Don't Try to Explain Me to Me

Since most of my PT Dilloway books have been out for a while, I don't really check on them on Goodreads as often as Eric Filler ones.  But when I noticed the sidebar on this blog said Second Chance had 5 reviews, it seemed like that was different than usual, so I went to check and found this gem:

There's just so much wrong about this.  People who haven't done this stuff literally hundreds of times like I have don't really understand the underlying issues involved.  You can't really just "continue the story" in a gender swap series.  If there's no swap then what's your hook?  "Hey, read this book because more stuff happens...like Stacey goes to college and tries dating and gets stage fright singing."  There's really no hook to that.

This is supposed to be a thriller-type series, so you can't have the story just be Stacey adjusting to life as a girl.  In the first book she (and Jake) killed all the bad guys (except Jake) so there wasn't really any unfinished business as far as that goes.  She was a police detective so she could open a detective agency, but who wants to hire an 18-year-old girl?  I suppose she could just happen into cases, like some classmate runs into trouble and she investigates, but I wasn't wanting to turn this into Nancy Drew or Veronica Mars.

So if you want my actual motivation and not some silly bastard's dumb thoughts, something needed to happen to Stacey.  And when Steve turned into Stacey, she was a grown adult.  So this gives Stacey a chance to experience childhood, most notably her crush on a classmate that when she grows up again helps her to reconcile her feelings for Dr. Mac.  And by having Madison go through the change with her, it gave their relationship a new depth.  Those things help to "resolve the story" later on.

It was different and probably "wacko" but it wasn't a prank and it wasn't desperation or anything like that.  These are the kind of complaints of someone who probably doesn't write books--or certainly not books like these.  Along the lines of what a comedian might tell a heckler:  I don't tell you how to do your job; don't tell me how to do mine.

The funniest comment is probably:

It feels like they didn't want to keep writing this, but they had to, so they just fully jumped the shark and wrote something totally ridiculous that had nothing to do with the themes of the first book and did not deliver on any of what you might be expecting from a continuation of the story.

Um, it's a self-published book and I didn't release the first one for almost 18 months.  So if I didn't want to write the sequel, why the hell would I?  In actuality I already had a lot of Second Chance outlined by the time I finished Chance of a Lifetime and I was pretty fucking fired up to write it.  The first draft was nearly 110,000 words; does that sound like someone who didn't really want to write it?

As for it being a "slightly racist James Bond plot" I don't really get that.  It's racist because the company that kidnaps them is Chinese?  The same Chinese company that was introduced in the first book you loved so much?  Was that "racist" then?  Really in the first book I made it a Chinese company because I wanted it to be a big rival company to the original makers of the formula and China has lots big corporations now.  If it was a company in France or Germany or Australia would it still be "racist?"  I doubt it.

Anyway, you can probably get away with speculating on the motivations of some big important author like Stephen King or JK Rowling or John Irving--I've done it--but don't try that shit with a small-time author with too much time on his hands.  You don't know me or what I do or what I've done, person who hides behind a fake name and no picture.  Go fuck yourself.

I looked it up and this person gave the first book a 4-star rating with no words and the last book a 1-star rating with  no words.  The latter I'm surprised they didn't write another screed about me not telling the story they wanted.  Which would be hard considering I wrote the first drafts of these 10 1/2 years ago and obviously I don't know this person.  Someone did something similar with my Children of Eternity series, bitching because the sequels didn't follow the story they imagined it should be.  And how could it?  

I suppose we all do that to some extent, but I think what's more important isn't so much whether the story is what we imagined it should be but whether it's a good story on its own.  The problem with the Star Wars sequels (and prequels) or things like that aren't that they aren't the scenarios I drew up on this blog, but that they're rife with plot holes and stupidity.  That's the difference really.