A sense of impending doom . . . .

Today -- Friday, 10 January 2020 -- has not been one of my better days.  Maybe that's why I'm back here, after a long and not entirely voluntary hiatus.

I wrote a long time ago that I wouldn't be doing book reviews here.  I thought about setting up a separate blog for reviews, and in fact so much time has passed that maybe I actually did that and have just forgotten about it.

The truth is, I don't write a lot of reviews of current fiction.  Most of the reviews I do write and post on BookLikes are of books I didn't like, didn't finish, didn't get past the first few pages.  There's a reason for that, and it's not a good reason.

My budget is severely limited.  More or less retired, I live on Social Security and some supplemental self-employment income from my writing and from the sale of various arts & crafts products I make.  My Social Security benefits are reduced because I elected to start them earlier than full retirement age.  The supplemental income is not reliable, and it has been made even less reliable by my inability to shake off various stressors.  Anxiety is not profitable, but it is pervasive.  I do not write as much as I should.  I do not make as much jewelry as I should.

I do not make as much money as I need.

Therefore, my reading material tends to fall into certain distinct classifications:

1. Physical books I already own, which number about 5,000.
2. Kindle books, mostly freebies and therefore many self-published
3. Non-fiction library books, whether physical copies or digital borrows.

It's that second category that ends up being "reviewed" on my BookLikes blog.  Sadly, many of those author-published books just aren't very well written.  But I did try them.  I really did.

My longer, more analytical reviews were saved for those favorite personal classics, books like Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar and Leslie Turner White's Lord Johnnie.  I loved these books when I first read them more than 50 years ago; rereading them for the purpose of close analysis was just as much fun.

The past few weeks have been filled with the drama surrounding Romance Writers of America, a scandal of sorts with its roots in racism, lack of diversity, and lack of transparency in dealing with those issues.  I'm not going to rehash any of that, or bring up my very tangential involvement, except to say that my fifteen or so years of active membership in RWA meant I made a lot of connections with other writers.  Friends? Um, not all of them, and only a tiny few of those connections have survived.  But it still means that reading a book by someone I knew back then brings in an automatic bias.  So I haven't posted reviews of many books by people I know or knew.

Let me be clear:  I would never, under any circumstances, direct an author to a review I had written of their work*.  Reviews are for readers.  But I don't have any way of knowing, unless they post it in front of me on Twitter or something, which authors routinely search for reviews of their books.  It's not likely that I'd post a really bad review of a book by someone I've had a positive personal relationship with -- whether in person or just through social media -- but even minor criticisms might be taken the wrong way.  I really do appreciate my online contacts, and I would rather not review a book written by a cyber-friend than risk that friendship.

(*I did recently inform an author with whom I've interacted on social media  that I reviewed one of their books 30+ years ago. I no longer have a copy of the review.)

But BookLikes has become more problematic today than it has been for a while.  I think I started to take it for granted again, but it's been down for 24 hours now with only a brief Facebook notification that they're working on it.

So, what to do?

Well, I have a website that I haven't even looked at for a year or more.  It's due to renew in February, and I actually thought this morning that I might let it all lapse.  Could I convert it to something more attuned to books and book blogging?  I don't know.  That's not my area of expertise; I wouldn't even know how to start.

But it's been six and a half years since the Great Purge at Goodreads, and so many of us have found a home at BookLikes.  We like the freedom, even if we don't like the spammers.  We like the platform, even if we don't like the silence from the operators.  Most of all, however, we like each other.

If the platform returns, I'll be backing up as much of my material as I can.  Some of it may end up here.  Comments may be lost, but at least the core will be saved.  Again, that's if the platform can be resuscitated.  And I'll add links to it for this post, too.  If it comes back.

I'm committed to doing what I can -- within the constraints of time and budget -- to keep the community alive, regardless.



 

Words that fill unusual needs

Once again, I need to remind myself that I do not believe in omens.  Really and truly, I don't.

Coincidence?  Yes.  Even serendipity and luck.  But omens, with their implication of supernatural manipulation of human events?  No.  Just, no.

On the other hand. . . .

Several years ago, a rather unusual sequence of events put me in possession of a faceting machine.  Though I have played around with rocks and stones and gems for a very long time, I had never considered faceting.  The equipment was too expensive for my budget, for one thing, and I had no clue how to go about learning the craft.  But the machine was offered to me for free and would have ended up in a Dumpster otherwise.  So I took it.

I subsequently found out what it was worth and was more than a little astounded.  Flabbergasted is probably a better word.  I also learned that a few small and inexpensive but absolutely essential accessories were missing.  They were quickly and easily replaced and the machine was fully functional. 

As I wrote in Really Neat Rocks, faceting is one of the lapidary arts that requires significant investment.  The basic machine can cost several thousand dollars, but then there are the accessories -- laps and dops and transfer jigs and so on -- not to mention the rough rocks.  Facet-grade rough is a lot more expensive than the agates and jaspers that can be found out in the desert for free.  The machine I acquired came complete with all those expensive accessories and with a modest supply of rough as well. 

I should have been all set.

I wasn't.

The machine came with a little booklet of maybe 60 pages, Facet Cutter's Handbook, that purported to be all one needed to learn how to facet.  For me at least it was woefully inadequate.  I already had an old edition of John Sinkankas' Gem Cutting: A Lapidary Manual, which was likewise inadequate as well as out of date.  I needed a well-illustrated, step-by-step manual.  If I have that kind of guide, I can usually figure out how to do just about anything.

The books that might have filled that niche were, unfortunately, long out of print and subsequently priced way out of my budget.  I played with the machine a couple of times, and managed to achieve some results, but I didn't really know what I was doing.  So I quit.

But I did join an email discussion list sponsored by the U.S. Faceters Guild.  Almost every day I receive emails from the other participants, most of which comments are way above my head because I know so little about the craft.  There's never been a temptation to unsubscribe, however.  Though I delete most of the emails -- they're archived should I ever decide to revisit any of them -- I do read them all.  Now and then there's something that either adds to my store of knowledge about other aspects of lapidary or is something tucked away for an indistinct future when I will actually get to use the machine.

As I recorded yesterday, I gave notice two weeks ago to quit my day job.  Just a couple days after I made that rather scary decision,  one of the members of that USFG email list posted that he had published a book.  Two books actually, because two volumes were needed to contain all the information. 

I bought the books.  Immediately.  They arrived yesterday.  I've read the first chapter of the first book, and I'm very, very impressed.  Tom Herbst has done an excellent job, and if the rest of the books live up to the promise of the first chapter, they will fill a huge need.

He acknowledges right at the beginning that self-publishing is the way to go for this kind of specialty books.  Digital print-on-demand allows authors to create the special-interest volumes that just can't be commerically viable for a traditional publisher.   Are these POD editions lacking the glossy full-color photos that many of us in the arts-and-crafts fields are accustomed to?  Yes, they are.  Though Herbst's books are loaded with black and white drawings and photos, there are no color pictures.  Because I've researched it myself, I know that the cost of including color printing in a CreateSpace product shoves the cost into the stratosphere.  In a way, these new books are a step backward in terms of the illustrations.  They're more like Sinkankas' 1963 hardcover than James Mitchell's 2012 Gem Trails of Arizona.

But today we have the internet and the www and Google images and Flickr and if we need color images, we know where to get them.  We don't need the glossy color photos; we can get more and better pictures online.

Tom Herbst's books arrived, in more ways than one, just when I needed them.  A few weeks ago, I probably would have ordered them but maybe not.  A year ago the probably drops down to possibly, but not very likely.  But last week there was no question.  Everything came together at just the right time.  I have the equipment, I have the time, and now I have the books.

What does this have to do with writing romance novels?  Ah, I'm so glad you asked.  ;-)

We never know, as readers or as writers, how our words are going to impact other people's lives.   We never know, as writers, how our product is going to be received.   It behooves us, then, to make sure our product is the very best that it can be.  I'm not an expert faceter.  Hell, I'm not even a beginner yet!  So you can bet I'm going to be watching the reviews, even the informal ones, that show up on the USFG email list.  And I'm going to pay attention to what those people have to say.  Because they are the experts.  I've seen the kind of work they produce and I know they know what they're doing.  As reviewers, they may not have perfect grammar or spelling, but that's not the expertise they're utilizing.

And they won't hesitate to criticize if necessary. 

The worst word of all

Of course it's a four letter word, at least in English. 

Fear.

We human beings do terrible things out of fear.  Fear begets loathing, fear begets hatred, fear begets violence.

We're afraid of all kinds of things.  Some of our fears are justified, many are not.

We're afraid of flying, of snakes.  We're afraid of caves, of disease.  We're afraid of being poor, we're afraid of being alone.  We're afraid of failure, of rejection.

We're afraid of difference, and we're afraid of the unknown.

We have a difficult time facing up to some of our fears, usually because we're afraid of something else.  We're afraid to admit we've been wrong about something or other, because we're afraid that if we admit to being wrong, other people will laugh at us or shun us or lose respect for us.

When we live surrounded by fears, many of them manufactured by outside interests, we can very easily lose sight of how foolish our fears are, and how destructive -- even self-destructive -- they can become.

