  What matters is your ability to determine if their editing will make your novel better or worse.

Let's look at the opening paragraph to one book as an example.  Even though we don't have the original text and can't see what the editor has changed, if anything, we can at least look at the final (?) result.

The book in question is Not in the Cards by Amy Cissell, published by the author in October 2018.

And we know this book has been edited because the author made sure to thank the editor!

Special thanks to my editor, Colleen Vanderlinden and my cover artist Daqri Combs for helping put together such a polished book. No woman is an island, and a writer is nothing without a great editor and fantastic cover artist.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 66-67). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Disclosure:  I obtained my copy of Not in the Cards when it was offered as a free Kindle book on Amazon on 21 June 2021.  I do not know the author nor have I ever communicated with her in any way about this book or any other matter.  I am an author of historical romance, contemporary romantic suspense, and assorted non-fiction.

Now, about that opening paragraph:

Sandy unlocked the front door to the little shop she’d just rented and pulled the string on the sign that hung in the window, the sign that had brought her here— to this shop, to this business, and to Oracle Bay. The buzz of the neon broke the near silence. She walked outside to look in at her shop. From the outside, the windows appeared to have been cleaned with shortening. A large triangle of yellow neon framed the words “Alexandra’s Tarot Readings.” A red Eye of Horus and the outline of three cards took turns blinking on and off at the top of the triangle.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 76-80). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

As a reader, I came to the first line and saw Sandy walking up to the door from the outside.  I don't yet have any mental image of her or of Oracle Bay, but I do see her approaching the door from the outside.  She unlocks the door, walks in, and turns on the sign.

The "walks in" isn't stated, but I inferred it because that's the scenario my years of reading have prepared me for.  So when Sandy instead walks outside in the third sentence, I have to adjust my mental images.  It takes a tiny bit of effort to do that and settle into the new scene of Sandy standing outside, perhaps on a sidewalk, looking into her new shop.

I could understand the sign having brought her to the shop, but did the sign in the shop in Oracle Bay bring her to Oracle Bay?  I'm already figuratively scratching my head.  

She pulled a string, so now I'm envisioning a swinging sign, perhaps wooden, perhaps cardboard, that hangs in the window.  I have to alter that image when the author informs me it's a neon sign.  Now I think maybe "cord" would have been a better word than string, to indicate she's turned on a switch of some kind for this electric sign.

Then comes that third sentence where I realize she's been inside and walks outside.  Instead of additional information being revealed with each subsequent sentence to clarify an established mental image, the narrative keeps changing what the previous text has implied.

If the windows looked like they'd been "cleaned with shortening," are they cleaned at all?  Wouldn't "smeared" be a better term?  Are they  just dull or do they look greasy and dirty?  Shop windows that are made of acrylic sheets -- Plexiglas (r) and other trade names -- can easily be scratched when cleaned with anything abrasive and over time become dull and lose some of their transparency.  But that wouldn't make them look "cleaned with shortening."  Would it?

That description interrupts further description of the neon sign, again disrupting the flow of the text.

After just one paragraph, I'm having doubts about the qualifications of the editor.

Now, before you jump all over me for being picky, let me clearly state that yes, I am very picky.  And yes, it's possible for a writer to become very successful without my suggestions!  If you as that writer, however, aren't as successful as you'd like to be, maybe stop and step back from the emotional reaction to my criticism and look at the work -- it's not yours, after all -- objectively.

Did the editor make Not in the Cards so much better that there weren't obvious weaknesses?  Even if we don't know what the original version was, is this the best it can be?

The next two paragraphs are backstory, narrative explanations of how Sandy came to be here outside the shop.  I had some issues with the phrases "it'd belonged to" and "Sandy'd made" because I thought "it had belonged to" and "Sandy had made" would have flowed more smoothly, but they weren't big issues.

Then came 

She turned the sign back off, opened a bottle of wine, and grabbed the cheese and cracker plate she’d picked up at the local supermarket. She made herself a floor picnic, complete with a couple candles to help add light to the dim room, and toasted herself and her newfound freedom.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 87-89). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Wait, what?  When did Sandy go back inside the shop?  We left her standing on the sidewalk, but there isn't a single word about her going back inside.  Did she have to open the door again?  Why did she go out in the first place?

Was the action of going outside just a device for the author to introduce the sign?

An editor or even a good critique partner could/should have caught that.  It's not a major thing in and of itself, but an author should be able to make sure the characters' actions are fully and clearly understood.  I stopped reading when I came to that fourth paragraph and went back to carefully reread the preceding three to see if there was any mention of Sandy returning to the interior of the shop.  

There wasn't.

Interestingly enough, a few pages later, Sandy does the outside-and-back-in-again routine, but it's spelled out.

She walked outside and watched [the sign] cycle through its neon advertisement a couple times before shrugging. [Did the sign shrug?] It was what it was, and there was no going back now. 

Sandy went back inside, pulled a book out of her expansive beaded hemp purse, and sat down to wait for her first customer.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 114-116). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In due course, Sandy's first customer arrives.

Her breath caught in her throat as the woman paused

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 121). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The woman paused and squinted

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 122). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

 the woman took a tentative step

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 125). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

 the woman jumped

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 127). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

the woman instinctively grabbed

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 128). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The woman blinked

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 129). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

 The woman hesitated

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 133-134). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

note of the woman’s name.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 135-136). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

The woman did as requested,

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 139). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

the woman sitting

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 139-140). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

This woman was

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 142). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

the woman as she drew

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 143). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

the woman asked.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 149). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

Did you keep track?  If not, it's thirteen times in less than four pages that the client is referred to as "the woman."  Only once is she called a customer and one more time a client, as well as a few times by her name, which Sandy has learned is Ann.  The rest of the time she is "the woman."

Is this wrong?  No, not really.  But it isn't good.  It isn't polished and professional and evocative.  As a reader or as a writer, can you think of other words that might have been used?  Customer and client are valid possibilities, and each was used once.  What about "stranger"?  "Visitor"?  "Guest"?  Any others?

But the multiple repetitions of one word are only one thing that's awkward -- I'm trying to avoid saying "wrong" -- about this scene of Sandy welcoming her first paying customer.

Ann isn't her first customer.

Remember how the previous scene ended?   Sandy goes outside, comes back in, and waits for her first customer.  It's normal to assume, then that the woman who walks in the door in the very next paragraph is in fact that first customer.

Sandy prepares to do the tarot card reading for Ann, but in the midst of those preparations, we get this:

The clients who’d come in earlier that day had all been vacationers looking for some happy news.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 142). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Wait, what?  

