Lilith Saintcrow

You know, dear Readers, that I don’t comment on reviews for a variety of reasons. I’m the first to tell a fellow writer to buck up, ignore the effing reviewers, and be professional.

I saw Alice Hoffman’s Twitter fail the other day, where she called out a Boston Globe reviewer. I winced as I read it. Hoffman was irate because the reviewer had completely given away the plot of the novel–”spoiling” in a major newspaper. She called the reviewer a moron and posted the reviewer’s public email and publicly-posted phone number. Since Hoffman was new to Twitter (fifteen hundred followers when I looked, but I could be wrong and her Twitter account’s been deleted) the reviewer wasn’t deluged. But still, plenty of people have been gleefully trashing Hoffman since. Including people I used to follow on Twitter.

And you know…even though I think Hoffman was a noob for getting angry publicly, I understand.

One disclaimer: I am a big fan of Hoffman’s work. Seventh Heaven and Here On Earth are two of my favorite books EVER. She’s an autobuy for me, and I think she deserves the terms “genius” and “magical realist.” Plus I’m a fellow writer (though just a hack, and not in her league at all) and, well, I feel her pain. I’ve been tempted to sound off many a time, even knowing what a bad f!cking idea it is.

Here’s the thing: we are awash, on the Internet, with people calling themselves “reviewers.” Pretty much everyone’s got a dog in the fight. There’s Amazon reviews, which are a sinkhole of comments that may or may not be about the book or item in question. There’s Internet “review sites” that do follow Sturgeon’s Law–many of them are there to stroke the “reviewer’s” ego, and end up being crap. There are group review sites where the group dynamic has more in common with the locker room or a Plastics clique.

I think a review site that does low-bullshit, high-quality, and scorchingly funny reviews is Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Looking at it and comparing it to other sites of its ilk, you might be tempted to see the foul-mouthing and the bad grades and the cover snark as all alike. But I have always found the Smart Bitches to stand out from their contemporaries for two reasons: honesty and professionalism, both in short supply when we’re talking about “reviewers.”

Candy and Sarah have reviewed some of my books. They put disclaimers on the reviews because both Candy and Sarah have a personal (well, in Sarah’s case, as personal as emailing a little bit over personal questions etc. can make it) relationship with me, and they put that up front for other readers to be aware of. They savaged the books on some points (rightfully so, I might add) and noted their good points too (which I was grateful for.) I did not feel like the reviews were personal attacks, or that Candy or Sarah had anything to “prove” by the reviews. I was happy with them, even if they stung.

Such is not always the case. I’ve read reviews where the reviewers obviously had a personal problem with something I’d said on my blog, or something they thought I said, or even something someone else said or a bad hair day or something, and they took it out in the review, on my book. I’ve read screeds that don’t even spell the characters’ names right, where it was obvious they didn’t even read more than the cover copy, spoilers galore, and a whole host of inappropriate and highly inflammatory reviews. They stung, yes. They were out there on the Net for everyone to see. And in some cases there were the usual blog swarm of Yes Men piling on to show how cool they were by trashing the subject du jour. Which just happened to be my book on that day.

Yeah, it made me mad. Yeah, I’ve bitched about it to the Selkie over drinks. Yeah, I’ve written private, flaming responses and deleted them lest I be tempted. Hey, I’m only human.

This is why I understand Hoffman’s frustration. We are literally drowning in reviewers, online and off. The Boston Globe reviewer did give spoilers, and did clunk through an embarrassing (and in my opinion, unwarranted) bad review. (The review reads to me like the reviewer wanted to cause a bit of ruckus by panning the book, for her own reasons. But that’s just me.) The seduction of the easy response was there on Twitter, and Hoffman took it. When you’re mad you don’t think straight. I’m pretty sure that at some point in the future I’m going to be mad enough to break my own rules and cause an Internet kerfluffle. The flesh, alas, is weak.