Here's an example:

In recent years, in the U.S. at least, there's been a quiet build up of fear about germs on grocery store shopping carts.  For probably a century or so, no one gave this a single thought.  Then suddenly we began to notice people bringing little disposable wipes with them to swab off the handles of the carts before using them.  Next thing you know, there were dispensers of little disposable wipes at the entrance to every supermarket.  For a while a few years ago, one of the supermarkets where I shop had a huge machine sitting outside that was used to disinfect (using ultraviolet light???) the whole fleet of shopping carts every evening.  Of course, the germs came back right away.

Few people ever do more than wipe off the handle.  I've watched customers carefully extract one of the disinfecting wipes from the dispenser, rub it along the handle before they even touch the cart, and then go merrily on their way.  They put their groceries in the main basket of the cart, which hasn't been disinfected.  Women put their purses in the child seat, which hasn't been disinfected.  Just a few days ago, I waited patiently while an elderly woman went through the ritual, taking care not to touch the cart's handle until it had been safely cleansed, and then she settled her cane, which had been in direct contact with the unsanitized parking lot pavement, in the main basket where she was going to put her groceries.

It seems like a harmless fear, and I know there will be plenty of people who think there's nothing wrong with eliminating even a few of those flu germs from the shopping cart handle.  After all, we don't know what kind of illness the previous user had.  Might have been a child with a runny nose, or someone who didn't cover up when they coughed or sneezed.  Many of us are afraid to admit we're afraid of something someone else told us to be afraid of that we weren't afraid of until we were told to be.

You've got to be carefully taught, as Richard Rodgers told us in South Pacific.

So how do we fight the fear?  Any fear? 

The greatest enemy of fear is knowledge. 

How often have we seen this scenario?  The child, cringing in fear, clinging to its mother, terrified of the friendly looking dog.  The mother, smiling and confident, urging the child, "Come on, pet him.  He won't hurt you.  He's a nice dog."  And then the child, taking confidence from the mother, reaches out tentatively until the dog wags its tail and licks the child's hand.  Lifelong friends have been made, because now the child knows the dog is not something to be afraid of.

Caution is not the same as fear.  We are cautious around dogs we don't know, because we know that some are dangerous.  We are cautious when driving in unfamiliar cities because we don't want to get lost.  We are cautious using power tools because we know they can cause serious physical injury.

We justify irrational actions based on irrational fears, and sometimes we take that irrationality to extremely violent ends.  Does one nation become so terrified of running out of a vital natural resource that it invades another nation, killing thousands, to take possession of their natural resources?  Does that kind of national fear blind an entire population to the possibility of finding alternatives?  Does it lead to an irrational fear of anyone who might pose an obstacle to obtaining that resource, including anyone who might look like someone who might post such an obstacle?  How elaborate can we build that chain of fear?  How strong are the bonds that secure us to our fears?  What, if anything, can we do as individuals to break those chains?

And what in the hell does any of this have to do with writing?

Okay, let me bring this all back down to a more personal and manageable focus.


The following is a quote from one of the comments made by Courtney Milan on the July 2012 Dear Author opinion piece on bullying:

The power dynamic explanation cannot explain the entirety of my loathing for the kind of attack the goodreads bullies are using, because I can think of extremely powerful woman(sic) who have been subjected to threats of physical violence precisely because they are powerful. In that case, those threats exist to weaken the women themselves, and also to threaten those who watch. It sends a clear message: Don’t you dare reach for power, because if you do, you too will get this. 

There is something particularly loathsome about the people who posted Sandra Day O’Connor’s address in DC and suggested that she should get raped, or people who talk about lynching Barack Obama, or people who threaten to hang out outside Oprah’s studio and shoot her. Regardless of what you think about those people, I hope everyone agrees that this is wrong. Those people are very powerful–no doubt about it. There’s no doubt in my mind that they have more power than their attackers. But those attacks are designed not just to attack, but to disenfranchise. 

You do have power, Jane [Litte, of Dear Author]. So do many other reviewers. I’m not saying that the power is equal. I am saying that your stalker targeted you–and the STGB targeted the reviewers they did–because you have power. It’s intended as an object lesson to others who are less powerful: that if readers stick their necks out, they will be chopped off. Sending the message that powerful women need to be cut down to size by any means necessary is, to me, the more despicable aspect of this issue than the the power dynamic.

Since the publication of that opinion piece and the subsequent discussion, Jane Litte herself has come under recent personal attack in the form of a lawsuit.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book has been stalked to her home, with the stalking publicized by the author.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book has been harassed on the telephone by an author who admitted to tracking down the reviewer's personal information, and who then bragged about it online and dismissed her actions as not harmful, not stalking, not threatening, even though they were.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book was stalked to her workplace and physically attacked by the author.

These are the cases we know about.  How many more are unknown?  How many more reviewers and bloggers have just quietly stopped reviewing because they're afraid?    How many readers have taken reasonable caution to a fearful extreme and allowed themselves to be more or less voluntarily silenced?

When I came back to the writing game a few years ago, the game had changed.  There was now instantaneous digital publishing available to just about anyone with a computer.  There were countless blogs and websites offering readers a wide variety of reviews and opinions.  There were discussion groups and paid reviewers and circle jerk review swaps.  As both a reader and a writer, I had to learn the new rules, familiarize myself with the playing fields, and even buy a program to identify the players.  And like any rookie, I made some mistakes.  Some of them were rather embarrassing.

In my early explorations of the Amazon/Kindle universe sometime in  2010, before I knew how to sort the offerings for the low-cost and free books that fit my budget, I stumbled across a free book that looked interesting.  I downloaded it, read the first couple of pages, and was astonished at how terrible the writing was.  In all my years of judging RWA contest material, in all my years in various critique groups, I had rarely come across something so bad.  And yet, as I had noticed on the Amazon listing, this book had several five-star reviews.

I couldn't believe what the reviewers had said about this book.  That the descriptions were vivid and made the reader feel as if she were "right there."  That the characters were well drawn, and that the writing was grammatically flawless.  That the book was wonderful, they couldn't put it down, they couldn't wait for the author's next book, that they couldn't wait for this book to be made into a movie.

Had they read the same book I did?  If they had and they couldn't see the errors I had seen, was there something wrong with them?  Or was there something wrong with me that these things mattered?

When Amazon sent me a little email some time later asking "How many stars would you give to __________?" and provided a handy link to the book's page, I took them at their word.  I left a very brief "review" in which I wrote that I had purchased the book but was unable to read more than the first chapter or so because it was so badly written.  I gave it one star. 

Within a day or so, I received notice in my email that people were commenting on my review.  In my naiveté, I anticipated notes from grateful readers thanking me for pointing out how terrible the book was, or even from the author thanking me for giving her tips on how to improve her writing.  Therefore the anger in the responses shocked me.  How dare I, they fairly spat, criticize this wonderful book if I hadn't read the whole thing.  If I remember correctly -- this was in the days before I knew how to take screen shots or had any clue they'd be necessary -- there were three such responses, all in the same vein, and two of them were from other reviewers of the same book.

My first reaction was simple shock.  I had never expected such venom toward a simple review that simply stated facts.

My second reaction was anger.  I had not been rude in my assessment, and I had not attacked the author in any way.  I only wrote that I had found numerous errors of spelling, punctuation, and syntax and that I quit reading after the first chapter or so.  Yet these people whom I didn't know had turned on me with obvious anger.

My third reaction was fear.  How many more people like this were there out there?  Had I in fact done something wrong in posting that I couldn't read the rest of the book?  Had I broken some rules?  (Actually I had, sort of, but I didn't know it at the time.)  Because I didn't know the rules of the game and therefore didn't know how to defend myself in that situation, I immediately figured out a way to delete the review.

I silenced myself.  Out of fear.  I'd been bullied into silence.  I'd been bullied into questioning my own judgment.

As a result, I did some research.  I learned the rules of the game.  I learned who the players were and which side they played for.  I vowed not to be bullied into silence again.

Since then, I've been the target of other intimidation tactics in efforts to silence me.  I've been called names.  I've been cyberstalked by more than one author with a bruised ego.  (If any of them have tried calling me at home, I don't know about it.  I do not answer calls from people I don't know, and I often don't even listen to voice mails that come from unfamiliar numbers.)  My books have been revenge rated, poor things, and I've been featured prominently on a website that shall remain nameless.  Most recently, I've been banned from another website, without explanation but probably for the cardinal sin of not being nice enough (although there may be other reasons).

I will not give in to fear.  Being banned from that site didn't shock me or even really surprise me.  It certainly hasn't silenced me, and it won't stop me from reviewing books, including books I think are badly written.

By the same token, writers should not be afraid of negative reviews.  Again, knowledge is the greatest enemy of fear, and the more you as a writer know about negative reviews, the less you'll have to fear from them.  If your book is good, a bad review can't hurt it.  Not just won't hurt it, but can't.  If your book is bad, you can either learn from the reviews or not and either improve that book or the next, but you should also learn that if your book is bad, no quantity of good reviews will save it. 

If we have to be carefully taught to hate and fear, then we can also learn not to.

If you let your fear of a negative review blind you to the opportunities presented, then you probably have no business being a writer in the first place.  Writing for publication requires both a certain amount of rational caution and a certain amount of fearlessness.  What it doesn't have room for is the worst word of all:  Fear.