The mental sequence of Sandy settling down to wait for her first customer, reading a romance novel while waiting, and then greeting the woman who walked through the door as her first customer probably should have been revised.  The story action isn't flowing smoothly.  It's been interrupted by the reader questioning what she's already read.

Could the editor have suggested that Sandy reflect on her first couple of clients as being vacationers and that this tarot-reading gig was going to be a lucrative cinch before Ann comes in?  Well, if I were the editor, I certainly would have.  As a reader I noticed the bumpy sequence right away.  

Do most readers notice things like this?  To be perfectly honest, probably not.  If you look at the reviews and ratings author-published genre fiction gets on Amazon and Goodreads, the numbers skew very high.  Few of these novels average less than 4.0 stars, and the one- and two-star ratings are few and far between.  Is that because the books are so good?  Or is it because over the past few years negative reviews and their writers have been so often attacked?  Is it because positive reviews are encouraged?  Do readers who have negative reading experiences resist writing reviews because there are so many pressures not to?

One of the most common and most vociferously argued is "Don't write a negative review unless you've read the whole book."  And if the book is so bad you can't finish it, writing a review saying so is therefore strongly discouraged.  Result: badly written books don't get negative reviews.  Subsequent result: authors of badly written books don't improve because they don't know their books are badly written.  Or, in some cases, badly edited.

(As an experiment, look at some of the reviewers on Goodreads who don't leave reviews but post five-star ratings.  How many of them have very high average ratings, 4.5 and above?)

To continue.  The first chapter of Not in the Cards contains two detailed tarot readings, one that Sandy does for her paying customer Ann and another she does for herself.  Tarot cards aren't all the same; today there are dozens, maybe hundreds of different decks featuring themes such as dragons and witches, angels and fairies, dogs and kittens, and in styles such as Native American, feminist, pagan, and so on.  To someone even slightly familiar with the Tarot, the lack of description of the deck used and especially of the individual cards that turned up in Sandy's readings was noticeable.  

Sandy is apparently using "her old college tarot cards" (Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 83-84). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.)  Nothing between that statement and her ushering Ann in for a reading suggests Sandy has obtained any other tarot deck.  So the reader doesn't know if the deck Sandy obtained in college is the familiar Rider-Waite deck or some other.

The reader is also assumed to be familiar with the cards and with the whole method of tarot divination.  None of that is given the slightest explanation in the text.

For instance:  What does it mean when a card is reversed?  What is the Celtic cross layout?  What does The World card look like?  What does The Fool card signify?  What are pentacles and cups, wands and swords and rods?  (I assume she meant rods and wands to be interchangeable, but I don't know for sure.)  A novel doesn't have to give all the details, but it should give . . . some.

I managed to get through the first full chapter but wasn't enticed to read further.  There were other minor issues that bothered me in addition to those cited above.  The one that stood out most was Ann described as 

her skin was the rich shade of brown.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 123-124). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

"The" rich shade of brown?  Is there only one?

I can overlook the occasional punctuation/capitalization/grammar error, but things like that pull me right smack dab out of the story into  "Huh? Ugh!" territory.

Not in the Cards was published in 2018 but only has 26 reviews on Amazon, and 64 ratings on Goodreads.  When it was offered free on 21 June 2021, it shot up to #20 in the Kindle Free listings, so it will be interesting to see how many reviews it picks up on both Amazon and Goodreads as a result.

 

 

 

Separation of words and self

The past several weeks have been rather, shall we say, challenging for me, which is why I haven't kept this blog up quite as regularly as I would have liked.  Two separate writing projects have demanded my time and concentration, as well as other aspects of real life.  Right now, however, I am facing the prospect of about a week tending a dog recuperating from surgery, so I'll probably have a lot of time at the desk and computer to catch up on some of the blogging.

One of the issues that's been brought home to me in some rather startling ways is this whole issue of writers wailing that their books are their babies.  They seem to use this claim as a justification for both outrage over negative book reviews and outright attacks (usually verbal rather than physical) on the reviewers. 

This is not a new phenomenon.  Writers have been dissing critics just about as long as there have been writers and critics.  My own experience goes back just around 30 years to my early days in Romance Writers of America and judging RWA contest entries.  In face-to-face critique groups and online groups, along with one-on-one evaluations, responses to criticism ranged from "You're right; I need to fix that" to "It's my book and I'll write it the way I want to!  Who are you to tell me how to write my book?"

After this more recent brouhaha over critical reviews which escalated to the point of reviewers receiving death threats, I wondered what is it that makes some writers react to criticism of their writing with such intensely personal outrage.  The reviewers don't know the writers; all they're doing is commenting on their reaction to the book.  And yet the writers take it so very personally.  Why?

I'm not sure why I happened to think of my old writing buddy EK last night, but I did, and I began to see a connection between her reaction to criticism 20 years ago and this current wave of battered egos.

EK was in her early 60s when I met her, a delightful, cheerful woman with an infectious laugh and a constant smile.  Nothing about her demeanor suggested she had been through some very, very hard times.  Her first husband had deserted her with two small children; she had at one point lived with the children in the basement of an abandoned church.  Her second husband was abusive, and in and out of jail for various not-so-petty crimes.  After two more children she divorced him, but he hounded her for years and years afterward.  He broke into her home, stole from her, made so much trouble that she was evicted from several apartments.  The problems with him only stopped when he beat her so badly -- because she didn't have any cash in her home for him to steal -- that she ended up in the hospital and he ended up in jail for a much longer stretch.

She had lived in or near poverty most of her life, unable to hold a job very long because of the issues in her personal life.  One child died of AIDS in the early days of the epidemic; another disappeared into the streets.  There had been other, serious problems, the kind none of us wants to have even one of but EK had several.

Two other writers and I had formed a critique group, and when EK asked to join we welcomed her.  At our first meeting she described her work-in-progress as a contemporary romance featuring a high school math teacher recovering from a bitter divorce and a firefighter who had just lost his young wife to cancer.  Given that this was the late 1980s, EK's characters were way ahead of their time in terms of the contemporary romance market.  The rest of us warned her about this, but she insisted this was the story she wanted to write, and these were the characters she wanted to write about.  Okay, fine.

The book began with a Prologue that provided almost all the backstory for both characters in a classic "Write Chapter 1, write Chapter 2, throw away Chapter 1" fashion.  EK politely accepted our suggestions that she weave backstory into the narrative, but continued to insist it was her story and she would tell it her way. 

