Die in a Fire

So, hey, I want you to look at this very fine review of Black Halo by my good friends at Porno Kitsch.

It’s worth drawing attention to, just because with it, I’m noting that I don’t get a lot of gushing reviews (where are you gushers on my Amazon page, hm?  HMMM?)  But I’m kind of pleased about that, really.  I take a lot of pride in the fact that my books seem to stimulate a lot of discussion about art, writing and the process of trying, rather than just a press release blurb and then a number of stars, puntos or strippers at the end (note: if you’re reading this, Porno Kitsch, you should start rating books in strippers).

Which led me to another issue: given the fact that I’m pumping this one, and given the fact that I’m rarely disappointed by a review that at least takes the time to discuss what happened and why it worked or it didn’t, why don’t I pimp more reviews?  I hope you bloggers out there who have been nice enough to take the time to read it don’t think I’m ignoring you.  It’s not you, baby, it’s me.  I know I told you that when we broke up, and when I dated your sister, and when I set your house on fire, and that one time I accidentally shaved your cat, but…

…hang on.

Anyway, to let you in on a little secret: I didn’t handle reviews that well when I was first starting out.  I wasn’t mentally prepared and it really didn’t occur to me that anyone would think I was anything less than fantastic.  So when I got a couple of bad ones starting out, I got really discouraged, depressed and my mood was ruined for days.  I eventually learned to stop reading them (it still sucks, it never stops sucking), but I only really was able to do that after rationally figuring things out for myself.

The fact is: reviews don’t change the art form.  A good review will not make the story different than a bad one.  If lots of people say the same thing (in which case, it’s usually also occurred to me), then I do look at it.  But in the end, the story cannot be dictated.  Not by blogs, not by reviews, not by Publisher’s Weekly and not even, really, by the author.  At the risk of going all douche nouveau on you, I’ll conclude this by saying that one of the methods of keeping myself sane was to not too heavily invest in reviews.

That said, though, if you really wanted to talk about a review or wanted me to bring attention to it/your site, please feel free to let me know and we can set aside a whole dang blog post for it!

On this note, though, I feel I should weigh in on this little tidbit that’s been making the rounds in publishing.

I blush to admit, despite the fact that we’re in the same publishing house, I’ve never read Steph Swainston and I was only barely aware of her up until today when I read on Mark C. Newton’s blog that she was stepping out of the book-writing business.  I’m not going to reply word-for-word, I’m not even going to repost what she said (because, like the gentle oxpecker bird, I sit upon the leathery back of the great, scaly alligator that is Mark C. Newton and peck the parasitic bacteria off his flesh to feed myself), but I am going to address it because it’s been on my mind.

Specifically, this bit:

“I don’t have a problem with fandom,” she says. “But I don’t think fans realise the pressure they put on authors. The very vocal ones can change an author’s next book, even an author’s career, by what they say on the internet. And writers are expected to engage and respond.” She pauses. “The internet is poison to authors.”

There’s been a lot of hithering and thithering about this, of course, as to whether she’s weak, nutty, wrong, right.  I’m not prepared to suggest any of that, of course; she’s doing what works for her and she’s not comfortable with what’s going on in her career.  It’s a totally sane, respectable and laudable idea to bow out of it.

That said, though, I do sympathize with her standing here and that’s what brings me back to the notion of internet engagement.  It’s essential: it’s great for interacting with readers, it’s great for marketing yourself, it’s great for getting in touch with other people and getting to know authors.  It’s also incredibly irritating: people are always talking about you, at you or some notion of you that they think they know.  There is positive and negative, push and pull, yin and yang, Twi and La.

And I’m not sure I can separate them yet.

That might sound like crying over milk that is not only not spilled, but sitting in a golden goblet, but before Richard Dawkins tells me to quit whining, I feel I should point out that it’s pretty stressful.  To me, it seems like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.  On the one hand, you need to have the internet presence: the website, the response, the facebook, the clever, witty blog in which you swear a lot.  But on the other hand, you need to have a thick skin, the fact that people can sometimes take a dump on you is just taken as granted and you can never violate the golden rule: don’t respond to criticism.

A lot of people tell me that it’s easy to grow that thick skin and just ignore the negative and embrace the positive.  It might just be me, but I don’t think it’s actually that easy, because while it doesn’t blend together, it does tend to run into each other.  Someone praising you might invoke someone else coming in and calling you a hack.  Someone saying you have a good point might invoke someone else coming in and saying “NO HE A WHINY BABY.”

Because this is the internet.  And it’s not really compartmentalized.

It’s like standing in a big room at a party.  Most of the time, you’re having a lovely time.  But occasionally, you feel a wet smack of someone slapping a fish against the back of your head.  You turn around and there’s a guy with a bucketful of fish standing in the corner, staring at you.  When you turn away, he smacks you with a fish again. The people you’re talking to are perturbed that your witty repartee is disrupted by getting smacked with a fish.  You get hit again and then you pick up the fish and smack him back and then no one wants to talk to you because you smell like fish now.  And then three other guys with fish show up: one starts smacking you out of solidarity, one starts smacking you because he assumes you’re into that now and the third starts smacking you with a fish because you’re not paying the proper respect to prose poetry.