Strong words, wrong words

Every once in a while I get an idea for a clever pun, then find out I had the wrong reference.  This is a bummer.

I was trying to think of an alternative to "grammar nazi," since that kind of hyperbole can be more than a little offensive.  One can be a stickler for good grammar without being a jackbooted thug capable of real atrocities against real people.  Hyperbole has its place, and it can be amusing as well as effective in making a point, but this particular one can be very offensive.

So I came up with the idea of "grammar ratchet."  There are lots and lots of tools around my house, including several ratchets -- those little gizmos that tighten (or loosen) nuts depending on which way they're set.  And I had thought to use that term as a play on the inflexible, by the book, mean as dirt Louise Fletcher character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, until I discovered her name was Nurse Ratched. 

I've only seen the film once, and I can't say I enjoyed it.  I'm not a big fan of that sort of film.  The problem with Nurse Ratched, as I saw her, was that she couldn't see beyond the rules.  They were there in and of themselves, not as tools or -- to pull a term from another popular film -- guidelines.  Reality had to be bent to the rules, in Nurse Ratched's world, no matter what.  She found her security, her rightness, in those rules, but she never found a soul.

Well, my pun on ratchet didn't work.  I'm still looking for one.

But I guess that's as good an opening as any into an examination of what I find is a disturbing trend to compare negative book reviews to physical violence, and for the authors of books that receive negative reviews to liken themselves to the victims of rape, murder, and genocide.

Yes, indeed, one self-published author has said in public that the existence of a group of readers on Goodreads.com who address issues of "Badly Behaving Authors" reminded him of 1942-1945 Europe.  The self-published author did not, of course, reference any of his own abusive posts on Goodreads, yet all anyone did to him was . . . . not like his book.

Words have meanings.  Nazism, genocide, murder, rape, bullying -- all these words have very distinct meanings.  "I didn't like your book" doesn't come close. 

Even if one reader rallied her friends to collectively bash someone else's book, how can that equate to the experience of having armed men invade your home in the middle of the night, take your family into an alley, and shoot them all in front of you right before they shoot you?  We're not talking apples and oranges; we're talking butterflies to B-52 bombers.

The same self-published authors who bitch and moan and whine and complain about the negative reviewers who gang up on their books never say a word about the rallying cries they send out to their own fans and supporters to flood the review sites with five-star fountains of praise.  And the truth is that very few of those fan-rallies are ever really called out.  Oh, some of the more egregious sock-puppet masters have been exposed, but for the most part your average self-published novel that gets five or ten or even 25 glowing reviews and a few one-star comments that are basically, "What the hell were they reading?  This is crap!" get a pass.  If customers on Amazon alert the system that there are obvious shill reviews, or the author's spouse is blatantly promoting the books, the reviews might be removed.  But most of the time, Amazon and the other retail booksellers are in the business of selling books and they really don't care. 

Needless to say, neither do the authors who are benefiting from the fandom.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, to lurkers, to readers, to my (so far) innocuous stalkers:  You are not your book, and your book is not you.  Criticism of it is not necessarily criticism of you, and very often even the most scathing criticism contains seeds of wisdom.  It is only your own fault if you don't pay attention.  Claiming that your critics are just meanies and trolls and bullies, Nazis and rapists and murderers is just childish exaggeration, and it will not change the quality of your writing.  Only you can do that, if you really want to.

Private words, private pain; public words.......

In my previous post, I wrote about the steps many new, digitally self-published writers have skipped on the road between writing and publishing, and how I believe very strongly that the lack of criticism that's gained via critique groups has led many writers to publish works that really are far from ready for publication.  After I had put that blogpost up, I thought of another aspect of that process, and I considered revising the post to include this other point.

I've decided instead to give it its own post.  I think the issue is sufficiently important.

I am somewhat notorious for my DNF reviews of self-published books, and it's not likely that I'm going to change that habit.  A single page is often enough to tell me the writing in the book is so far below standard that my time would be better spent teaching my Australian shepherd to sing "Largo al Factotum."  Unfortunately, any such review is an opinion expressed in public.  A review is not meant for the author; it is meant for other readers.

The author had her chance.  Before she published her novel, she had all the time in the world to make sure it was well written, that her grammar and punctuation were correct, that her plot had no holes, that her research was accurate.  Once she publishes, she in essence certifies that she's done with it.

The reviewer's comments may in fact read like a critique, and those comments may be harshly critical of the writing.  They may be the first critical words the author has received, and if she doesn't have the experience of dealing with criticism, she may react vehemently to them.  If her reaction is extreme and it's in the public arena of an Amazon or Goodreads review, she may become labeled a "badly behaving author."

Which leads me to the purpose of this post: 

A critique group is small and private.  The comments made in it are personal, but they are not public.  No matter how outrageous the author's errors, no matter how poorly written her work is, she does not have to endure the criticism in front of The Whole World.

I've mentioned here before an evaluation given to one of my novels by an author unknown to me and to whom I had not given my consent to critique the book.  I was quite stunned by some of the comments she wrote on the manuscript, and I was outraged that the penpal/critique partner I had shared it with took it upon herself to give the book to someone else.  Regardless, whatever pain, embarrassment, anger, outrage, or other emotions I felt at the time, there were only three people who knew about it.  I could physically rip the manuscript to shreds, burn it, bury it in a dresser drawer, and no one would be the wiser.  I could tell everyone, "Oh, I just decided I didn't like it all that much," and who was to argue with me?  I could lick my wounds in private, then when my pride healed a bit and my anger cooled, I could look at the comments again and see if maybe the critic hadn't had some good points after all.

It's much easier to learn how to deal with criticism if you don't have to deal with it right off the bat in a public place. 

So it's not just that many new writers have never had the kind of constructive, work-in-progress criticism that comes in Steps 2 through 7; it's also that their first taste of criticism comes where they're least prepared to deal with it: in public.   If their friends and family members have given them unconditional support and encouragement, and posted five-star reviews, these authors may be utterly gobsmacked when someone they don't know blurts right out on Amazon something like "This is probably one of the worst written books I ever read.  Do not buy it.  Do not pass Go and do not collect $200.  Just run away from this garbage as fast as you can." 

No one wants to be humiliated in public.  Private humiliation is bad enough, but in public it's even worse, and the temptation to defend oneself is enormous, almost irresistible.  Fortunately, it is very easy to spare yourself the grief of having the book you labored so hard over ripped to pieces by an online reviewer.  If you're a new writer, one who hasn't gone through any form of private, personal critique, do yourself a favor and don't publish your book until you get a truly qualified, independent opinion of your work.  Not a friend, not a family member, not a paid editor.  Someone who is qualified and who has no incentive whatsoever to lie to you.  And get it in a setting where you, your book, the critic's evaluation, and your reaction are all out of public display.  Keep it private.

In this age of instant electronic gratification, many writers may not have the patience to go through the process.  Those who do, however, will probably end up not only with better written books but also with the thicker skin that will allow them to weather the crank reviews, the stupid reviews, the retaliatory reviews with a mere shrug while they go back to writing their next -- and even better! -- book.

The words in delicate balance, part 3

So. 

I wrote Part 1 and Part 2, and I had pretty much made up my mind how I was going to approach my personal dilemma regarding reviews.  Not that it was really all that difficult a choice; the whole thing was more a little thinking aloud to make sure I hadn't overlooked anything important enough to make me change my mind.

After that, I was prepared to resume what passes for my normal life.  It wasn't quite that simple.

Let me start with the onset of panic.

One of my long-time non-writing online buddies read Part 1 and Part 2, and she sent me an email.  She warned me against being too honest, because it can be dangerous.  "Are you crazy?  Some of those people can go a little nuts when you don't tell them what they want to hear, or do tell them what they don't want to hear," she wrote.  "Sometimes they go real nuts."

The panic was hers, not mine.

To be sure, not all the reaction has been, shall we say, positive.

But to say that the backlash has begun is not at all true.  The backlash against honesty started a long time ago, and it has pervaded our culture so thoroughly that virtually every coffee shop these days is likely to have at least one conversation dominated by defenders of Lance Armstrong's career of lies.  Yeah, really.

Nor am I personally unfamiliar with the more negative, even hostile reactions.  Because this blog is about my resurrected writing career, I've decided to dig deeper into that personal history book, not so much to enlighten you, dear blog reader, but to refamiliarize myself with a few details.  I may have identified my particular balance point, but it's sometimes a slightly unsteady balance.

The backlash against my personal honesty -- at least in terms of writing -- started in the mid-1980s, when I dared to tell one of my penpals that her novel-in-progress had some rather significant plot holes.  We had been swapping a few chapters at a time, back and forth through the USPS, offering suggestions and criticisms.  Mostly we were positive, and the good goddess knows neither of us was anything of an expert.  My infallible guide in those days was Larry Block's Writing the Novel from Plot to Print along with selected magazine articles.  So when I found what I thought were some pretty big plot holes, I made sure I pointed her toward what I thought would be Larry Block's advice.