At our next meeting, we critiqued her Chapter 1 (which was effectively her second chapter), which served to introduce the firefighter hero character. Though it was competently written for the most part, we three readers found some continuity and consistency flaws and a few other mistakes.  EK graciously and sometimes self-deprecatingly agreed with almost all of our assessments and said she would fix the errors.  My personal feeling was that she had a workable story in process, and if she continued to accept advice as well as she had, she would probably end up incorporating her prologue's info-dumpy contents into the story and ditching the Prologue to produce a viable book manuscript.

Our third meeting should have brought us to Chapter 2, but instead EK brought her revised Chapter 1.  She had reworked the sections where we had found problems, and she had made some other revisions and additions.  The new material revealed some other errors and weaknesses; she didn't argue with our comments and agreed these things needed to be fixed.  We specifically told her to let them go for the time being and bring us the next chapter.

She didn't.  She brought yet another revision of Chapter 1.  When we asked her why she hadn't brought the next chapter, she explained that she hadn't written it yet.  "I have to have this chapter absolutely perfect," she said, "before I go on.  This character is my hero, my hero, and to tell the truth I'm reluctant to share him even with the other main character in the story."

At the time, we all kind of laughed and teased her about falling in love with her own fictional creation, but as a few more meetings went by, she brought only the first few pages of Chapter 2 along with more revisions, more additions to Chapter 1.  It became clear that EK really had fallen in love with this fictional firefighter, and she wasn't about to share him.

For a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with EK and her book boyfriend, the critique group dissolved after about five months.  I stayed in contact with both EK and one of the other members for a long time afterward, long enough to learn that EK never did write any more on her book.  The other writer, who went on to be traditionally published, and I agreed that EK really wasn't writing for publication.  She was writing to create the kind of man and the kind of romance she had never had in real life. 

We further agreed that there was nothing wrong with this.  If EK had been pushed to finish her book, if she had found a publisher for it, she would have had to share her hero; and sharing him would have broken her heart.  She wasn't writing for readers, she was writing for herself. 

In at least one of the recent explosions of writer over-reaction to negative reviews, the writer had made it abundantly clear that she was writing the kind of story she loved.  As in EK's case, there's nothing wrong with that. 

What seems to be more and more apparent in each of these emotional outbursts in response to negative criticism of the writing is that the writers are equating that criticism to attacks upon themselves.  They claim, sometimes in explicit language, that their books are their babies and criticism of the book is therefore a personal affront. 

They claim that they don't mind low ratings (1- or 2-star ratings) or negative reviews, provided the review is constructive, is kind, is helpful.  Again, they want the review directed toward them, as the writers, not toward the readers for whom the review is intended.

Which all makes me wonder if in fact the writers were never writing for readers in the first place.  They were writing for themselves, with really no thought to the fact that other people would be reading, people who did not have the same passion for that particular book that the writer had.  Unable to separate themselves from their stories, the writers are unable to put themselves in the position of "mere" reader.

Very often there are other specific details about the writer's experience that raise some red caution flags. 

The writer who over-reacts to negative reviews often has a group of fellow writers for mutual support.  Most of them will have very little if any experience or knowledge of the writing/publishing business.  They are writing books based on personal experience or personal passion with the intent of sharing the writing as a direct extension of the self.  There is much less emphasis placed on how the resultant work will effect or impact or be received by the reader, and more emphasis placed on the personal expression of the experience or passion.  In other words, the writing is writer-centered rather than reader-centered.

The group is not, in fact, a critique group directing its attention to the writing, but a support group directing its effort toward the writer.  The writer is encouraged to write, but the writing itself is not critiqued.  Or if it is, the critique is more encouraging than critical.

Even after the writer has self-published the book, there is an entire community of writers who refuse to offer critical reviews because of their identification with the writer.  They admit they do not want to hurt the writer's feelings.  They refuse to leave a negative review or low rating because to do so would be to minimize the effort the writer put into the product.  They defend other writers, even when the writing is shown to be objectively sub-standard, and admit they fear retaliation if they even point out mistakes.  In some cases, these writers' works exhibit the same mistakes, suggesting they themselves are not qualified to provide the kind of writing-criticism the original writer needs if she wants to write for readers.

It's easy to make the leap from this to speculate that many of these hyper-sensitive writers have never been voracious readers.  They don't exhibit any kind of empathy with readers, but only with writers.  They seem unable to recognize the writing flaws that distinguish their writing from "good" writing, or at least writing that fits the standards generally accepted for successful popular fiction and non-fiction.  Even when they do admit, however reluctantly, that their writing mechanics may fall short, they offer a common set of excuses and/or justifications: They can't afford an editor, or the reader shouldn't complain about a free/inexpensive book, or the writer is a beginner and shouldn't be held to the same standard as professionals.  Again, the writer and her feelings always have priority over the quality of the product and the reader's expectations of it.

Anyone who disagrees with them is a bully, trying to kill their book and their writing career.  I'm not sure, at this point, that most of those writers ever really contemplated a writing career.  They have exhibited little to no professionalism in the production of their books that would indicate they've studied how to write and how to publish.  Instead, they have simply poured their "heart and soul" into words on electronic paper and uploaded them.  That's not a career any more than my buying a set of golf clubs would make me a professional golfer.

A common response to these meltdowns is that the writers need to develop thicker skins, and I've certainly expressed that feeling often enough myself.  After some of the most recent events, however, I'm beginning to think that's the wrong advice, simply because for these writers, growing a thicker skin is simply not possible.  Their books were really never intended to be shared with a wider audience than friends and family and supporters who would be encouraging and uncritical.  Their books really are their babies, part of themselves, created for themselves, even if the writers insist otherwise.  There's no indication that the writers did any kind of research to make sure they were producing a work that would be well-received by the reading public.  There are many more indications that they were simply writing for their own enjoyment.

And again, there's nothing wrong with this.  The problem arises when the writers forget -- and perhaps they never knew -- that when one writes for other people's enjoyment, one has to take their considerations and expectations first, not last.

Those of us who are avid readers long before we are compulsive writers know almost viscerally that books are not their writers.  Books are a creative product put into a public marketplace for consumption, discussion, comparison, and review, quite separate from their creators.  The conversations we readers have with each other about those books that fall short of our expectations as readers are not about the writers -- unless and until the writer inserts herself confrontationally into that conversation.

Letting go of the words. . . . again

So, it's done.

Legacy of Honor is live on Amazon.

I was never a shameless hussy of self promotion, and I doubt I'm ever going to be.  This blog and my comments on various books-and-authors websites like Booklikes and maybe a post on Facebook are as much promo as I've ever been comfortable doing.

