Lilith Saintcrow

I have been working all morning, but it seems like I’ve gotten nowhere since that work is all of the invisible maintenance variety. Ugh.

* First, the serious: NPR won’t use the word “torture” when Americans do it. But when anyone else does, it’s fair game.

* Charles Kaiser pronounces the Washington Post dead, writes obituary.

* Now the geeky-cool scientific: the Sarychev volcano eruption seen from space, and the “volcano sunsets” it’s causing.

* Last but not least, the utterly freaking hilarious: the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners are announced. SO WORTH the half-hour I spent reading them. (Hat tip to Kat Richardson for the link, and also for noting the winner hails from Federal Way, WA. Washington state rules!)

And that’s all, folks. Back I go to plugging away on the manuscript…

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.

Andrew Sullivan is doing some of the best and most important coverage of the protests in Iran right now. There’s also Twitter, of course, and the mainstream media is just beginning to catch up.

Why is this important? Glenn Greenwald, Daily Reveille, and my friend RealThog offer some thoughts that illustrate different aspects of why people should care. Laura Ann Gilman makes a good point, too. You can’t stop the signal. Our interconnectedness as human beings is reaching the point of the instantaneous and obvious.

This would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago. It was unthinkable even fifty years ago. It is incredible and amazing that the whole world can be watching this sort of thing go down, that we can have updates of events as they happen from the people actually involved. Wow. Just…wow. And Twitter responding to calls to change its scheduled maintenance and downtime for 1AM or so Iran time so the protesters can keep using the service was a Good Call by a company. They’ve bought themselves a lot of credibility and goodwill with that one move.

I am reserving judgment on a lot of things related to this issue at the moment. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the people of Iran, or a significant portion of them, are protesting peacefully and do not trust the election results. The government has replied with truncheons and jackboots. I don’t think it will go so far as revolution, but I’m thinking Ahmadinejad didn’t win the election cleanly or clearly and what happens now will be incredibly important not just for the people of Iran but in the broader Middle East and by extension, the world.

And I’m thinking, thank God we have a President who thinks before he speaks now.

Wow. Just…wow.

Crossposted to The Deadline Dames.

I see a lot of new writers abusing the Internet, or being abused by it, nowadays. So, in the vein of Jordan Summers’s recent Dame For A Day post, I thought I’d weigh in about various pitfalls of that lovely, wonderful timesuck.

I was amused and horrified to read about what Jordan calls “Internet authors”–writers who write around their Internet time, not the other way around. I was even more horrified when I took a hard look at my own Internet usage and…erm, well, yeah. (Truth hurts, doesn’t it, Lili?) So I got out that writer’s best friend, the kitchen timer, and put myself on a strict schedule. Timer rings, I’m off the Net, even if I haven’t “finished.” This forces me to get important correspondence done and the daily blog post out, and leaves me just a few minutes for surfing, say, the Comics Curmudgeon or I Can Has Cheezburger. (Not to mention playing on Twitter…)

There’s nothing like a timer to concentrate one’s mind and priorities. At least, so I’ve found.

There’s something else I want to talk about when it comes to the Net, though, and it’s social networking. No, this is not a paean to the wonders of Facebook or a gushing about how one should really get on Twitter. No, this is about a little thing called asymmetrical follow.

Asymmetric follow happens because on sites such as Goodreads and Facebook, once I am “friended” with someone, I have little control over what gets sent to me. Yes, I can see their profile and there’s good things about being “friended,” but I also have to wade through a bunch of invitations, events, and other stuff on a daily basis. If I followed up on all the invitations I get on Facebook, I’d have literally no time for writing.

This is a bad thing.

I’ve ended up using Twitter more regularly because I can control what I see through Tweetdeck. To put it bluntly, I tend to follow industry professionals, fellow authors, and people I know out here in meatspace. I don’t follow everyone who follows me, nor do I intend to. I am not required to follow anyone who follows me, really; that’s not what I use the service for. I do read my @replies and engage in conversations with fans on Twitter, but if I followed everyone who asked the service would lose a great deal of its usefulness for me. Asymmetrical follow is a fact of life, and the passive-aggressive behavior of some folks who think they’re “owed” a follow or a friending (because obviously I exist to fulfill their needs, not to write books or have a life) just makes me turn away.