My penpal was not happy with my comments.  In a series of unpleasant letters, she lashed out at my daring to criticize her, but then changed virtually everything I'd recommended.  When I mentioned to her that I was glad to see she had revised it and I thought it would probably sell as result of those changes, she denied having changed anything on the basis of any suggestions I'd made.  I thought her reaction was a bit odd, but I didn't really get upset about it.  When in fact the book did sell -- to the same publisher and editor who had bought my first book just a few months before -- again my input was dismissed.  Well, okay, fine.  I mean back in those days we were all eager to sell and I hadn't really learned how rotten people could be.  Yeah, okay, she had asked me if it would be all right for her to send her manuscript to the same editor, and yeah, I had said sure, why not, we're all in this together, and I had given her the editor's name.  So why would she deny she had done it?  Or why insist that even if I had given her the information, she could have gotten it elsewhere?  Indeed, she could have.  So why did she ask me?  Did she include my name in her cover letter, suggesting that I had recommended her?  (Long before there was doc-dropping there was name-dropping.)

I don't know.

Thinking back on that experience isn't something I enjoy doing.  It's painful to feel you've been used by a friend, and I admit that I've always been a kind of obnoxious person who hasn't had many friends, so the betrayal was especially bitter.  Unfortunately, it got worse. 

Quickly.

Although she'd been offered a contract, she delayed accepting and signing because her book was a finalist in a major writing contest open only to unpublished writers, and she hoped that if she won, she could negotiate more money.  Well, she did win, but she didn't get much more money.  What she did get was an agent who, when I attempted to congratulate my "friend" on her triumph, physically turned her away from me and said to her, quite clearly to make sure I heard every word, "Dear, you don't need to associate with people like her any more.  You're going places."

Was I hurt?  Was I stunned? 

Do you really have to ask?

Did she go places?

She didn't. 

For reasons I was never really able to understand, she proceeded to tell several of our mutual friends that I was jealous.  And mean.  And that I had tried to sabotage her book.  (How I would have or even could  have done this, I don't know.)  They stopped speaking to me, and I didn't know why.  In fact, I didn't find out why until several years later.  All I knew was that a lot of people I'd been friends with suddenly wouldn't answer my letters.

Why didn't I confront her?  Well, in part it was because I didn't even know what she was doing, at least not in terms of what she had told mutual friends.  Also it was because I'd been so shocked that I didn't believe she really had done it.  There was also the part of me that believed somehow it was my fault or I deserved it or . . . . something.  But the ultimate answer then and now is a simple I don't know.  Even if I had, what would I have said?

Yet even after all this, even after she had told other people not to communicate with me, she continued to do so and even asked for my advice again, on another book she was writing.  I warned her that I would have to be honest, because I just couldn't be anything else.  Her agent -- yes, the same agent -- was giving her a hard time about this follow-up book and she wanted my opinion.  And when she didn't like my opinion, she had another meltdown. 

At that point I recognized that it would be a waste of time to ever offer her my opinion again, and in fact I never did.

Somewhere during all this drama was when I mailed her a copy of my contemporary romance, detailed in a previous blog post.  After telling me how much she liked it, she handed it off to a friend of hers without so much as informing me, let alone asking my permission.   Was it before she asked for the second critique?  After?  I don't remember now.  And maybe I took some of the comments her friend had written on my book as a kind of retaliation-by-proxy.  Did I believe I deserved it?  I guess maybe I did.

But through all this, the fact remained that my suggestions may have helped her sell her first book, and the second book that I said had huge plot holes never did get published.  Not even her snotty agent, who had told her "you're going places" was able to sell it.  After the publication of just a few more books, and dismal sales on all of them, this friend pretty much disappeared from the writing scene.  I have no idea where she is now. 

I relate this story to illustrate that from very early in my writing career, I had experienced the backlash that comes from an honest but  negative critique/review.

Similar things happened when RWA contestants bewailed the low scores I gave their manuscripts.  I was accused, in letters that I have in my files to this day, of taking out my frustration on the poor, innocent unpublished writers who just wanted to get published.  For some reason or other I was never able to figure out how my personal frustrations became their poor grammar or inconsistent characterization or lack of dramatic conflict.  They rarely challenged my assessments; they just didn't like my honesty.

Because it hurt.

And it wasn't just the big national contests that earned me the nasty responses.  

In one case involving an individual RWA chapter contest, I was accused of changing the scores on the manuscript that ended up winning.  The problem was that I was only one judge out of three and I had no idea who the other judges were or what the scores were on the entries I hadn't judged.  I wasn't the person who kept track of the scores either, yet she was my accuser!  Kinda hard to manipulate what I couldn't even access.  Even harder when I found out the person leveling the accusation had in fact changed the very scores she accused me of changing!

Of course, in that little fiasco, I made the mistake of trying to defend myself, and while others involved in the situation admitted I was in the right and my accuser was in the wrong, guess who they stood up for?  Well, let's just say they didn't stand up for me.

Why?  Why did any of them do it?  Was it because, as one of the chapter members told me, I was the most active published author in the chapter and therefore it was my fault none of the unpublished members had become published?  Were there personal animosities because I had given a negative critique to a friend of my accuser?  Were they jealous of my tiny bit of writing success?

Some of the writers involved in that little bit of nastiness are still active in the writing game -- some trad published but most self-published digitally -- so I won't post any details that might lead to their being identified, but I will say that that experience, even more than the initial betrayal by my award-winning friend, stunned me to the point of at least a partial withdrawal from the contest judging arena.  I'd had enough.

Even while some RWA members were writing letters to the editor decrying the lack of qualifications for contest judges and expressing their desire for honest critiques from published authors, others bitched and moaned about their low scores and the meanness of the judges.

"Bullying" wasn't a buzz word in the 1980s and 1990s.  Then the word was "jealousy," which hasn't gone away.  Jealousy provided a convenient motivation for just about any nefarious act.  Unpublished writers were jealous of published writers.  Published writers were jealous of individual authors for their stories; fear of story theft by a contest judge was voiced often.  And of course the sad truth was that many of the stories we judges saw in the RWA contests were nothing to be jealous of.

There was no way, it seemed, for the published author -- who might actually know something about writing -- to win in this battle.  Many published authors in RWA simply refused to participate as judges because they feared the backlash, either to their careers or to their personal lives.  I can't say I blamed them, and then finally I joined them.

But then there were the critique groups.

The dynamic in a critique group is very different from judging a contest entry, and because of the various formats a critique can take, the reactions can be different, too.  Whether the material at a critique group is read aloud or taken home for advance reading and commenting, the response to criticism can be stiff and minimally polite, or openly hostile, or enthusiastically grateful.  I experienced all of those, and I also experienced vicious retaliatory spite that led to some of the most malicious treatment I've ever received from fellow writers.

Imagine this scenario, if you will.  A member of your RWA chapter, whose manuscript you read in progress and offered suggestions on, sells her first book.  The entire membership, which is 95% unpublished, is overjoyed that one of their own has made it.  A year later, when the book is finally in print, the chapter arranges to host a book-signing at the local mall on the same evening as the regular monthly meeting.  Yes, dear readers, this is in the days before the big stand-alone stores.  The chapter member in charge of arranging the event invites the only other two published members of the group to join the newly published.  I was one of those two.  I was asked to contact the bookstore and give the manager the details -- title, publisher, ISBN -- of my books so the store would have a sufficient supply on hand.  I did so, talking directly with the store manager.

By the time this happened, in the early 1990s, the online writing communities had begun to flourish, and via the Prodigy network I had established a casual friendship with another writer in another state.  When I told her about the book signing, she telephoned the store where it was to be held and purchased copies of two of my books.  She left detailed instructions with the store manager on which books, who they were to be signed for, and how to send them to her.  She had paid for the books and the shipping via credit card.  I had no idea she was going to do this; she only told me about it after she had made sure all the arrangements were finalized.  She had had enough experience with long-distance purchasing to know the store manager might forget or the right clerk might not be working that night. 

The chapter member in charge of the event kept in touch with me to confirm the time and other details.  The third  author included in the book-signing had also contacted me to get exact driving directions to the location, as she wasn't entirely familiar with it.

With all these advance preparations and with all these confirmations of preparations from various people involved, you'd wonder how anything could go wrong, and if anything could, what would it possibly be?

I arrived at the mall with a friend -- also a member of the chapter -- and we grabbed a bite to eat before the booksigning.  Then, well in advance of the actual event, we strolled to the bookstore where a lovely table had been set up with lovely stacks of the books by the newly-published author and. . . . the other published member of our chapter.  There were two vases with rosebuds, two name signs.  There was nothing for me.  Not my books.  Not a name tent.  Not a vase with a fucking rosebud.

To say I was a bit disconcerted would be putting it mildly.  I was hurt and angry and devastatingly embarrassed that I had to go into the store and ask what the heck was going on.  When questioned, the store manager rather rudely told me she had been informed that I would not be attending.  She had already sent all copies of my books back to the warehouse.  When I asked her about the copies I was supposed to sign for my friend, she said she thought those might still be behind the counter since they were paid for.

The friend who had accompanied me to the meeting and I were able to salvage the evening by finding copies of my books that hadn't been sent back to the warehouse and a more helpful store clerk made another name sign and few of the other members of our chapter ever suspected that the night was almost a disaster . . . . or at least a disaster for me.

Of course, one of those other members knew.  It took a little time, and a lot of heartache, but I did learn who had called the store and told them that I wouldn't be there:  The newly published author.  Why?  Why would someone do something so cruel?  I never did find out the answer to that one.  I did learn that once again, people I had thought were my friends were not.  And of course, by the time I discovered who had done it, her anger at me had festered. 