But as I blogged earlier, something about this republication of my first print-published book has been very emotional for me.  I'm not totally sure why.

Back in March of this year, when I really began the process, I blogged some of my thoughts about to change or not to change a book that had been written over 30 years ago, whether I should bring it up to the, for lack of a better phrase, market sensibilities of 2013.  Back then I made the decision not to. 

In March I already knew some of the problems with the various versions of the book, and I knew I was going to have to make at least some revisions.  I had no idea then how extensive they would be or how much effort they would take, but I didn't really think the process would be too difficult or complex.

I was wrong.  Very wrong.

Part of that March blog post was intended to form the basis of an author's foreword to the digital edition, and I did paste it into the digital manuscript as I worked on the edits.  What started as a couple of paragraphs, however, quickly grew to several pages.  As usual, I was telling someone how to make a watch when all they'd asked for was the time.  Fortunately (I hope!) for my readers, I cut that foreword back to just a couple of paragraphs for the now-republished digital version.

While sitting at my desk today, working at my day-job and waiting for Legacy to go live on Amazon, I experienced a very unexpected emotional assault.  Like my heroine Alexandra, I cry easily, and so I wasn't particularly surprised that I found myself near tears several times this afternoon.  I know myself pretty well, and that's how I am.  But I also usually shake that stuff off pretty easily.

In the context of all the ruckus online regarding negative reviews and authors responding inappropriately and especially my own comments, I sat back to examine how I felt about all this.  In particular, how did my emotional reaction compare to the "my book is my baby!" nonsense I had criticized when other authors offered it as an excuse for their tirades against negative reviews.

Was I more sympathetic to them?  Did I have a clearer understanding of how they felt?  Did I accept their defense as valid?  In words of one syllable:  No, yes, and hell no.


What follows now is that much, much, much too long "Author's Foreword to the 2013 Edition" further expanded with some thoughts now that the book has in fact been republished.  Some of this text will be familiar to those of you who have read the earlier version in March, but much of it is new.

There is sometimes a temptation, when preparing a work for republication many years after its debut, to alter the story and make it more suitable for the present day's audience.  In essence, to write it the way it would have been written today.  After some considerable deliberation, I chose not to do that with Legacy of Honor, which was my first published novel.

I have, however, made some minor changes that I feel will improve the reading experience without changing the substance of the book, in either content or tone.

Written over a period of roughly two years between 1980 and 1982, Legacy endured rejections by several of the major paperback publishers.  During the submission process, one editor suggested the manuscript be trimmed from its original hefty 240,000 words (Version #1) and she'd take another look at it; I made substantial cuts and resubmitted the manuscript (Version #2), but that editor ultimately did not offer a contract.

At some point after that rejection, I decided on my own to make a major revision to the ending, for reasons detailed in one of the previous blog posts.  I also purchased a new typewriter.  Since the entire manuscript would have to be retyped to lead into the dramatically altered ending, I rewrote the synopsis to reflect that change, then typed the standard outline-and-sample-chapters submission to send to Leisure Books.  I anticipated at the very least the usual two to three months before receiving any response, which would be plenty of time to make all the revisions necessary to accommodate the new ending as well as type the rest of the approximately 650 manuscript pages.

I didn't count on a letter arriving just five days later -- via snail mail, which was all we had in 1984 -- requesting the complete manuscript.  Somehow or other, I managed to make the changes so the book matched the revised synopsis, to retype the whole thing, and to send it back within about a week.  That was the version (Version #3) Leisure purchased, of roughly 180,000 words.

Months later, the editor requested further cuts – about 15,000 words – to meet production costs; I made those in two or three days (Version #3a), with little time to make sure internal consistency was maintained and no glaring plot errors were created in the process.  I did the best I could, then trusted any details I missed would be caught and fixed by the editor.

Except that they weren't caught or fixed.  With the exception of typesetting and other errors, Legacy of Honor was published exactly as I had written it.  There were no revisions requested; there were no revisions made.  I never saw the page proofs prior to publication, so was quite stunned to discover the product that hit bookstore shelves in February of 1985 was riddled with typos and other minor errors that I probably would have caught if offered the opportunity to proofread.  But in those days, a published novel was essentially carved in stone.  My name was on the cover and I had to live with the errors.  I could always blame the editors for the errors; after all, they were the ones responsible for the errors -- including typos! -- on the back cover blurb.  I had nothing at all to do with that.

Fast-forward to 2013.  With the publishing rights reverted to me after the Dorchester bankruptcy, my first task in digitizing the text was to catch as many of those errors as possible, just as I would have done if I had proofread the print version.  I made an OCR scan of the print version to digitize it and thought it would simply be a matter of proofreading and fixing small errors.

In the process, however, I also discovered minor line-editing details – many of which were related to those cuts demanded by the editor at the last minute – that I had thought would be fixed but weren't, such as a character who entered a conversation before entering the room.  Most of these errors required little more than the restoration of a line or two from the original, untrimmed manuscript or other similar quick fixes.  I knew I had a copy of the original Version #2, and I located a copy of Version #3 to see where most of the cuts had been made and what could be restored.  I felt comfortable that I would be publishing a digital version that was 99.5% identical to what was printed in 1985, and that the 0.5% (or even less) would be virtually undetectable.

As I began what I thought was a final proofread of the digital edition, I discovered a much more significant error of exactly the type I had expected an editor to catch.  I'm not sure if I would have noticed it in 1985 when all I'd have been looking for was typos, but on revisiting the story almost 30 years later, the omission of some crucial text was glaring.  I went back to my original manuscripts and realized that, for various reasons, this problem could not be solved just by adding back in a paragraph or two from a previous manuscript version.  Several scenes needed substantial revisions, not so much to change the story but to make it make sense.

 

I recognized that the major change I'd made between Version #2 and Version #3 really required more revision than I'd been able to make in that ten day or two week period.  There were some rather large continuity errors, some of which had in fact been exacerbated by the later cuts that became #3a.  I realize this almost certainly makes much more sense to me than it does to you, dear reader, because I know how the novel evolved through those changes.

But that is what led to the dilemma.  Did I want to make the changes now, in 2013, that I felt an editor should have requested to correct what appeared to be, well, some rather significant plot holes?  Or did I want to preserve the original as much as possible?

I had to give the matter some thought.  Serious thought.

Because there were some other issues. 

Writing in the days before the Internet, before Google and Wikipedia and all the other wonderful research tools now available at our fingertips, I had to rely on much more limited resources for historical detail, and as a result there were some minor errors of fact – minor, that is, in terms of how the story was constructed.  I didn't want to leave those uncorrected, which meant at least some changes from the original text.