I engage on sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, even the Deadline Dames and my own blog, for a reason. And that reason is not to fill up my time or stroke someone’s ego–not even my OWN ego. I maintain a presence on MySpace and Facebook for my dear Readers, on Goodreads because I like to get book recommendations as well as track my reading. I’m on Twitter for two reasons: to have conversations with industry professionals and friends, and to give fans a little more of a “personal” relationship with my public self as an author. At the Deadline Dames I’m supporting fellow authors, centralizing promo opportunities, and enhancing another aspect of my public self as an author.

My personal blog is really not quite that personal. I’m careful what I put up there, because it’s about (you guessed it) my public self as an author. I don’t blog about certain aspects of my personal life. I don’t post pictures of my children or the real names of my friends and family, because that’s an infringement on their privacy and safety. The website is my public face, and I don’t want egg or mud on it.

I see a lot of authors treating their websites like their living rooms. Which would be fine–except they forget that other people come in and look around. The living room is the room you invite guests–fans and the curious–into. You can walk around naked in your living room if you like–but do you want to do it when you’ve got company over? More grief and Internet wank comes from this than from just about anything else.

Authors and industry “professionals” sometimes forget that the Internet is public. Even when you set your posts on Livejournal, Blogger, or your own website to “private,” whatever you’ve written is out there on a server somewhere. It’s like giving the key to your diary to someone else to hold. If you trust that person, fine. But can you trust a blogging site? Murphy’s Law and the nature of the Internet tells me that it’s perhaps not wise.

It’s one thing to make an ill-considered public statement and deal with the fallout. It’s another thing to bare your soul (or your metaphysical boobies) in a public venue and deal with the fallout. I’ve seen a lot of authors treat their blogs, whether on their sites or on a platform like LiveJournal, as if it’s their diary and say things that should be kept behind the vest. Then, when all hell breaks loose, they feel violated. Then there’s the entertaining trainwreck of authors blogging about their sex lives, marriages, personal peccadilloes or vendettas in the industry–and being surprised when it explodes in their face or the fans get disgusted.

One of the most important things I learned in massage school was the principle of dual relationships. When I was practicing massage therapy, my relationship with my clients was simple: client/massage therapist. If a client invited me, for example, to a barbecue, I could make the call whether or not I wanted to add another relationship: friend/friend. It was hardly ever advisable to do so, but if I did, I had to be clear about which relationship I was in at any given moment and what the boundaries were. This saved trouble and heartache, and it was the professional thing to do.

That system of thought has stood me in good stead ever since. When my writing partner is critiquing me, we have a professional and well-defined relationship. When we’re kibbitzing over wine at our favorite Thai restaurant, we have a personal, friendly, and no less well-defined relationship. When I work at the bookstore, my boss is also my friend–but when she puts the “boss” hat on, I have the “employee/volunteer” hat on, and that relationship is, you’ve guessed it, well-defined. We make it clear what relationship we’re in at any given moment, and it cuts down on troubles and misunderstandings.

This is a skill we hardly ever bother to teach teenagers, or tell them they’re going to need. It would do the adults they turn into a world of good.

On my personal blog, I’m paying for the bandwidth and I have a comment policy. But I also have a professional relationship with my readers. I am there to provide content, not just to moan about my cat’s hairballs. On Twitter, I am providing content–or trying to do so, anyway. (My ideas of “content” on Twitter are a LOT looser than on my blog.) But there are well-defined boundaries to the relationship I have with my Readers on my blog, on Twitter, on Facebook–just about anywhere online. Those boundaries keep me intact and reasonably un-embarrassed, though I am just as prone to making an ill-considered statement as the next person. Thinking about, having, and sticking to those boundaries saves me a great deal of trouble and grief.

And remembering that the Internet is public can save other writers a lot of grief.

‘Nuff said.

I’m over at the Witchy Chicks this morning, guest-blogging about writing paranormal. A big thank-you to the Chicks, especially Yasmine Galenorn, for inviting me!

Today I shall be trying something I have not tried before. No, it’s not rollerblading or skydiving. No, it’s not demon-hunting (done that) or recreational drinking (can’t do that anymore, got kids) or lumberjacking. Oh no.

No, today I shall be making French Onion soup, from a Mastering the Art of French Cooking recipe. Because I am completely and utterly insane. Wish my poor desperate soul luck.

If I may get philosophical…Life doesn’t just throw one thing at you. It throws a bunch of crap at you and hopes something sticks in between long periods of not-much. Since it is in the nature of life, I guess I can’t complain. Or I could, but it wouldn’t do any good.

Over and out.