Shall I go on?  Are you tired yet of my tale of woe, my bitching about the meanies who didn't like my meaniness?  Shall I tell you of the Big Name Author who joined me and my husband for a casual dinner at a conference I had chaired, laughed and joked and drank wine with us for several hours, and then the very next morning lied about me to my friends, accused me of refusing to grant her a special, unscheduled workshop at this conference, even though she had never asked me?  Why?  I had never done anything to her.  Never critiqued her manuscripts, never reviewed her books, nothing.  She had no authority to demand a platform to speak at an RWA chapter's conference, but she never even asked! 

Why?  Why would anyone do something like that?  There was no reason for her to be jealous of me; she was a best-selling author, had won numerous awards, was liked and respected by a whole lot of people.  I had read some of her books and I had enjoyed them.  Because of the type of conference this was and the location it was held, a bunch of us had gone to a nearby supermarket and bought deli stuff to take back to the hotel that evening, and she invited herself to join us.  She was welcomed eagerly, and she spent several hours with two or three other writers, myself and my husband.  We sat on the floor around a coffee table in our hotel room and ate sandwiches and chips, laughed and talked and got a little drunk.

The next morning she spread lies about me that haunted me the rest of the time I was in RWA.
I never really found out why she did it.  Hurt, angry, confused, I didn't pursue the issue.  When I asked other friends why they hadn't set her straight, I got the usual answer:  They didn't want to hurt her feelings by pointing out how wrong she was.  And what about my  feelings?  Oh, I was strong, they told me, and I'd get over it.

I didn't.

Some of you reading this now may recall that I posted on a private forum in a discussion of a somewhat related topic, "I rarely forget, and I almost never forgive."

I have not forgotten any of those events, nor have I forgiven any of those people, published or unpublished.   And there are many more examples.  I seem to have a big red target painted on me that says "This person is strong and smart and can take your abuse.  Abuse her to your heart's content."

They seemed to think that if you're strong it doesn't hurt.

It does.

In the course of the 15 or so years I was active in critique groups, I saw some pretty pretty awful stuff.  Sometimes writers didn't stay in the group after a first brutal critique; sometimes they stayed only long enough to retaliate.  Some couldn't handle even the slightest criticism.  But there is another aspect of critique groups that often isn't explored in a post mortem.  It's not just the members who can't handle receiving a critique that cause a group to collapse; it's also those who don't know how to give one.

In my last group, in the early 1990s, I was sharing chapters of one of the books that eventually was published by Zebra.  Our standard procedure was to distribute copies of the material at one meeting, then it would all be taken home for reading and mark-up, to be discussed at the next meeting, when another batch would be handed out.  This sometimes caused problems if errors were noted that affected the next section that had already been distributed, but we seemed to work around that fairly well. 

One of the members, whom I shall call Jane for the sake of this discussion, was sharing her work-in-progress which was a very poorly written historical romance.  The book featured two heroines, the classic "identical cousins" named Joanna and Jeanne.  After reading only a few pages, we all recognized that both characters should really have been named "Mary Sue," since they were very thinly disguised avatars of the author herself.  One was the absolutely perfect, absolutely lovely, absolutely saintly person that the author so often said she personally wanted to be; the other was the much abused, imperfect but trying to be good person the author apparently saw herself as in real life. 

The obviousness of the Mary Sue situation and the defensive posture of the author in the face of any criticism had us all backing off.  In one scene in a convent, one of the heroines is reciting a prayer she had composed .  The author got the Latin wrong, which I recognized from my one year of high school Latin.  I looked up the correct Latin and marked it on the copy of the manuscript.  Even confronted with the evidence, and having no evidence to support her own contention, the author insisted she had not made an error.  She, after all, had gone to Catholic schools and was herself a devout Catholic (never mind that pesky divorce thing) and knew better than someone who looked it up in a Latin text book. 

Understand that this prayer was not a memorized prayer from church ritual that may indeed have contained incorrect Latin but still have been been "correct" according to canon.  This was something the character had written herself based on her own convent instruction in Latin.  Jane, who had never actually studied Latin or taken a course in it, had made up the prayer by taking words from her missal.  They were, like, really really wrong.

But the point that really came from the event was we all knew now criticism of Jane's work was therefore off the table.   We knew she would take everything personally, because she had written herself so thoroughly into the book.  The wider effect, however, was that everyone began to pull back on all other critiques.  Jane's aggressive defensiveness set a precedent.  The next writer who received pointed criticism jumped to her own defense, and even though she was every bit as wrong as Jane had been, the others acquiesced. 

To test a theory I developed about this, I deliberately put a huge glaring error in the next installment of the book I was bringing to the group.  If I remember correctly now -- this was roughly 20 years ago, you understand -- the error involved a character dressing in explicitly described clothing in one scene and later removing very different explicitly described clothing.  I wanted to see if anyone would catch the error and, if so, what would they say.

Some caught it, some didn't, but no one said a single word.  When I asked them afterward -- I explained that I had caught the error after distributing the copies; I never told them I'd done it deliberately -- why they said nothing, the responses fell into two types:  In the first case either they thought that because I was a published author I wouldn't make such a mistake and therefore it couldn't actually be a mistake, or they thought I had done it intentionally for some published-author reason unknown to them and therefore it wasn't a mistake.  In the second type were those who didn't say anything because they feared that if they said something negative about my work, I would retaliate and say something negative about theirs, so that by saying nothing about mine, they were trying to guarantee that I wouldn't say anything about theirs.  Of course, in the two years or so that the group had been in existence, I had never engaged in retaliatory critiques, but that apparently was lost on them.

The group disbanded very shortly after that.   What had happened was that they were no longer critiquing the books, they were critiquing (or not critiquing) the writer.  A critique group that can't be honest about the writing, that deliberately pulls its punches, is worthless.

I still have some of the manuscripts from those groups, however, and over the past few months I've looked at some of them.  Oh, dear goodness, but some of them are so, so, so poorly written.  They make me feel sorry for the characters who are trapped in such inane dialogue and pointless actions.  I have more sympathy/empathy toward them than I do their authors.

When I left fiction writing in the mid 1990s, I thought I had put all that stuff behind me.  I worked my little jobs and dealt with the grief over my writing career, and then suddenly in 1998 I went back to college.  I pretty much knew nothing about writing academic papers, but at least I knew how to write. 

During my first semester I took a literature course in which we had to read and  analyze a specific category of novels.  They certainly weren't the popular fiction romances I was used to, but I recognized various elements as similar.  I was able to analyze them on that basis, even if it wasn't quite the basis the professor was looking for.  My first paper earned me a B, but with a lot of notations on it and a request that I rewrite the paper according to the suggested changes.  As I really hadn't known what I was doing with the first attempt in terms of academic writing, the professor's comments made perfect sense and I felt I now understood where I had gone "wrong."  I rewrote the paper and got an A.  That much didn't surprise me.

What surprised me were the comments that came with subsequent assignments in that class as well as others.  Not the comments written on my papers but on the papers of my classmates.  Most of them were 20, 25 years younger than I, were coming from an uninterrupted academic experience (they hadn't dropped out for a quarter century) and were familiar with the conventions of academic papers.  As the professors handed assignments back, I could see "bloody" papers going to the other students, pages covered with red ink, scarlet paragraphs written in margins and on the back and sometimes even over the printed text.

Mine never looked like that.  Oh, to be sure there were often short comments written in the margins or questions asked toward clarifying a point I'd made, but my papers didn't come back to me with more written on them by the professor than I'd put in the text.

Being a new student, and an older, returning student, I didn't have the confidence to approach a professor and ask what the hell was going on.  Besides, I was getting almost straight A's, so I really didn't need to be concerned.  After several weeks, when I did feel more comfortable in my new role as student, I broached the subject to one of my instructors, one who had consistently given my papers approving comments and even little smiley faces (yes, she did!) in the margins.

She chuckled, and her reply was something along these lines:  "Linda, you know you can write.  I don't know what your background is or where you learned it, but even if you don't have the academic background some of these kids have, at least you can express yourself and your ideas in a way that someone else can understand you.  Half the time these other people don't even know what they're writing about.  They put words on paper and think that's enough.  When I read one of your papers, I never have to stop and try to figure out what you've said."

A semester or so later, in another class, we had an exam that included a number of essay-type questions.  After the tests had been graded, but before they'd been handed back to us, the instructor put several of them on the overhead projector to show the rest of the class what an "A" answer looked like and what an "F" answer looked like.  I wasn't really surprised to see one of mine exhibited as an "A" answer; by that time I was in my second or third semester and had developed some confidence in my writing ability in this different form.  But when my second and third answers were displayed, and there were whispered comments around me regarding the now-familiar handwriting, I started to squirm a bit.  Afterward, I asked the instructor if she could please not display all my responses.  She laughed and said, "But yours are such perfect examples.   All of them should be writing like this."

In another class, an assignment intrigued me to the point that I surpassed the three-page length required by several pages.  I think I actually turned in about 15 pages, along with an apology to the professor for my wordiness.  The paper came back with the notation, "Reading your 15 pages was a lot easier and more enjoyable than reading 3 pages from most of the others."