Given those changes and the fact that I had already made minor line editing corrections and restored other bits and pieces that had been cut from the original, I finally decided that if the book was worth republishing at all, it was worth republishing with its flaws fixed so it at least made internal sense.

 

I still work a day job, though I do work at home and have a certain amount of flexibility.  My day job, however, requires a great deal of intense mental focus, which precludes using that time to write or even think about writing.  I had to do all of my rewriting, all of my proofreading, all of my writing in short bits of time snatched here and there from other endeavors.  Because the revisions also required very tight focus -- I had to weave everything in as seamlessly as possible to the existing narrative and not change any more than absolutely necessary -- I was rarely able to do very much at a time.  And I had to keep going back and checking to make sure I didn't make more problems with each revision than I was fixing. 

 

Unlike the other previously published books I'd put into digital format, Legacy was demanding a lot of original creative effort.  In a way, this was good, very good.  I was enjoying that creative effort immensely and only wished I had more time to devote to it.  My frustration came not from the complexity and delicacy of the project but from the time I had to give to other activities. 

 

Slowly, slowly, page by chapter by revision, everything began to come together.  I found a cover design I really, really liked.  I made it through a second read, then a third to do an intense proofreading.  I found more small errors that had to be fixed, so I fixed them.  Then came the conversion for Kindle -- with no misspelled words on the first try!! -- and another proofreading.  Even on this fourth read, I found tiny, tiny mistakes that reminded me no matter how carefully I would go over it, undoubtedly there were still errors.  Nothing is ever perfect.

Then it was time to write the blurb (that's a blog post in itself!) and put it all together and actually publish it.  I did that about 11:00 this morning, and around 6:00 this evening, Legacy of Honor went live for the first time since 1985.

And for most of those seven hours, I was a basket case.

Do I have a better understanding now of how an author feels when her precious work receives a negative review?  No.  I always understood that.  I also understood, better than those who have never been through the process, what it's like to put your creative work in the hands of someone who will not have the intimate respect for it that the author does and who ultimately puts it out there in the public's hands with what amounts to a dirty face, mismatched socks, and holes in its underwear. 

I took that poor abused child back, washed its face, made sure its stockings were the same color, and put on brand new undies.

And then I let it go.

Because that's what you have to do.  It's what you have to do as a parent and as an author.  You have to let go.

So how does this saga end?

 

Cleaning up the typesetting and a few research errors, plus restoring some of the excised text (a total of approximately 25,000 words, including the original Prologue, thus bringing it to 194,000 or ~550 Kindle pages) and revising for clarity were the only changes I made.  The story line, the events and actions and the characters remain otherwise unchanged from what was printed in 1985.  And I've left my writing style alone, too, pretty much.

Did I write the book differently in 1983 than I would if I were writing it today?  Of course.  But the Legacy of Honor I wrote in the early 1980s was true to its time.  In releasing it again, I wanted to keep it true to itself, and to myself as the writer I was then.  So yes, there is rampant head-hopping.  Will it drive the reader crazy?  Oh, maybe.  And if I'd had an Internet to do research, I might have gone into more historical detail.  But I wrote with the tools and experience and style and editorial guidance that were available to me, and that's the way it will stay.

I hope you enjoy it.

Putting the words back together again

To be perfectly honest, I never thought it would take me this long to complete the revisions to Legacy of Honor.  It didn't take as long as the actual writing of the book, though there were times when I thought it might.  But as of approximately 10:00 A.M., Wednesday, 4 September 2013, the revisions were complete.

I began to detail this process here and here.  Now that the revised version is 99.0% ready for digital republication, I have a much better understanding of what happened even than I had four or five months ago.  In light of other things that have happened in the book world recently, I thought it might be worthwhile to share some of that understanding.


When I wrote Legacy of Honor -- that was the working title from the beginning and never changed -- in the early 1980s, I wrote it for myself.  Though I had been reading historical romances for close to 20 years by that time and had even written another before Legacy, I didn't consciously write with any other reader in mind but myself.

This is not to say I didn't have intentions of trying to publish it from the beginning.  That was always the objective.  But I was still writing first and foremost for myself.  If somehow or other the book attracted a publisher and found itself in print, well, that would be all well and good, but I was the first reader and I was going to write the book(s) I wanted to read.  I really never even considered the other people out there who might read it.

As I began to share Legacy with a handful of friends, however, my perspective started to change.  The feedback from those first few readers -- none of them were writers -- put me in a very different situation.  I was still writing for myself, but because they were reading it, I was also writing for them whether I wanted to or not.  That didn't mean I had to take their advice and change the book to suit their preferences, but I did have to take into consideration that they might not read the book the same way I had read it, or even the same way I had written it.

Letting non-writers like Suzanne, Johneen, and Connie read it was a bit scary.  Almost no one had ever read any of my fiction before, and I didn't know what to expect in the way of feedback.  But as it turned out, they really liked it, and even though I didn't entirely trust their assessment -- they were, after all, friends, so they'd be biased; and they knew nothing about writing -- they did give me enough encouragement that I sought out some writers to share it with. 

Through a variety of channels I began networking.  I had always had my personal sources for information about writing and publishing like Writer's Digest, Writer's Market and The Writer, but I needed more if I seriously intended to try to get this book published.  I bought several how-to-write books, some of which I considered invaluable and others not so much.  (Lawrence Block's Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print was one of the solid gold nuggets I still recommend.)  In addition to studying how to write, over the next several months I established a circle of pen-pals with whom I swapped manuscripts.  Those connections in turn led me to Romance Writers of America and Romantic Times magazine. 

At that point I was not just sharing with other people the story I had written for myself; I was beginning to write for them, with them in mind, with their potential reactions and comments anticipated while I was still writing.

Please understand that I was not consciously aware of this at that time.  Subconsciously I undoubtedly was, because I made a major change to the ending of Legacy in order to make it more marketable.  Or at least to make it more dramatic, to carry a particular thread through from beginning to end, to make the ending more intense -- all in order to make it more attractive to editors and other readers.

When did I begin to realize this on a conscious level?  I'm not sure.  Maybe I never did, at least not until beginning these revisions.

This was a really terrifying concept.  It had the potential to change how I wrote; more important, however, it had the potential to change why I wrote.  And even if it hadn't affected my writing 20 or 30 years ago, it certainly was now.

In fact, it did change both the way and the why I wrote.

