One issue book reviewers are just as annoying. People who don't care about anything else that happens in a book as long as their one issue is dealt with favorably. Generally I've had three types of these:
Unhappy endings. Wah, the book didn't end happy! One star!
Meanness: The one character was too mean! Wah! One star!
And then this one a-hole has twice given books one star because the gender swapped female character hooked up with a male. And that cannot--I repeat, cannot--happen! One star!
Besides the one star it just irks me when someone reduces a whole book to a single thing. Even if the book in question isn't extremely long, it's still annoying to boil the whole thing down to an ending or a "mean" character or that other thing. Stories are fairly complex things: you have plot, characters, setting, and so on all tied together with sentences flowing into paragraphs flowing into pages. There's a lot of moving parts. So boiling it all down to one thing is like saying I hate a particular car because I don't like the rims or the color or the cupholders. It's taking something complex and nuanced and simplifying it to a childish degree.
I'm sure politicians love one issue voters. They're easy to placate. I mean all you have to do to win gun nuts over is wave around a pistol and blather about the Second Amendment being the most important thing in the universe. To win over "pro-life" people all you have to do is say Roe v Wade is the worst thing since the Holocaust...oh wait, they probably don't think that happened.
So I guess I could placate these people. I could make every book end Happily Ever After with no one being mean and no gender swapped women ever get together with men. And guess what: these assholes won't go around giving me good reviews. Because they don't. Or they give me one and then do the heel turn and give me like 5 bad ones. Or that one a-hole saying gender swapped women can't hook up with men has only reviewed 2 of my books, both one star. But I have plenty of books where the gender swapped woman hooked up with another woman. But maybe this a-hole only read those two books, right? He just never read any of those others, despite that there have to be dozens by now. I mean come on, the law of probability on that is pretty freaking outrageous.
Catering to these people then seems like largely a waste of time. Also, I'm a Grumpy Bulldog so I don't like being told what to do. If you say I HAVE to write books a certain way then I'll tell you where to shove that. Unless you pay me a bunch of money. $2.99 don't cut it. 10,000 times that maybe.
Anyway, while I'm whining (because isn't this Insecure Writers Support Group day?) recently this one guy took the heel turn far quicker than anyone I've seen. By that I'm referring to fake wrestling where a "good" wrestler suddenly becomes a bad guy, like Hulk Hogan in the 90s--I see you, Laplume! In this case you get "reviewers" like my hero John Daniels who give me a glowing review and then turn around with bad reviews. It's actually happened a few times.
The latest the guy does a nice review for How the Cookie Crumbles and then the very next day does a negative review for Transformed Into a Pregnant Girl. And just like Daniels it's full of all this crap like he's some kind of Eric Filler expert. You read one other book! That doesn't make you my biographer. Though it's funny he says "I've read many of the author's other books..." Really? Then why aren't you giving all those good reviews? Oh, right because complaining is so much fun--hence, this blog entry.
This part was probably the lamest part:
this just reads like it was written on a deadline by someone who quickly grew bored of his own storyI mean, I self-publish so there are no "deadlines." Duh. Maybe he thinks Planet 99 Publishing is a real operation. I guess that spiffy website is coming in handy then. But really this was written 3 1/2 years ago, so I don't really remember a whole lot. Except I wrote it on the way from Michigan to Seattle because I remember writing bits of it in Michigan and South Dakota; I don't remember if I finished it by the time I got to Washington, though I think I might have.
I think mostly he's pissed this wasn't a whole novel. But really if you're such an expert you'd know none of the books in this series were extremely long. Some got up around 100 pages, but none of them were "novels." So if you're really an expert you'd know this was pretty much the same length as all the others. Thus you shouldn't be reading in anything about it being an "outline" or that I "grew bored" or had a "deadline" to meet.
I suppose that is better than those one issue assholes though. They're just the worst.
2 comments:
I agree. I also think politicians know this, and it forces them to be strongly one-sided on various issues or risk losing voters and not winning.
I honestly don't think it's fair of you to call yourself "grumpy" because you don't like to be told what to do. I think there's a strong argument to make that "men" in general are all about "control" and to this end, "being in control" means you hate being told what to do. So are you grumpy? Or are you just being a man? I'm going with the latter.
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