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A recent post on Musings Of An Aussie Writer that made direct reference to me and reviews of my work got me thinking about reviews. A lot of people react badly to reviews, even when they’re primarily positive. I don’t know why.

As far as I’m concerned, as an author, once I put my work out there I have no right to tell people what to think of it. I always make my writing the best I think it can be before I let it go public. Often that’s the only way it can or will go public.

After that I always remind myself of that old adage: “You can’t please all the people all the time.” I just hope to please as many people as possible as often as possible. I at least want to please more people than I piss off.

There’s another old adage that’s more writing related: “The reader is always right.”

If a reader interprets something I’ve written differently to how I intended, that’s my fault. It doesn’t matter what I want the reader to experience, or what I meant by a certain passage, the reader is always right. The way they read something and interpret it is their reality and there’s no point in me saying, “But you don’t get it! You don’t understand my genius!” It was my writing that resulted in their interpretation. If that’s not what I wanted them to think or feel then I need to learn from that and improve my craft.

When I send out a book for review I’m asking for that reviewer’s honest opinion of it. I’m not asking them to tell everyone how great it is. I’m asking them to tell everyone what they thought of it, and I desperately hope that they think it’s great.

I’ve yet to have a really scathing review for either RealmShift or MageSign. I’m very pleased and humbled about that. It’s become pretty evident from many reviews that my second book is an improvement on my first. I’m really pleased about that too – it’s much better than the other way around.

Certainly reviewers have had issues with a number of things in both books. They’re right about that. Other people might disagree with them. They’re right too. I genuinely mean it when I say that I’m happy if a review is overall positive and pretty much says, “I was a bit disappointed by this and that, but on the whole this is a good read and you should check it out.” Obviously, the more glowing the review the happier I am, but anything that brings attention to my books without downright slamming them is invaluable as far as I’m concerned.

BT’s Horrorscope review of RealmShift finished this way:

“Still, it is definitely worth the time spent reading it as Baxter manages to work with an intriguing list of characters, throws a thought provoking explanation of religion at the reader, and keeps everything moving at a rapid pace, while making some nice observations about today’s society and those within it. I look forward to reading the second instalment, MageSign, to see where the authors goes from here.”

His Horrorscope review of MageSign finished this way:

“Baxter has delivered a book which is better than the first one, which was pretty good to start with. If this trend continues, I’ll be looking forward to the next instalment.”

Regardless of various issues he had with the books (you can read the full reviews by clicking the links), these are the final thoughts that will resonate with people that read the review and they are the final thoughts of BT as a reviewer. I’m really happy with a result like that. One day I hope to get reviews for my work that do nothing but sing the praises of my flawless novels, but I can’t expect that from the outset. I can’t expect that for a long time yet, if ever.

And as for the things that reviewers have raised as issues within the work, things that made those reviews three or four star reviews rather five star reviews, well, I’ve certainly paid attention to those. I’ve thought about what’s been said, why it was said and what I can do to stop reviewers saying things like that in the future. Sometimes a reviewers negative comments will reflect more on the reviewer than the writer – a person’s personal preferences are often going to be at odds with mine. But it’s my job to recognise the things that I can use to improve my craft and work at implementing those every time I write something. If I’m precious about reviews all the time and just huff and puff about these useless reviewers that have no idea what they’re on about then I’ll never improve as a writer.

This is a cross-posting of a blog entry dated 9/13/09 from Alan Baxter Online.

Today I’m going to give you an excerpt from my book about my father.  Hello Alzheimer’s Good Bye Dad"  ISBN 1438278276 is a candid look at my father’s battle with Alzheimer’s.  Yes I know there are many books on the market much like this one, but mine is different.  I have caregiver tips throughout the book to help other families cope with the problems we faced. 

The book is sold by me and Amazon.  Also, the book can be found at Lemstone Christian Bookstore in Collins Road Plaza across from Linndale Mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

You might be surprised if you knew how many people with Alzheimer’s are driving.  In my father’s case, I knew I had to prevent him from driving even though he had renewed his driver’s license.

As with so many families, that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty for depriving him.  My heart was feeling sorry for the father that was instead of seeing my father the man with diminished capacities.

The Friday Dad had to go back to see the license examiner I was scheduled to work at 2 P.M. I took Dad to town when the office opened at noon. He passed the examiner’s eye test this time with the doctor’s okay and his new glasses, but he still had to drive. There was a semi test scheduled ahead of Dad, and he had to wait. Afraid this would make me late for work, I took Dad with me down to Harold’s parents and asked to use the phone. Harold was off work with a bout of tendinitis. I called to see if he was up to coming in to wait with Dad until he took his driving test. Harold came, and I left for work in our car. Really I was glad to get out of there. I didn’t want to be there when Dad was told he couldn’t drive anymore. I knew it would break his heart to hear that.