Most of us have witnessed the painful meltdowns of writers who weren't prepared for any kind of negative criticism of their work and who took even the gentlest of suggestions as tantamount to ritual murder.   Their tantrums today quickly go viral via Twitter and Facebook, and their critics are instantly labeled trolls and bullies and criminals.  But the truth is that most writers, even those who are embarrassingly unskilled and who upload writing that would make a fifth-grade teacher weep, don't fall apart at criticism.  They either ignore it, deny its validity, or don't care. 

Maybe they are still in that blissful state of enjoying writing for its own sake.  Maybe they're still just writing for themselves and understand that ultimately, that's all that matters.

Writing is a supremely selfish act.  It's a supremely self-centered act.  No one should be surprised that there are so many "Mary Sue/Marty Stu" characters -- writers put themselves into their stories all the time and so the Mary Sueishness is really just a matter of degree.

Publishing, and especially self-publishing, is an act of profound contradiction that requires the writer to be both supremely selfish and supremely self-denying.  The writer must maintain her confidence and her pride in the work, making it a part of herself so that she treats it with the love and respect and care it deserves; but she must also prepare it to live on its own in the dangerous world of the literary marketplace where it may be slammed and shamed and stabbed and eviscerated by people who frankly don't give a shit about it -- or about her.

As I completed my revisions and then prepared to make a final proofreading sweep through the book, I realized how much more I worried about what other people thought of it than I had when I originally wrote the book.  In examining my personal history of writing, I realized too that there were all these various stages through which the book passed, virtually without my recognizing it. 

The old adage about writing is still true.  First you do it for fun, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money.  But it's also incomplete.  In between writing for your friends or those readers you've personally selected and making any money, you have to write for strangers.  It's all those unknown readers out there over whom you have no control who pose the greatest danger as well as the greatest potential.

At some point, the writer has to trust them.  More than that, however, the writer has to respect those readers.  Respect them enough to give them her very best work possible, and respect them enough to give it to them unconditionally.

I've reached the point of a final (I hope!) proofreading pass of Legacy of Honor.  It will be the best I can make it.  And then, dear readers, it's yours.

Words as therapy, words as dreams

One lovely Sunday morning in August of 1963, I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled to the little drug store near my home.  I purchased an ordinary spiral notebook there and pedaled home.  With pencil in hand, I sat down on the front porch of our house, opened the notebook, and began to write:

Sunday, August 11, 1963 (Morning entry)

I won't bore you with the teen-aged drivel-and-angst the followed.  After all, I was two months shy of fifteen so there was a lot of teen-aged drivel-and-angst to be written.

This was not, of course, my first foray into writing.  At a considerably younger age -- perhaps 9 or 10 -- I had started a number of the almost obligatory horse-and-girl fantasy stories, but by the time I reached junior high, my range of reading material had changed.  I was only in sixth grade, so not yet 12, when I began writing a pirate story in the style of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood, with a bit of treasure from The Count of Monte Cristo thrown in for good measure.  The summer before the diary was born, I had started what would today probably be called a dark ages historical romance, set during the barbarian invasions that collapsed the Roman Empire.  Though none of that manuscript remains in existence, I remember enough details of the story to know that my historical research for that period was pretty much non-existent!  Can you spell "anachronism"?

Sometime between the summer of 1962 and the summer of 1963, however, I began work on yet another novel, a contemporary mystery romance titled A Party of Ghosts.  The plot is kind of not really there and the main character is very Mary Sue-ish.  But there are themes of murder and sexual violence and non-marital sex and there may even be an illegal abortion.  This was pretty strong stuff for a 14 year old.  I'm not sure how far along I was on this novel by August of 1963, but I had definitely made a healthy start on it.  Writing the diary was not a new adventure for me.

Interestingly, though, I kept at it.  And I kept at the other writing, too.  Eventually, perhaps in the summer of 1964, I finished A Party of Ghosts.  The first draft -- chapterless and single-spaced on an ancient Remington manual typewriter -- is about 100,000 words, and I still have most of it.  There are a few pages missing, and I'm not sure why, but most of it resides in the file cabinet next to my desk as I write this.  Like the diary, it's filled with a lot of teen-aged drivel-and-angst.

I continued to write through high school, through my first stab at college at the University of Illinois, through my wanderings to New York and France and Spain and back again, but none of my fiction reached the completed manuscript stage.  And again, I still have a lot of it, tucked neatly in file folders or three-ring-binders.  Most of it is, um, not very good.

With my marriage in June of 1969, I vowed not to write fiction any more and instead to put my energy into being a wife and eventually a mother.  That vow lasted a few months.  But I had never promised to give up the diary, and it went on.  Yes, by that time, the diary was almost six years old.  It had gone beyond that spiral notebook and now filled several.

As the years went on and I continued to write fiction, I continued to keep the diary as well.  It now, almost 50 years later, comprises 23 spiral notebooks of various sizes and has recently entered the 24th.  I spent a great deal of spare time over a  period of about eight years actually transcribing it all, often horribly embarrassed in the process.  Was I really that angst-ridden at that age?  And "that age" wasn't necessarily as a teen-ager!

Would I ever want the diary published.  Good goddess, no!  I'd be mortified.  As Susan Douglas writes in the "Introduction" to Where the Girls Are: Growing up female with the mass media:  "Reading the diary I kept as a teenager is now excruciating, so mortifying that, if someone were to find it, I think I would blind myself with hot coals or simply commit hara-kiri.  I look back at my former self . . . the words she wrote in her spiral notebooks obsessed with two topics -- boys and sex -- and I wonder:  Who are you?  How could you have been so insipid?  Are you related to me?  How did you become me?"

When I read the first page of Douglas's marvelous, witty, and yet devastatingly honest book, I knew exactly what she was talking about.  But I also felt she had missed one point:  The importance of being able to look back at that former self.  Douglas's book, however, is not about the value of keeping a diary.  And keeping a diary is not a luxury everyone has or wants to have.

But as recent events have unfolded regarding the publication of unedited, authentic personal accounts, lost in the legal ramifications is, I believe, the true empowerment value of being able to express, without reservation and without qualification, one's feelings, all the drivel-and-angst that assails all of us at any age.

I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to  write.  It was never a matter of wanting to; I simply did it.  And I can understand that there are people for whom writing isn't the joy it is for me.  But as I've read some of the personal accounts of people who have endured traumatic personal events, more and more often I've read that they found some comfort, some relief, some healing in the venting of their feelings through writing. 

This kind of personal satisfaction doesn't rely on good grammar or perfect spelling.  The writer doesn't need to know or care about the difference between affect and effect, accept and except, writing and writting and written and wrote.  None of that matters, and it shouldn't.  That's the kind of writing that is for the writer.  She and only she is going to read it, and she knows what she means and what she wants to mean.  Eyes off and hands off her words.  They don't belong to anyone else.