But still, I’ll say it again: I understand and share Hoffman’s frustration. Being a writer means getting rejected and judged over and over again. We’re judged by agents, editors, publishers, and finally reviewers and readers. Every time we turn around we’re told our manuscript could be better with X or isn’t good enough because of Y. The prevailing attitude in our culture that devours the content we produce and kicks us in the teeth in myriad ways for being “artists” and producing it does not help. “Don’t be such a big baby! You chose to be a writer, you gotta have a thick skin!”

Just because I have a thick skin doesn’t mean someone has to attack me to prove it, and it doesn’t mean I need to put up with inappropriate crap. It also doesn’t mean inappropriate crap hurts less. And just because a writer chooses to write those books you do or don’t love does not make them your bitch, your property, or your punching bag/whipping boy. A lot of people, however, did not get that memo. A lot of people will never get that memo, and dealing with it as a writer is wearying.

“Wait!” you could say. “Alice Hoffman is (that magic thing) a NYT Bestseller! She doesn’t have anything to prove! Why couldn’t she just keep her mouth shut?”

You know…I try to feel better when I read reviews by people who obviously read and loved my work, people who got it and liked it, who maybe had some quibbles but overall liked it. The problem is, we’re trained to accentuate the negative, so to speak. We’re trained–and I don’t know if this is writers in general, or women writers because we’re women and taught from the cradle to make nice–to give greater weight to criticism, warranted or not, than to praise. Praise seems evanescent, while the hurt lingers.

I don’t think a writer ever feels like they’ve proved themselves. If they do, they tend to go down what I call the Anne Rice Road–I’m thinking about her famous comment (I can’t dig up a link, so this is as best as I remember it) about how she’d worked her ass off for many years to get to the point where she didn’t have to let an editor touch her beautiful prose. If you, as a writer, understand the danger of that line of thought and choose not to go there, the alternative is to listen and be vulnerable over some things. Including a crappy-ass review that dumps, for reasons that do not seem to you to be justified, all over work you spent years producing and agonizing over while it’s in production.

Which brings me back to the Internet. A lot of writers from even just-slightly-older generations do not get that the Internet is a huge effing echo chamber that isn’t ubiquitous even though it seems like it is to everyone on it. About the fiftieth time I saw a review site where the dominant tone was “we’re too smart for anybody, especially the writers whose work we’re gleefully insulting” and saw the long line of Yes-Men comments, I flashed back to high school and though, haven’t we f!cking outgrown this?

I think that a lot while reading a lot of reviews–and not just reviews of my own work, thank you.

No, we apparently haven’t outgrown high school. When I worked retail I was pretty sure 60% of the population never does. Since I’ve been on the Internet I’ve modified that slightly–I’m pretty sure 75-80% of the population never does. (What can I say? I’m an optimist.)

So, while I winced when I saw a writer I adore and consider a class act losing her sh!t a little on Twitter, I understood. God howdy, how I ever understood. The thing that comforts me is the cyclical nature of such things–in fandom, for example, you stick around for a year or two and you start seeing the patterns. “We’re having this argument again?!” is a cry I’ve heard many a time in fandom, and it seems to repeat itself on the Internet ad nauseum.

It doesn’t take the sting out of a vendetta-review, or even out of mildly bad reviews that hit on a really bad f!cking day and make the top of my head fly off. Still, it provides a grain of salt that keeps one from losing one’s mind some days.

That is, I’m afraid, the best I’m going to get. I am not resigned to it, but I am a realist. I don’t know if it’s ever going to get better, due to the nature of the Internet as a nondiscerning echo-chamber. But I do know that in a couple weeks it’s going to be something else, someone else losing their sh!t on Twitter, and another crop of reviews flooding around the bilges. There will be ones that hurt, and ones that don’t. In the end, the ones that hurt are just like every other voice in your head or elsewhere that picks at one’s self esteem and tells you to quit. You can’t let it get so loud it drowns out the story.

The trick is to just keep writing.