When I got home from work that night I was in for a surprise. Harold told me that Dad had gotten his driver’s license renewed. I couldn’t believe it. The lady who rode with Dad came back just a little shaken up, sat down by Harold, and asked him if he had ridden with Dad recently. Harold told her no, because we always took them where they needed to go so Dad hadn’t had to drive lately. She said he was not very good at driving, but she would renew his license for a year with a 15 mile radius on it so Dad could only drive to Keystone or Belle Plaine. Harold said Dad seemed content with that. At least, he had his driver’s license. Fine, but we still had to worry that he’d take the car, and we knew it wasn’t safe for him to drive so Mom continued to keep the keys hid in her purse. When Dad asked for them, she told him Duane or I had the keys, and he could have them when we brought them back. That seem to be all right with him at the moment.

When Mom mentioned that Dad had been looking for the keys, I asked him where he wanted to go, and he said, "No where right now." He never wanted to go anywhere, and I knew that. At least not with Mom and me. I started asking him if he’d like to go with us when we went shopping just to keep him realizing that he had a way to go if he wanted it. I imagine that he looked for the keys to the car when we were gone just like he hunted for his pipes when Mom hid them, because he still wanted to drive himself somewhere just like he always had.

Often, Dad walked down to the garage to check to see if the car was there, spent time sitting behind the wheel, or looking under the hood. He was always anxious about his most important possession. Maybe he was afraid the "bunch up north" was going to take his car like they took his guns.

The next year in October when it came time to renew Dad’s driver license, he had bronchitis. His memory had slipped a little more so he didn’t remember about his license, and I thought that was a good thing. We’d let it expire and not say anything. After all, he wasn’t going to get his car keys back so we could just let him forget about the time going by to renew his driver’s license. Wrong! One day, Mom wasn’t in the house, and the phone rang. Dad rarely ever answered the phone, because he hated talking on the it. Usually he’d say he didn’t hear well enough, and later on, he either slept though the rings or moved too slow to get to the phone before the caller hung up. Once in a rare while, he’d answer when I called. He’d talk okay to me, but he’d never deliver my messages to Mom. He always forgot.

This was one call he didn’t forget for a long time. It was the Iowa Department of Transportation calling to tell him that his driver license had expired, and he needed to send in his license by mail.

Dad took the call hard. He couldn’t understand how the government could take away his license when he had been a perfect driver. It didn’t matter that he never drove anymore, but this was just one more thing taken away from him. Mom said he sat down and cried. I never saw my dad cry. Since then I have seen people with Alzheimer’s disease cry for what seems like no reason at all, and I think of my dad. Maybe these people don’t remember the reason why they are crying, but they had a reason, too.

This article, from P. Bradley Robb, originally appeared on Fiction Matters on 7/8/09.

Whether you’re self publishing or polishing your work to send to agents and editors, you’ll need to [do] some heavy edits. Line editing, going through your writing line by line and judging every word on [its] own merits, is a part of the writing process, marking the departure from writing for yourself and the start of writing as a job. With line edits, you’re focusing on tone, consistency, and style – the combination of which bring your story to life in the best possible way. Here are five lessons I personally employ when doing fiction editing.

Whenever Possible, Edit On Paper

I prefer a double spaced, 12 point, monospaced font. Usually that means Courier. The double spacing gives me room to write. The font face and size means I can easily judge word count – a page in this setup averages 250 words. Editing on paper allows you to hold the work, and doing so makes it feel more real. It’s there, it has weight, and just like reading a book, one lets you visually gauge how far you still have to go.

Whenever Possible, Edit in Ink

The other reason I prefer to edit on paper is because, for all they can do with a computer, it still isn’t as flexible as pen and paper. Yes, the modern word processor allows you to flag content with comments, to highlight, to underline, and even to strike through, but you have to pass through buttons and menus to do so. When working with pen and paper, the editing flow isn’t disturbed by attempting to translate natural motions into computer language. Even working with a tablet PC or a Wacom tablet doesn’t proof to be as easy or intuitive. So, for ease of use, pen and paper make things easier.

Read the rest of the article, including tips #3-5, on Fiction Matters.

This post, from Zoe Westhof, originally appeared on her Essential Prose site on 4/29/09.

I’ve been thinking a lot about education lately. It all started when I watched this TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” Robinson asserts that creativity in education is as important as literacy, and the current school system does not treat it as such. In fact, he says, the current school system stifles creativity.

What these things have in common you see is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they‘ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. But what we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong.