That's how I feel about my diary.  When someone once read a part of it, I felt absolutely and totally violated, as though he had drilled a hole in my head and not only entered my thoughts and feelings but took them away from me, claimed them for himself, deprived me of my most personal possession.  For that reason, I never ever ever violated my children's privacy.  I never listened in on their phone calls.  I never looked through their dresser drawers.  When I found  a little "diary" that my daughter had written at the age of about 13 or 14, I returned it to her unopened and unread -- and it didn't matter that she was by then in her 30s!  The privacy of thoughts was sacrosanct.

When a writer decides to share her words, whether it's with one other person or with "the public," all those things that didn't matter before suddenly do matter.  Grammar and spelling and punctuation and using the right words.  All that stuff.  Why?  Because now she wants someone else to read her thoughts, and she has to use the tools of language to make those thoughts as clear as she can.  And the more people she wants to share it with, the more important her skill with those tools become.

As angst-ridden as my diaries from those teen-age years are, they are at least competently written.  As shallow and plotless and Mary Sue-ish as A Party of Ghosts is, at least a reader would understand what I was trying to say.  The verbs are right, the pronouns have proper antecedents, words are spelled correctly, commas are used where they're needed and not used where they aren't.

But that's because I always wrote.  I took the lessons learned in "language arts" class, as it was called at South Junior High in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and I used them to hone my storytelling skills.  These were the absolutely essential tools of the writing craft.  In all the years since then, I have often wondered if they might not also be the absolutely essential tools of living.

Maybe not.  Maybe now, in the days of Twitter and texting, when speed and brevity are more important, when feelings deeper than a :-) or a :grr: have no emoticons, when "IKR" is a whole sentence, what difference does writing make?

Writing makes a difference because we can't dream in emoticons and acronyms.  We still say "I know, right?!" in a way that means so much more than "IKR."  Maybe that will change with some future technology.  Maybe someday there will be tablets that you touch an icon and a whole emotional paragraph will appear on the screen or be broadcast through the speakers.  Who knows?  But for now, words are all we have to take what's in our hearts, our souls, our dreams, and make it real enough to share with someone else.

Sorrow shared is sorrow cut in half; joy shared is joy doubled. 

Sometimes it helps to share our sorrow, our grief, our fear, our anger, even if the only one you can share it with yourself.  Write it out, put it on paper or on the computer screen, and even if you don't share it with anyone else, even if you don't send that angry email or post that vicious comment or publish that scathing blog, just getting the words out can help.  Maybe it's just a vent for pressure and steam, or maybe it puts ideas into context, or maybe it helps understand.  If it's for yourself, that's enough.

But when the time comes to share the dreams and fears and joy and pain, then it matters how you write it.  It matters if you want someone else to be able to understand and feel what you felt. 

We do that, we who write, by following conventions so everyone is on the same page (pun intended).  Some of those conventions are so obvious they don't seem to need much explanation.  We all use the same alphabet, for example.  We all know what most of the common words mean: a, the, and, book, story, large, small, running, walking, eating.  We know, as both readers and writers, that something that doesn't follow those conventions won't make a whole lot of sense.

For example:

Deer Sirr:

I seed yoo wokkin outer the pos offiss yessaday an is hoppin yoo fown mi wollet gotz sum munny init.

Can you figure that one out?  Would it have been easier to read if I had written

Dear sir:

I seen you walkin outta the post office yestiday and I is hopin' you found the money what I lost.

In creating fiction, the writer has lots of options for re-creating the differences between what we consider standard English and non-standard.  Does the exact same feeling come across?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the compromise gives the same impression -- the person who wrote the note is not well educated and probably doesn't speak any more literate than he or she writes -- while still leaving the text intelligible for the reader without forcing her to back out of the reading experience to understand it.

This is part of the "invisible manuscript" technique that's so important for every writer.  You want the reader to forget she's just looking at letters and words on a page.   You want her to enter into the experience you're describing.

Some of us are lucky enough by fortune and experience to have acquired the language skills necessary to do that, and to have acquired them before we embarked on anything resembling a writing career.  For those who didn't, however, there are options.  Not everyone, of course, plans to become a writer.  Many who never wanted to write or who even actively disliked writing when they were in school find themselves years later wanting or needing those skills. Some never had the opportunity to learn.  But no matter what the reason, failure to write in a manner that allows the reader to enter the story rather than struggle to discern the meaning pretty much guarantees that the work will not find an audience.  If you want your story read, if you want people to get your message -- whatever that message may be -- you must make sure your writing conforms to the conventions established.

Does this mean you need an editor?  Yes, it does.

The necessity for a good, competent editor is never more apparent than when a good story that's been badly written is published, and all the world gets to see how terrible the writer is.  No matter how wonderful, how powerful, how emotional the story is, if the reader can't read it, all that wonder and power and emotion are lost.

Again:  If you are writing for yourself, if you are writing to get out the pain and fear and joy and frustration and excitement, none of it matters.  When you want to share that pain and fear and joy and excitement, it matters a lot.  And only a fool thinks it doesn't.

A fool and her words. . . .

. . . .are too soon published.

I'm trying very hard not to be that kind of fool.

As I blogged last month I'm in the process of preparing my first published novel, Legacy of Honor, for digital republication.  I knew it was going to be a rather difficult task, for a variety of reason, so I'm not really surprised that a month later, I'm still working on it.  I have a day job, after all, and other real-life obligations that take some of my time, too, and I still need to eat and sleep.

It's been a multi-step process, not always easy.  Although I'm changing nothing of the storyline, there are areas that cried out for better editing than the book got when Leisure published it.  If all I had to do were re-insert lines or paragraphs or even pages from the original manuscript, hey, no problem.  But there were two different edits involved, both of which did more than just remove text.  The intent of those edits was to improve the book, and for the most part, they did.  So my task is not only to fix errors that were made but also to avoid adding back any more. 

As I began work on one particularly delicate scene, I thought maybe it really didn't make any difference.  The changes I wanted to make were extremely fine-tuning in terms of clarity.  Would the reader notice the difference?  Would she care?  How many people, after all, had read the print version and never questioned anything?

Oh, wait a minute.  There was no Amazon in 1985, no Goodreads.  No forums for readers to complain, "WTF was that on page  XXX?  There are characters speaking who had already left the room!"  If I, as the writer who mentally knew how everything played out in the book, saw it and wondered about it, then I owed it to the reader to make sure those characters were put back on stage so they could speak.  And that the rest of the errors were fixed, too.