Play nice in the comments, folks. Thanks.

And I’m breaking my afternoon silence to note two things: there’s an interview with me over at Drops of Crimson, where I answer the Dean question and the Lipton questions, and there is a new Secret Life of Dolls. If you don’t read SLOD, you are so missing out. I got to “tiny Fay Wray” and totally, completely lost my sh!t laughing.

That is all.

You can win a copy of The Eternal Kiss, a YA vampire anthology, by heading on over to Suzanne McLeod’s place this fine morning. The Eternal Kiss is due out July 27 and features stories by a ton of awesome authors, including Libba Bray, Holly Black, Rachel Caine…

…and, well, yours truly has a short little story in there calledAmbition, which almost didn’t make it in. Because it’s dark and nasty. Actually, it’s one of a very few “bilateral” stories I’ve ever done. A bilateral story happens when I take a whack at a short story, I don’t like it, I scrap it and start all over again, and then go back and finish the first start anyway because the second whack at the short story showed me what the first one should have been about in the first place.

Sound confusing? It’s doubly so when I’m working at it.

Short stories are far more difficult for me, because the execution has so little space to move in. Each choice in a novel narrows down further choices, from the very first line. In short stories this is taken to the Nth degree.

And now I have to finish my coffee and get down to getting the third Dru book into reasonable first-draft shape. If I can keep up wordcount and polish at the same time I will reward myself with a sliver of choco tonight. Mmmmh. I can already taste it.

Over and out.

First off, news! My writing partner the Selkie, aka Nina Merrill, gave an interview to Grace Draven the other day. It might be interesting for readers of my Friday posts about process to see how another writer answers some of the same questions. (You can find Nina’s work here and Grace’s here. Yes, they both work for a small press for the moment, yes, I know about the covers. Really. I do.) I absolutely adore Nina–she’s my writing partner and beta reader, after all–and I love Grace’s kick-ass-and-take-no-prisoners attitude. So, enjoy!

Keri Arthur did a great post yesterday at Deadline Dames, titled Achieving The Dream. It’s chock-full of truth and usefulness, and I’m going to shamelessly borrow the idea and talk a little bit about #2 from it.

I don’t know about your family, but mine never really took my writing seriously. In the early years, it was considered ‘my hobby’ and was not something anyone ever thought would amount to anything (including me, most of the time). So, they never really considered it an inconvenience to interrupt my writing sessions for whatever reason. (Keri Arthur)

Yes. Oh, God, yes. I know this. And Keri goes on to hit the cause on the head:

In the early years of my writing, it was totally mine. My family treated my writing as a hobby simply because I did. I might have been serious in my attempt to be published, but I didn’t voice that. I let myself be interrupted. I didn’t treat my writing as a job, I didn’t give it any degree of importance. So if I didn’t, why the hell would any one else? (Keri Arthur)

I’ve talked about this before, but I want to tell you something different today. Yes, most people will get the hint when you start making writing a priority. For example, my hairdressing friend MakeMe came over the other night to hang out. “I’m under deadline,” I said. “Two hundred more words, then I can talk to you.”

She nodded, grabbed a book, and sat down to read while I finished up what I needed to do. There were two parts involved with this: I was willing to enforce my boundary and she was perfectly willing to respect it. Both sides were reasonable. As soon as I finished we settled down for some serious power-lounging and gossip.

But it is not always this way, my chickadees. There are people who just don’t care what your priorities are, and it is hard to deal with them when it comes to your writing time. It is even harder when those people are lovers, spouses, friends, parents, relatives–you name it.

Now, my children have a perfect right to expect to be more important than just about anything. My priorities as a mother trump my priorities as a writer–but they do so reasonably. Writing is how I make the money to feed my kids, after all, so it is actually kind of a mother priority. My kids know I have to work during the day, and they know Mommy’s writing is how she pays the rent. They know they can break in for an emergency, and they know that, in absence of emergency, my attention will be fully theirs once I get my wordcount in. We manage all right.