And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way — we stigmatize mistakes. And we are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said, that all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately; that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather that we get educated out of it. So why is this?

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

When I heard this, I of course started thinking about my own schooling. I was fortunate enough to go to some pretty unconventional schools throughout my childhood. My elementary school, for example, encouraged “inventive spelling.” If you didn’t know how to spell a word for the story you were writing, you made it up — you wrote it the way you thought it should be. Now, I can’t prove any cause and effect here, but I now happen to be a top-notch speller. I’m sure that’s more due to my childhood consumption of every book I laid my hands on, but inventive spelling was great nonetheless. We actually had a class called “Rhythm” that, as far as I remember, entailed a lot of jumping and dancing around a big empty room. I also didn’t have grades until I was 10 years old, and the school I went to resided inside half the public library building.

So my schooling experience wasn’t exactly conventional, but it began to fit into certain molds as I grew older. After all, I had to get into college, didn’t I?

Robinson suggests that our schooling system would look to aliens like an entire process devoted to creating university professors. If you look at the path from high school to university and beyond, schooling and academia have become insulated, self-perpetuating ecosystems that are often irrelevant to the world outside. Luckily, there are many teachers who reach beyond that — but it is a hard system to crack.

Read the rest of the post (which includes the TED talk video referenced in the opening paragraph above) on Essential Prose.

This post, from author Allison Winn Scotch, originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 9/10/09.

There comes a time in every author’s life when he or she will receive the inevitable: the terrible, horrible, so-bad review that you want to jump inside of your computer and rip it off the web so no one who ever knows you, much less anyone who has never met you, will read you and judge you by it.

Welcome to the life of a public figure. It’s almost a hazing ritual, it’s so common.

I remember receiving my first truly terrible, TERRIBLE review, even almost three years later. My debut book was coming out that week, I was admittedly a bundle of frayed nerves, upset intestines and barely-coherent brain waves. But – until that point – all of my reviews had been positive, and frankly, let’s be honest, I thought my book was pretty damn good. So there I was, on a lazy Sunday morning, surfing the web, when my google alert came on. “Ooh, I’m in the Washington Post!,” I thought. I scrambled to check it out.

O.M.G.

Blood rushed to my cheeks, time stood still, I probably screamed.

Not only did this reviewer not like my book, she EVISCERATED it. Just gutted it inside and out. It was so bad that my agent called me to see if I knew said reviewer and had personally wronged her at some point in our lives. (I’m serious. And I didn’t and I hadn’t.) Once my pulse returned to semi-normal, I tried to put it out of my mind. I deleted my google alert email, vowed never to pull up the review in my browser again, and may or may not have also wished a few terrible things on the reviewer, all the while contemplating a voodoo doll or something similar.

Read the rest of the post on Writer Unboxed.

Allison Winn Scotch is the author of The Department of Lost and Found: A Novel and Time of My Life.

This post, from Henry Baum, originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 9/9/09.

That title sounds like a pretty rudimentary question from a site going into its tenth month, but that’s not the question that’s been asked most often here.  The question has been: is self-publishing legitimate?  This comes in response to people who say things like “Self-published books are crap,” which is sort of like saying, “All dogs bite,” after being bitten by two.  Plainly put, they’re wrong, overgeneralizing, and aren’t worth too much more ink.

Now that self-publishing is a legitimate way to go, is it something you should consider?  The “About” page for this site says,

The aim of this site is to legitimize self-publishing – not just as a fallback plan, but as an avenue that’s increasingly necessary and useful in a competitive publishing industry.

This may need to be revised because more often than not self-publishing should be a fall back plan.  Given the fact that distribution is better with a traditional press – especially mainstream publishing – it is preferable to self-publishing.  Yes, there are arguments for building a readership outside the walls of the gatekeeper, but you can’t deny that widespread brick and mortar distribution and an expanded outlet for reviews is helpful.  As I’ve written here before: mixing together the will of the self-publisher with the distribution network of a traditional publisher and whatever marketing muscle they put behind a book is preferable to totally going it alone.

I don’t totally buy the profit angle (self-publishers make more money) because it’s so much harder to sell books. Retaining rights is a better argument: your book will never go out print, as is the idea that you have complete creative control.  But: it’s possible to have the latter with a traditional press.  And what’s more important: selling 20,000 books or retaining rights?  These are the questions you should be asking.  Of course, selling 20,000 books isn’t a given with a trad publisher, but it is more likely.