In another class, the professor quite literally berated the students who had received low marks on a paper, telling them she was appalled that any institution of higher learning had produced students with such poor thinking and writing skills.  She hadn't handed the papers back yet, and so most of us were terrified of what we'd see when she did.  Maybe I shouldn't have worried, but I did, and yet mine came back with only a few minor comments.  Though the professor hadn't held up the papers for display or put them on the overhead projector, it was impossible not to notice some of the worst cases of "bleeding" paper, or to notice the few that were clean, including mine.

Two students left the class in tears.  One of them came up to me afterward and asked me what I had done to avoid the professor's wrath.  How could I tell her that the key to getting back clean papers was to write well?  My grades had little or nothing to do with whether the instructors liked me; I just knew how to write.

One of my last classes in graduate school was one of those "thinking" classes, as I called them, where the emphasis was more on analyzing ideas and concepts and putting them together in different ways.  The professor encouraged us to write papers that pushed the envelope, that looked at the issues from different perspectives, that took us out of our comfort zones and maybe did the same for her.  We weren't held to the standard format of the academic paper.  We were told be creative, inventive, innovative.  Mostly we weren't.

Toward the end of the semester, when we were supposed to be synthesizing everything we'd explored already, I wrote a paper that wasn't a paper at all.  It was short story.  I'm not a short story writer, but this one just kind of came to me in a flash.

Each of our writing assignments included a list of specific concepts or concerns or questions that had been raised in our reading assignments, such as conflicts between technology and industry, or whether ethics could be relative.   Our grade was based not only how well we addressed these issues, but how many of them from the list -- which differed for each assignment -- we were able to incorporate in a cohesive narrative.  What intrigued me as I wrote the story, fleshed it out from that initial inspiration, was how perfectly all of the items on that assignment's list fit into the tale.

But was a short story, pure fiction, an appropriate paper for an academic situation?  When I handed the finished paper to the professor, I told her that it was very different, and maybe it was too different to fit in her guidelines.  If so, I was prepared to write another, more traditional paper, but it was up to her.  I wouldn't say anything more.

At the next class meeting, she handed back the graded papers.  "This is amazing!"  she had written on mine.

"So, it was okay?" I asked somewhat timidly.

"It was wonderful!  It's exactly what I meant by trying something different.  You really need to get this published."

Later, she told me that she had read the story while she and her husband were watching television and she kept interrupting the program to exclaim over the writing.  What amazed her was that she couldn't imagine how I was going to weave all those assigned issues into the story . . . and yet I did.

I know this blog post has gone way off onto tangents.  It was intended to.  And it's a very self-centered one, painting a portrait of the writer as abused critic and smug academic.  And there's a reason for it.

I recognize that I am in an unusual position.  Not unique, for I'm sure there are many others like me, but different enough to have a special perspective.  As a published author from the old days, when we really had to compete -- often directly against each other -- to be published and had to produce work that met accepted standards before it was published, I have credentials.  Regardless what my ultimate sales figures were (because some of the responsibility for that in those days rested with the publisher, not with me), I had reached the benchmark of success, which was print publication by royalty paying publishers.

I've also been the victim of retaliatory criticism.  I know what it feels like, and I also know it's counter-productive.  I have absolutely no reason to engage in it, no desire to do so. 

I no longer have to prove anything to anyone.  I proved myself to myself and that's all that matters to me.

Nor do I have any reason to be jealous.  In fact, I find that being accused of jealousy is both laughable and insulting.  Why in the name of all that's sacred would I be jealous of someone who can't write?  Even more, why would I be jealous of someone whose self-published books aren't selling?  Anyone can offer a book for free and get lots of digital downloads.  But sales figures are actually obtainable, and they don't lie.  Folks, those books you're claiming you sold 10,000 copies of?  The evidence strongly suggests you sold fewer than a dozen.

Nor do I appreciate the accusations that my reviews and criticisms are attempts to harm someone else's writing career.  To begin with, I don't have that kind of power.  Really, no individual does, unless that individual is the author.  Good books will sell, and bad books won't.  My silence won't help bad books.  The silence of all the reviewers who would post negative reviews won't sell bad books.

Nor will the lies of the authors.

After writing and posting Parts 1 and 2, I came under attack from an unhappy author and her sock puppets and supporters.  I use that word "attack" tongue in cheek because the whiny words of an outraged author do not inflict mortal wounds. 

As I wrote in my review on GoodReads, authors are entitled to promote their books.  They are not permitted, under GoodReads' Terms of Service, to set up fake accounts to rate and review those books multiple times.  There was substantial evidence that this author had done that.  In the body of the review I made it very clear that the tactic had been identified and reported to GoodReads.  The author and her friends and family and sock puppets excoriated me, claiming she had done nothing wrong, was an honorable person who didn't lie, blah blah blah.  If you're a regular reader of this blog, of the BBA threads on Amazon, of the BBA threads on GoodReads, or are just generally aware of the tempests brewed by this type of author when hit by a bad review, you know what I'm talking about.

She -- and her friends, family, and socks -- then took the most drastic action they possibly could, which I'm sure they believed would have me quaking in my flip flops.  (I don't wear boots.  Period.  I even avoid the aforementioned flip flips as much as possible.) 

Horror of horrors, they one-starred all my books.

The thing is, I couldn't care less if I tried.  Other people might not believe it or agree with it, but it's the truth.  I sincerely believe my books, like anyone else's, will sell if they're good, if they're good in the opinion of the people who want to read that type of book.  I don't believe bad reviews or one-star ratings will hurt my sales, nor do I believe pumped up reviews from friends, family, sock puppets and shills will boost my sales in the long term.

So sorry to deflate your bubble, folks, but all those one-star ratings didn't cause me to shed a tear, lose a moment's sleep, or do much more than shake my head at your stupidity.  And yes, I have even told people, right there in the discussion on GoodReads, that I'd really rather not have fake five-star ratings.  They make me look bad.

And now we come to the crux of the whole thing.  Finally.  After this long journey.

I received an email from someone -- I do not know her name, and in fact I'm only assuming a female identity for her -- who was outraged that someone, anyone, would be so petty as to one-star my books just because I'd pointed out how badly written their book was.  My secret defender offered to one-star all of their books, down-vote all their reviews, and basically avenge the stupid shit they'd done to me.

Her email had me in tears.  I had forgotten that what I considered a juvenile and unproductive exchange between myself and a butthurt author could have much wider implications. 

Especially on GoodReads, where the "friends" and "followers" of those who post a review or comment on another's review will also see the review and the comments, words have a way of spreading.  We don't always know who will read them or how they will react.

Reviews are for readers.  Some of those readers may also be writers.  They may be the author of the book being reviewed, they may be her friend or her son or her mother.  They may be her enemy.  They may be competing against her for a contest prize or for Amazon sales.

Regardless who those readers are or what they are, the reviewer owes them all the same thing:  Her honesty.  Nothing more, nothing less.

As a reader, as a writer, as a reviewer, as a human being, I have nothing if I do not have my integrity.  My books may be targeted by all the one-star reviewers on GoodReads, but that won't stop me.  Will that self-respect be cold comfort when my books don't sell?  Not all all; the two issues are not related, except in the sense that I must put that same integrity into my writing as I do my reviewing.

So here's the last warning to you all:  I will pull no punches.  I will sugar coat nothing.  And if you think threats of doxing or one-starring will change that, then you got another think coming.

Words in response to the trolls and bullies

As difficult as it is to believe, I've been online almost 20 years.  Or maybe more than that.  I'm not sure when I got the first modem and the Prodigy software, but it had to be somewhere around 1992.

One of the first lessons I learned back in those old Prodigy days was "Don't Feed the Trolls!"  I remember a few of those first encounters.  Of course then as now I was mostly visiting threads and discussions about writing and reading, and we'd always get a few doofuses who wanted to make fun of women who read and wrote romance novels.  Then there was a guy who insisted no successful writer ever came out out of a critique group.  By the time I moved on to the GEnie network's Romance Exchange, or RomEx, and then to AOL, ignoring trolls was just another part of online life. 

However, I learned these lessons the hard way.  All too often I'd get suckered into one of those discussions, the kind that you can never win because they're designed that way.  Kind of like the old joke, "So, tell me, Bob, are you still beating your wife?"  There's no way to answer that and save face.

Yes, indeed, I often ended up in the role of the miserable, frustrated little soul, hunched over her keyboard into the wee hours, my brow furrowed in concentration, an enormous thought bubble hanging over my head with the words "Someone on the Internet is WRONG!" 

Most of the time, it wasn't worth the effort.  I changed very few opinions, if any, since all of us were safely ensconced behind our monitors and we didn't have to suffer much in the way of consequences.

The online world has changed a lot since then.  When I started with Prodigy and GEnie and AOL, DOS was still viable and there was no www, no Facebook and no eBay and no Amazon and no PayPal, no Twitter and no Pinterest and no YouTube.  Now we have all that, and more, and we still have the trolls.

As I've come back into my writing career (if you want to call it that) I've believed more than ever in the integrity of the words.  What we write has meaning and it has consequences.  If we are not prepared to accept the consequences, then we should not put our words out in public.  Once those words are out there, once we've hit the post or send or publish button, we've lost control of those words.  They are ours, but they are no longer ours alone. 