But what I’m talking about is other adults presuming you’re on earth just to please them. Which is, when you get right down to it, what a lot of people assume about everyone else, to varying degrees. It’s natural for human beings to think so. It’s also natural for you, as a writer, to put up with no sh!t when it comes to getting your words in–or to be conflicted when it seems that you do have to, after all, take some sh!t when it comes to getting your words in.

Therein lies the problem. There will be tension and various passive-aggressive and (let’s face it) aggressive strategies you will face at least once in your writing life. No matter how blunt and up-front you are about writing being a priority, there are some people to whom this will not matter. It’s a good bet that at least one of those people will be in your inner circle–family, close friends, spouse/lover.

I’ve had parents who told me writing was never going to amount much, the artsy-fartsy stuff wouldn’t put food on the table, I should get my head out of the clouds and do what their unfulfilled ambitions dictated so I would be Safe and they would Proud. I’ve had lovers and a spouse resent my affaires d’écrires and pull every possible emotional (and sometimes physical) stunt to pull me away from the keyboard. I’ve had friends come over and ignore my boundaries while I’m writing. I’ve even had friends who dumped me once I got published. (That’s a whole ‘nother blog post.)

You have to weigh this like you weigh other Important Stuff. If your lover tried to keep you from going to your day job or the doctor’s office, how would you react? Is your writing that important to you? It is to me, but your answer might be different. Is your emotional investment in this person enough to justify the toxicity of their overstepping of your boundaries? Are there other reasons to put up with this sort of behavior?

A lover who doesn’t “understand” or who doesn’t respect my boundaries when it comes to writing time is not a lover I’m going to keep, for a variety of reasons that might have nothing to do with writing. Any relationship isn’t going to last long if the other person don’t understand I write to pay my rent and cannot afford to stop. Cause, you know, I need a place to live. Besides, if that person doesn’t care about something so important to me, is it really a relationship that’s going to last? That would be…no. Nope. Nuh-uh.

A family member…well, that’s stickier, and you have to factor obligation and family duty into the equation. I am actually in a strange position because I don’t talk to most of my family at all, again for a variety of reasons. I’m pretty much only in contact with my sisters, and they understand both that I have to write to pay the rent and also that they can break in with an emergency and I’m all over it. (Because other things come and go, but sisters? That’s FOREVER, man.) So I’m saved a lot of the toxic and passive-aggressive crap I had to deal with back before I was writing for an actual living.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Lots of people who call themselves “writers” don’t write, or allow drama and crap like this to impinge on their writing lives and time. I hit a point, right about the time I hit thirty years old, that I just could. not. take. it. any. more. I became a lot more willing to tell people to leave if they weren’t going to respect my time and my work ethic. A lot more willing to draw the line, ignore, or just plain avoid the toxic. It’s an ongoing process, of course, but one I have to spend time on or I don’t produce and if I don’t produce I don’t get to buy groceries or live in my nice house.

It’s amazing how one’s priorities shift once it becomes “write-or-be-homeless.”

You might not be at this point, and your priorities may be different. But if you want to write, do yourself a favor and think a little bit about this issue. Think about what will happen when someone decides their emotional needs are more important than your writing and you don’t agree with them. Think about what might happen when and if you say, “Busy. Got wordcount. You can have my attention when that timer rings.” Think about just how far you’re willing to go, how much you’re willing to make writing a priority. If you want to make a career out of it, these are questions you’re going to have to answer sooner or later.

If you don’t, it’s better to know that sooner than later, right?

Over and out.

Three things I just wanted to note before my Friday Writing post:

* Pharyngula, on why faith is at odds with science and why this isn’t a bad thing. Why it is reasonable, and normal, and why science is better.

* Keely Kolmes, on whether therapists should Google their clients. Good stuff.

* And Cleolinda on Michael Jackson. I’ll just point at that, because she says everything I want to say.

And now, Friday writing! Onward!