In a long thread on Publishers Weekly, which started with a criticism of an interview I gave to a Sacramento paper, the blogger of the piece, Rose Fox, commented:

Henry: Given the willingness of major genre publishers to publish books by authors who combine and switch among genres–Iain (M.) Banks, Catherynne M. Valente, Michael Chabon, Maureen McHugh, Sharon Shinn, Richard Morgan, Terry Pratchett, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jay Lake, Scott Westerfeld, China Miéville, Jim Butcher, Cherie Priest, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Daniel Abraham/MLN Hanover come to mind, just off the top of my head–I remain baffled by your assertion that traditional publishers would be reluctant to buy a good book from such an author. Every traditional publisher I’m aware of also publishes debut novels…

She’s right, the publishing industry doesn’t totally suck.  Good books are traditionally published all the time.  Some of my best friends are traditionally published books! At the same time, how many submissions are enough before a writer takes it into his or her own hands?  One of the oft-mentioned criticisms of self-publishers is, “If it’s not good enough to be traditionally published, it’s not good enough.”  Wrong.  There are any number of reasons that a book might be rejected and they’re not all based on the merits of the book – it may just have to do with the financial status of the publisher, which right now is not particularly positive for many publishers.

Read the rest of the post on Self-Publishing Review.

When you say “I’m writing a book” or “I’m an author”, people have a number of different reactions. You can get support and enthusiasm or you can get negativity…and anything in between!

Sometimes it hurts, as this may be a lifetime goal and something you feel vulnerable talking about.

You expect your partner or your family to be infinitely supportive but sometimes they just don’t get it. You may also surprise them by what you write. My Dad and my brother found it “surprising” that I wrote a self-help book. They were expecting fiction. But why – when I have never written any?

“Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.”

William Zinsser, “On Writing Well”

You will put a great deal of yourself into your book. Even if it is non-fiction, you will find it an expression of who you are. After all, what you choose to write about reflects on the person you are. People will judge you by the material (but then they judge you anyway!).

The problem is worse when you only have one book, as this is your only child. Your sole expression of yourself in book form. It then becomes the only thing for people to judge you on and the main thing for people to attack. Once you have some more books, you can start to relax as there are different facets of you on show. Your confidence will also grow – you are now an author!

Everyone will have an opinion about you writing a book. At the beginning you might not tell anyone you are writing for fear of what they think, or might say – after all, lots of people talk about writing a book, but few actually finish one. When you tell people you are writing a book, the comments are a mixed bag. In my experience it went like the following graph of criticism and praise.

Initially, there was criticism, negativity and judgement – or at least that is what it felt like. This is also directly related to the editing process. The criticism I got at the beginning of the project was justified based on the quality of the writing. However, the criticism started to die off as the editing process continued and as I showed I was actually going to achieve this. As I then started to tell more people, the praise started to come in. The criticism also dies away (unless you have a controversial book!)

This is also related to your confidence as you may often start out sounding apologetic about writing a book, but this changes over time and you become proud of what you have done.

SOME PEOPLE WILL NOT LIKE YOUR BOOK.

This is inevitable and something you have to face. This will be difficult especially when you are still a new author and emotionally involved with your book. I remember bawling my eyes out when challenged on why people would buy it. I felt that a rejection of my book was a rejection of me.

I have learnt that this isn’t so – perhaps the message was not for them at that time.

How can you deal with this difficult time?

• Understand that how you feel is not unusual. You are out of your comfort zone. You are not an expert in writing books, so you need to get used to it. Be gentle on yourself, and accepting that you have some lessons to learn before you make it.
• When someone says something that you consider hurtful, take a deep breath and reassess their comment. It is useful feedback that you can try to incorporate to improve your book? If yes, note it down and use it. Is it jealousy, or a comment that does not help? If yes, try not to think about it again and don’t share your book plans with that person again.
• Talk yourself up and say positive affirmations. You have permission to write your book. Your opinion is valid. You can be an author. You are creative. These phrases are affirmations that you might need to repeat and say over to yourself. Fake it until you make it!
• You can achieve this goal. Writing and publishing a book is an achievable goal. It does, however, take some persistence. Think of it as a longer term experience and enjoy the ride!

So when people comment on your book, or on your dream of writing a book, just take a deep breath, note the comments and move on. You are fulfilling your own dream.

This is a cross-posting of an article that originally appeared on The Creative Penn site on 12/29/08. 

Written In BLOOD, the 8th book in the SF/vampire series Children of The Dragon by Theresa M. Moore, has had its publication date postponed to sometime in Spring 2010. Citing family issues and other technical delays, the author is taking a hiatus to clear the little grey cells and deal with the health of relatives. "It’s something like writer’s block, but there are too many things in the way which have more priority," the author said. "Once I get the niggling little problems sorted and stored properly I’ll resume the work." Other works in the hopper have been rescheduled according to timeliness and will be finished without further announcements. The imposition of a deadline sometimes interferes with the free flow of ideas.