One area that has quite obviously attracted a lot of trolls is the whole issue of book reviews.  It's been a hot topic just on this little blog, even though I don't do any reviews here.  I do write about reviews here, however, and one of the issues I've addressed is the need for honest reviews, especially about bad books.

The sad truth is that there are a lot of badly written books out there.  The sadder truth is that a lot of those badly written books are published by their authors.  Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords -- the two platforms I've used -- make digital publishing a snap, and far too many people have been seduced by that snap.  They've published too many books that weren't ready for publication, and worse than that is the fact the authors themselves weren't ready for the consequences.  They don't know why their books weren't ready nor do they know how to make them ready.  All they know how to do is lash out at the critics -- or anyone they perceive to be a critic.

I don't think I'd make a very good reviewer.  I say that even though I have been a reviewer in the past.  But the reviews I wrote for Rave Reviews and for the long-defunct online review site whose name I have completely forgotten were bland and formulaic and utterly commercial.  The opinions were mine and they were honest, but I felt as if they served little purpose other than to announce hey, random reader, here's another book you might want to take a look at.

As I've written elsewhere on this blog, the books I reviewed then were published by established print publishers who had a vested interest in making sure their product was literate.  That was one of the beauties of the old publishing machine.  You either wrote well enough to be published or you learned and practiced until you did.  When you wrote well enough to be published. . . .you were published, and it worked equally well in reverse:  If you were published, then obviously you wrote well enough to be published. 

Now there's no such validation, because anyone can be published.  There are no gatekeepers.

Books, however, involve a three-phase process -- writing, publishing, and reading.  Along with the traditional gatekeeping between writing and publishing, there was another between publishing and reading:  the book review.  Though less a true quality assurance function, reviews did serve to assist readers in making selections, especially in the romance fiction community.

But book reviews have proliferated just the way publishing has.  Where reviewers were few in number and were selected for publication in much the same manner as authors -- You had to have some credentials.  If your review was published in a reputable magazine, it was deemed to have some validity -- now anyone can be a reviewer, just as anyone can be an author.

So what the reader is faced with today is a double whammy:  A flood of self-published, unvetted reading material and a flood of untrustworthy reviews and recommendations.

Independent reviewers who try to wade through this tsunami are often attacked by self-publishing authors as well as their supporters.  This has been documented time and time and time again.  There are groups and individuals campaigning to force bookseller sites like Amazon and reader sites like GoodReads to limit reviews to only positive comments.  Reviewers are scolded if they aren't "nice" enough.  Reviewers who dare to express honest, personal opinions that happen to be negative have been the victims of cyber stalking, harassing phone calls, and publication of private, personal information -- all forms of extortion or blackmail to silence them. 

In other words, the authors whose books are receiving negative reviews have resorted to threats -- and in some cases carried out those threats -- rather than look to see if there is any validity in the criticisms.  And once the author has become angrily defensive about her work to the point of refusing to change one precious word of it, she's in denial and virtually incapable of seeing the errors that have to be corrected.

This is true even when the criticisms are leveled against elements of the book that are demonstrably and objectively inaccurate. 

For example, is the document properly formatted for digital publication?  Just about anyone can look at a Kindle device or the Kindle app for PC or Android or whatever and determine if a manuscript has been properly formatted.  Are there double- or triple-spaced breaks between paragraphs?  No paragraphs at all?  Are the margins reasonable, or too narrow or too wide?  These are the basic mechanical details of publishing the already-written book.  This is the process that makes the digital content look like a professionally prepared product.  This is what the "real" publishers do when they digitize a book.  The self-publishing author who doesn't care enough or know enough to format her product so that it looks professional probably doesn't care enough or know enough to write a good book.  Yet often when these formatting errors are pointed out in reviews, the authors or their supporters deny that the errors exist -or- they insist the formatting errors don't matter, that the reviewer is petty for pointing them out, or . . . whatever.

If there are spelling errors, punctuation errors, formatting errors, factual research errors and the author refuses to acknowledge them she is not going to be capable of handling the editing necessary to fix character motivation, plot continuity, and historical accuracy. 

Many of these problems used to be resolved in the critique group, contest, or "beta reader" process.  I don't know what happened to that.  I know that some of the free publishing sites such as www.booksie.com offer the writer the opportunity to receive feedback, but how much feedback is actually offered, what quality it is, and whether the authors take most of it is unknown to me, at least at this time.  Booksie, at least, allows the writer to delete negative comments.  Denial, denial, denial.

The ability of authors to deny or ignore criticism extends to more formal, commercial digital publication as well.  Ebooks aren't carved in stone.  When a book -- or its author -- receives too many negative reviews, the author can simply unpublish the book and then republish it, wiping the page clean of one-star reviews and negative comments.  Then all the fans and friends and family members and paid shills can repost the good reviews before the meanies get in there.

Reviewers have little recourse.  GoodReads, where I have actually begun writing reviews of some of the books I've read, defends readers more staunchly than writers and at least does not remove books solely because the authors have complained of too many negative reviews.  Once listed, the book remains along with all the reviews and comments.

I'm not afraid of the trolls and bullies.  I won't link to them or their websites, I won't name them, I won't out them from behind their screen names and avatars.  I don't care about them.  I write under my own name, and I will review under my own name.

As a self-publishing author, I care very much about the quality of the other books in the market place.  I'm not afraid to go up against the books published by the traditional publishers.  My work always has to stand on its own merits.   Nor do I fear competition from the hundreds, thousands of books offered at bargain prices by their self-publishing  authors, because I am confident my work is at least equal to if not superior to them.

If there is any threat at all, it comes from the poorly written, poorly presented books that make so many readers reluctant to even try the independent, small-publisher, and self-published fare.  There are no gatekeepers between the authors and publishing any more, and too few trustworthy gatekeepers between the publishing platforms and the readers, other than reliable reviewers.  Because some of the reviewers have either given up on "indie" books because of the actions of trolls and bullies, someone has to step into the breach.

I love writing and I love reading.  I love books.  Although my publishing portfolio isn't extensive, I think I have sufficient credibility to make not necessarily a good reviewer, but a good critiquer.  And the trolls and bullies be damned.

Giving the words away, or who are you writing for anyway?

One of the reasons I subtitled this blog "Adventures of a Resurrected Romance Novelist" is that part of my adventure involves pulling the past into the present and future.  It's about revamping and republishing old books.  It's about finishing and then publishing books I started years ago.  It's about taking lessons from the past and applying them to the now.

The little "lessons" I've included are, of course, similar to those I offered to fellow writers in the past.  Between about 1983 and 1998, I was active in several different critique groups, belonged to three local RWA chapters, judged dozens of manuscripts for contests, and taught non-credit creative writing classes through Estrella Mountain Community College.  I saw a lot of unpublished writing, and recognized that most of it did not meet the standards to make it publishable at that time.  Now, of course, the technology has altered, to a certain extent, the need for writers to meet publishing standards.  If it's a .doc file, it can be published seems to be the only requirement. 

The book doesn't actually need cover art, although it's possible to slap one together for next to nothing.  I did the cover for Half Heaven, Half Heartache, my undergrad honors thesis on romance novels, using a photograph I'd taken of a rose in my back yard and some inexpensive fonts. 

As can be seen by perusing the offerings from Amazon and Smashwords, there's no requirement that the book be proofread, that the formatting be correct, or even that the writing be stellar.  The writing doesn't even have to be. . .adequate.

I've blogged about this before when I've pointed out some of the really horrible (imho) products out there, the ones in eye-scorching bold fonts with incomprehensibly creative spelling and bizarre, almost random punctuation.  But I'm not alone.  Other readers complain in numerous reviews that they had a difficult time reading the text because of the problems with tenses and grammar and spelling.  And I suspect 95% or more of the time, those complaints fall on blind eyes.  Either the writers don't care, don't understand the complaints, or don't know how to recognize their own errors.

But then there are those writers who defend their errors with the excuse that they did it all deliberately to create a certain mood or convey a certain feeling.  There's an attitude floating around out there that rules don't apply to these authors.  They sometimes go public with statements to the effect that they know how to write, they know how to punctuate, they know how to spell, but it's their story and they will tell it their way.  And furthermore, any reviewer or critic who doesn't like it is just a hater and a stupid head who doesn't understand great creative work.

Uh, no.

I've explained often enough that the rules of grammar and spelling aren't restrictions on a writer's creativity but rather they are tools for unlocking that creativity.  They are the chisels and gouges that remove the excess marble and release the masterpiece hiding inside the stone.  And I've tried to get the point across to writers that if the reader doesn't get it, if the reader can't figure out what the author is trying to convey, then the author has failed.

It is not the reader's job to figure it out.  The reader isn't getting paid to fix the spelling or figure out that the writer didn't know the difference between "allude" and "elude."  The reader can't be blamed if the main character is named Larry in the first two chapters and then somehow morphs into Wayne in the middle of Chapter 3.  And it's not the reader's fault if she gives up in disgust and posts a DNF one-star review.

No, all you Special Snowflakes out there, it is always, always, always the writer's fault.  Even when the reader is wrong, it's the author's fault.  The author, and especially the self-published author, is always and entirely to blame.

Yes, you.  After all, who were you writing it for?