The writer is the book's first reader.  I know I would not want to read a book whose author knew about but didn't care about those details because all she really wanted was just to see her work in print -- even if it's only digital print. 

Even though some of these edits involve the careful massaging of three different versions of a scene to make sure all the crucial information is presented in the proper sequence so the reader can "see" exactly what's happening, and even though maybe no one ever would notice the errors if I hadn't fixed them, I  know they're there.

Legacy of Honor will have to wait a bit longer before its digital edition is published.  As impatient as I am to see it in "print" again after almost 30 years, I can wait.  And the readers?  All I can do is hope they're waiting, too.

As the words change. . . . and stay the same: Legacy of Honor

There is a temptation, when preparing a work for republication many years after its debut, to alter it and make it more suitable for the present day's audience. Some authors have done this as they've put their older print books into digital format, and the reviews seem to have been rather mixed.  Some readers preferred that the books stay the same as they remembered them from earlier editions.  But certainly authors have a right to try to reach newer readers who might not find those old 1970s and 1980s tropes quite as attractive.

When I republished Firefly, I did make some changes from the version that had been print published in 1988.  Most of those changes were along the lines of restoring elements that had been removed from the original.  My digital files predated most of the editorial changes that had been made for publication, and so the 2012 edition was actually closer to the 1980s original rather than "updated."

There wasn't anything about Firefly that would have been considered politically incorrect by today's standards anyway; if anything, the original contained material that was deleted as objectionable then which would not draw a comment today.

Secrets to Surrender (the digital version of Desire's Slave) and Shadows by Starlight (formerly Starlight Seduction) were virtually unchanged from their print editions except for minor clean-ups; story and content and style remained.  In both of those books, a reader would really have to sit down with the new and old versions side by side for a page by page comparison to find the changes.

With Legacy of Honor, which was my first published novel, the question I face going into a digital republication is a quite different, for a number of reasons.

Written over a period of roughly two years between 1980 and 1982, Legacy endured rejections by most of the major paperback publishers before finally being contracted by Leisure Books/Dorchester Publishing in 1984.  I trimmed the text from an unwieldy 250,000 words in the original version to approximately 200,000 for the complete version Leisure requested after seeing a sample, and that was the version contracted.  There were no editorial requests for revisions.  Editor Jane Thornton did require that I make additional reductions that brought the word count down to about 180,000 for publication, but after I made those cuts, she altered virtually nothing further in anything resembling an editorial process.

Editing was one thing; typesetting was another entirely.

I never saw page proofs of Legacy prior to its publication in February 1985, and I have to say I was appalled at the number of errors in the typesetting.  Sections of sentences were omitted, paragraphs were switched, and generic typos abounded.  As the author I was embarrassed, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.  (Again, one of the advantages of traditional publishing is that the author has lots of other people to lay the blame on!) 

So it stayed that way for almost 30 years.

Now, in 2013 and not having a digital manuscript of Legacy to upload for republication, I was faced with the task of transcribing the whole thing, either from the print edition with all its typesetting errors or from the original uncut, unedited 250,000 word and 888 typed page manuscript, which Leisure had never seen.  Neither of those alternatives was an attractive proposition.

I began with the print version, but after only a few pages decided to see if my printer-scanner's OCR software would do a halfway decent job generating a text file from the mass market version.  I was willing to sacrifice a copy if it meant saving myself the typing of 200,000+ words.  It worked, and in a few days' spare time I had the complete text file.  It's a mess of bizarre page breaks and weird formatting, but it can be fixed in far less time than it would take to retype the whole blasted thing.

The process of cleaning it up, however, exposed a lot of unexpected problems well beyond typos and missing lines.

When Jane Thornton requested those cuts to bring the book within reasonable production length, she gave me just two or three days at most in which to do them.  I had to go through 600+ pages line by line looking for words and sentences that could be trimmed without affecting the flow, the continuity, the plot.  There was no time for major rewriting.  And as a first-time author who had little knowledge of how the editorial function was carried out by a traditional publisher, I also trusted that if I made any egregious errors, Thornton or someone else in the editorial department would catch them and fix them.  Errors along the line of a character returning to a room she hadn't left -- because the line about her departure had been cut.  I expected any errors of that nature to be fixed.

Guess what.  They weren't.  And now, almost 30 years later, I didn't have a copy of the actual manuscript from which the book had been typeset.

Or did I?  Being an inveterate pack rat, I save everything, and I began a search in the hopes I did in fact have a copy of that intermediate typescript.  To my surprise and relief, it didn't take long to locate the old-fashioned carbon copy of that revised manuscript, complete with my hand-written edits.  I had over-nighted it to Thornton, and sometime after publication it was eventually returned to me.  And I kept it, neatly filed with a bunch of other pre-computer manuscripts.

My intention at that point was only to make sure I corrected, in the new digital edition, the worst of the typos and other typesetting errors exactly as I would have if given the opportunity to check the page proofs prior to the actual publication in 1985, so that the product that hits the ebook retailers isn't the kind of mess Leisure put out.  But what I was finding were exactly those errors that I trusted would have been fixed during the editorial process.  A character opens eyes that had never been closed, takes off clothes that had never been put on, re-enters a room that had never been left, dismounts a horse that had never been mounted.  That sort of thing, if not those exact examples.

And of course I now have the opportunity to fix those errors.

Do I also want to avail myself of the opportunity to update the book to the conventions of 2013 that might be very different from those of 1983?

Um, no, I don't.

There are elements in Legacy of Honor that might not be politically correct today.  I'm not even sure they were politically correct in the early 1980s when I wrote it.  As someone who has railed against some of what I've seen as misogyny in those early post-Woodiwiss historical romances, I'm probably going to take some heat for not making major changes to Legacy of Honor.  But in fact I think the book will stand the test of feminist times.

Whether it does or not, however, I feel it should remain in its own context.  As I've written so often before, books aren't written in vacuums.  They, and their authors, exist in contexts.  Legacy of Honor was written in that exciting, adventurous 1980s context when the historical romance as a literary type was going through revolutionary changes.  Authors, too, were changing and evolving.  If I were writing Legacy today, it would probably be a slightly different book.  But I'm not writing it today, and I have enough respect for it and for myself not to want to change it.

The version that will be digitally republished (soon, I hope!) will remain true to its original form and context.  Cleaned up, yes, with its typos and continuity corrected.  Some details from that original manuscript will be restored, and there will be an author's note added regarding research and . . . and another little bit of personal background to the story that I've often told in person but never had the opportunity to put into print.