And that's the question every author should ask herself/himself at least 10,000 times before putting the book online for sale, before reading any of the reviews, before commenting on any of the reviews, before ranting and raving and threatening a reviewer who had the unmitigated gall to tell you they can't pronounce the name of your character.

Who were you writing it for? 

Were you writing it for yourself?  Fine.  Do whatever you want.  You can use ghoti=fish spelling if you like.  Youcanignorespacingbetweenwordsifthat'swhatfloatsyourboat.  YOU CAN WRITE IN ALL CAPS AND SCREAM AT YOUR READER or in a bold italic that lacerates the eyeballs.  If it's all about you and what you want and what you like, then why not just keep the book to yourself?  It's your baby, your darling.  It's the opus you've slaved over for years and years and years.

Were you publishing it just so you could say you did it?  Fine.  It's published, now you're done, now walk away from it.  Pay no attention to the critics, the haters, the one-star reviewers, the DNFers, the MFs, the trolls and sock puppets who have blasted your precious words.  You weren't writing it for them anyway, so what does it matter what they think?

Did you upload it to Amazon and Smashwords and then ask all your friends and family to post OMGyougottareadthis reviews?  Why?  Unless you wrote it for other people to actually buy and read, why do you care about reviews and ratings?

Did you write it to make money?  Well, honey, then you wrote it for the readers, and you have to pay attention to what they want and what they like and what they don't like.  And you have to pay attention to what they say.  And you have to not attack them.

Some people can be very mercenary when it comes to their writing and the money they make from it.  They can write anything, even stuff they don't like, so long as it sells and they get paid.

Other people can only write what they love, whether it's poetry or cozy mysteries or rousing pirate adventures.

But no matter what they write, if they want to make money from it, they have to write for the reader.  Because the reader is the one who's got the money you want.  Duh.

And the writer has to understand that if the readers like what they read, they will come back for more.  If they don't like it, no amount of bullshit will persuade them to part with their money.  No amount of bullying, of insulting, of attacking, of browbeating, of whining, of pleading, of lying, of threatening will alter the simple truth: the readers don't like it.

And it's the writer's fault.  Always.  Got it?  Good.

"You keep using that word. . . "

The complete quote, of course is:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

And it comes from The Princess Bride, one of the most exquisite movies ever made, in my humble opinion.

The word, of course, is "bully."  And the people who keep using it are the Speshul Snowflakes (I think that's how it's spelled) who have decided to apply the term to me, identifying me with an Amazon reviewer who has left some rather harsh evaluations of some self-published (and even some traditionally published) romance novels.

Let's look at the definition of the word bully.

By Googling "bully definition" I came up with a whole bunch from a variety of websites.  I've chosen just a few of the first:

(noun) A person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker.

(verb) Use superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force him or her to do what one wants.

(noun) A person who is habitually cruel or overbearing, especially to smaller or weaker people.

(noun) Bullying is the activity of repeated, aggressive behavior intended to hurt another person, physically or mentally.

 

Now, to be honest, I can see where an author who received a negative review, especially a lengthy review that detailed what the reviewer considered the book's faults, might feel harmed or intimidated.  I guess I've been lucky that I haven't received one of those reviews, but then hey, I haven't received very many reviews at all!

A negative review, even a really nastily negative review, is not bullying.  A single review from a single reviewer is just an opinion.

If the reviewer sought out every book a particular author wrote and posted a scathing review, that might approach bullying.  If the reviewer sought out every positive review left for the book and posted a derogatory comment, that might approach bullying.  If the reviewer went to all the sites where the book is sold -- Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, etc. -- and posted negative reviews, that might approach bullying.  If the reviewer went to the author's personal blog and posted critical comments, that might approach bullying.

But a single review is not bullying.  It just isn't.  It's an opinion.

If the reviewer left nasty reviews on every single one of the author's books in every place published, reviews that were personal rather than addressing the content or form of the writing; if the reviewer left insulting comments on other reviews; if the reviewer stalked the author on her blog, on discussion boards where she posted, or wherever she was even talked about; if the reviewer attempted to harrass the author in her real life, either directly or by disseminating personal information about her that could reasonably be expected to lead to harm to her or her family -- that is bullying.  That is harrassment that goes way beyond a critical review.

Now, hold on a minute.  I know you're going to bring up the subject of negative reviews "harming" an author's ability to make money off her writing.  Unfortunately, reviews both good and bad are an expected part of the writing game.  There are no guarantees of success, no guarantees of good reviews.  Not every writer, even the good ones, succeeds.

Bullying is not just criticism; bullying includes that power and intimidation thing, too.  In other words, a bully wants to be able to influence the victim into doing something.  In the grown-up world it might be called extortion or blackmail.  But there has to be some intent on the part of the bully, some objective he or she wants to achieve relative to the person being bullied.

Most of the negative reviews I've seen are merely expressions of an opinion which leave the author free to ignore the review or act upon them if so desired.  In fact, all of the negative reviews I've ever seen have left the author free to ignore the review.

But what about the person the review is really intended for?  That's the reader.  Reviews are for readers; critiques are for authors.  However, I'm going to give the bullies at the stop-bullying site some wiggle room on this, because sometimes I do think a review can be written in a way that makes it seem like it's addressed to the author.

This is certainly true of some of the reviews posted at the Dear Author site.  Sometimes I think it's a little bit disingenuous of the DA reviewers to even pretend that the reviews are for the readers; when the review addresses the author on every negative point, it's pretty likely that the author is going to get the message.  I mean, yeah, the reviews are intended to let readers know what other readers thought about the books, but really you can't address the author repeatedly by name and not have her think the comments are directed at her.

However, even the most pointed review directed at the author is still not a demand that the author do anything.  There is no threat of retaliation, no "Do this, or else!"  Unless the review is part of a concerted effort to get the author to do something -- change the book, quit writing, whatever -- it's not bullying.  Bullying is not an end in and of itself.  Schoolyard bullying involving children may not have that kind of focused intent; adult bullying of the sort we're discussing here has to have a motivation, an objective.

If we go back and look at the other fundamental purpose of a review -- that it's directed at readers, not authors -- there still isn't any bullying unless the reviewer makes a "Do this, or else!" threat against the reader.  Don't buy this book, or else. . . .or else what?  Buy this book, or else. . . . or else what?  Since the review isn't targeting any specific reader, how would the, ahem, bullying reviewer make good on the extortion?

What we've seen instead, in the case of this particular group of Speshul Snowflakes, is authors who have received negative reviews and who have then deliberately targeted the reviewers with retaliatory behavior.  They stalked reviewers blogs, posted personal information that is totally irrelevant to the business of books and writing and reviewing and promoting.  And they're doing it to make the reviewers stop reviewing.  The authors -- either directly or through various surrogates such as spouses, friends, and sock puppets -- are using bullying techniques to extort silence from the reviewers. 

"Don't post any more negative reviews, or I'll post your kids' pictures."  "Take down your negative review, or I'll post your real name and home address."  "Stop telling the truth about self-published, unedited, unproofed novels, or. . . ."

Since starting this blog over a year ago, I've read a lot of self-published romance novels.  A few mysteries and some fantasy, but mostly romances.  That's my area of expertise and my favorite entertainment.  I've found some good ones -- in fact, I'm reading one right now that's absolutely wonderful, worth every sparkle of a 4.5 star.  But I have also found some real garbage.  I mean just awful stuff.  The kind of crap that editors would reject before the end of the first page.

Telling these authors that they've written garbage may be unkind, but it is also a very valid opinion, especially if that opinion is substantiated with material from the book.   Unfortunately, I think the situation has reached the point where these bullying authors -- hiding behind screen names in exactly the way they criticize their reviewers -- have lost all touch with reality.  They have become so wrapped up in their crusade against negative reviews that they are completely unaware of what they're doing.  If they read this post -- which I'm sure they won't do -- they will think either I'm not writing about them or, if I am, I'm attacking them.  Uh, no, I'm not.  I'm pointing out what they're doing.  It's up to them to make up their minds what to do about it.

I'm not going to post anyone's personal information.  I'm not going to spend hours of my precious time ferreting out who is whose sock puppet, mother, spouse, next door neighbor, or anything else.  But I'm old enough not to be afraid of bullies.  I don't back down.  I may feel a little shock for a while, but that wears off and then I'm back to normal.

This morning, Dear Author provided a link to this article about an Internet retailer who has been sentenced to four years in prison for harassing and threatening his dissatisfied customers.  His actions went a little bit further than what the stop-bullying bullies have done, but not really all that much further.  This should be a wake-up call for the stop-bullying bullies, but I'm sure it won't be.  I'm sure they're is such denial of what they're doing that it will go right over their heads.

So here's a personal message for them from me, Linda Ann Wheeler Hilton:

That's who I am.  That's my real name.  You can probably find out a lot (?) about me on the Internet.  You can post bad reviews of my books if you like, and you know I won't respond because I don't believe in it.  But there are other actions an author who is truly being bullied can take.  And if you try anything, anything at all, that threatens me, my home or my livelihood, or anyone I care about, I will not hesitate one single second to take whatever legal action is needed to keep me and mine safe.  Go write your books, regardless how good or bad they are, and grow up.  You're only making complete asses of yourselves.

But you knew that already.  You know what that word means.