Granted, these are never the fans and I severely disagree with Ms. Swainston that the fans are the burden.  I feel if you don’t like talking to people, you’re probably not in the right line of work (which, apparently, she agrees with), but I certainly do sympathize with the fact that it can be difficult to separate the good from the bad and to have very little recourse once you do.  It’s generally considered poor form to come out and bitch about a reviewer that didn’t like you or a guy who hates you (see fish theory) and, let’s be honest, it’s hard to feel bad for a person whose chief issue is having too much attention.

There’s talking to other authors, of course (and this is an astonishingly supportive community for those purposes), but there’s only so much they can do.  Everyone’s issues are different and they have problems of their own.

And yet…I can’t help but feel that it is kind of part of the territory.  You do have to grow a thicker hide, you do have to get tougher, you do occasionally have to eat some doo doo with a smile.  It’s tough, and I sympathize with that wholly, but it’s still something that kind of has to be done.  Does the negativity and irritation ever stop sucking?  No.  But does it frequently pale in comparison with the people who love the work and, most importantly, the fact that you are writing, doing what you love for a living?

Hell yes.

And that’s why I’m certainly not asking for sympathy.  I’m not weeping over what a hard life an author has.  I’m not even sure I agree with the fact that receiving negative attention and finding it overwhelming is a good reason for ducking out.  But I do understand.  I do sympathize.  I do wish Ms. Swainston the best of luck with whatever happens next for her.

But for now, it’s still a pretty sweet life.

If I can have but one thing said about me after I am finally in the earth (preferably after a dramatic battle in which all authors unite to destroy me), I would like it to be this: “He was the founder of the International Bikini Jousting League.”

If I can have two, I would like the other one to be: “He was never a dick without intentionally wanting to be one.”

Today, I might compromise that latter part, since today I am going to call out someone.

Before I continue, I want to preface this post with a few points:

1. I am not trying to quash anyone’s theories, pleas or discussions.  I absolutely welcome the idea put forth below, even if I disagree with it.

2. I take absolutely no issue with the poster.  Only his post.

3. It’s worth noting that I’ve been accused of the same thing that is present in this post and, at least in part, I am venting some of my personal frustration with it.

4. It’s also worth noting that I have, on public account, been guilty of the same dismissive attitude before (steampunk fans probably have a good reason to be irritated at me).  I don’t quite agree with myself back then, but I don’t blame anyone who still holds it against me.

If any of these reasons don’t sit well with you, or if you don’t believe me, then I must advise you that this post will not sit well with you.  Aside from that, though…

On one of the latest editions of SF Signal: Mind Meld, a thriving discussion on underutilized cultures in fantasy (with some very excellent posts by noted authors that you should definitely check out) is born.  It might be said that I’m being an anus and a troll by picking at the comments, but one of these, by B.C. Smith, stuck out to me:

What bothers me is that no one (Gaslight dogs, I’m looking right at you) can write a SFF novel set in another culture WITHOUT making a big political statement. So much so that it destroys whatever interest I had in the story or charactors. That and some just can’t simply write good stories (hint: just because a SFF novel is set in X culture other than europe and has a POC protagonist DOES NOT MEAN IT’S GOING TO BE A GREAT BOOK). Shall I point people to the awful short story ‘pimp my airship’ (damn, does it pain me to have to bring that up) and the urban fantasy series by maurice broaddus. Not exactly quality literature and not even good SFF period. That and the fact that some authors take the lousy route of just doing a LOTR\D&D clone set in an arabian fantasyland (hey! just like a certain saladin ahmed novel coming out). I personally can’t wait to see somebody do an asian fantasy that reads more like Joe abercrombie, scott lynch, GRRM, brent weeks, glen cook or steven erikson rather than said D&D clone masquerading as something creative or original. And I like my share of fantasy in other cultures (the desert of souls and the winds of khalakovo), but when somebody writes in those settings just to use their charactors just to carry out their political themes (resulting in me being bored to TEARS) or get praise for being different but who really CAN’T be orignal with anything else, that just reeks of sheer fail. Heh, I could get shot down for all that, but please consider it.

There’s a lot of this post we could comment on, some that probably should be commented on by people with more of a strength for it than me, but, at the risk of being a picker of nits, I wanted to address something in this post that I find alarmingly more commonplace online and in genre readerships.

We frequently bemoan the lack of originality in fantasy, dismissing things as D&D clones/LotR clones/GRRM-hacks, whatever.  This is not always an unfair assessment, but when it’s followed by such a dismissive gesture without even having read the book in question, it can come off as extraordinarily thick.  Beyond that, there is a certain brain-twisting ire that arises from a declaration that nothing is original followed by a laundry list of authors that other books are faulted for not being more similar to.

I definitely don’t want to seem like there’s something I’m not getting, and I most certainly don’t want to appear as though I’m picking on B.C. Smith here, but something about this just doesn’t add up to me.

You can’t mutter irately about a lack of originality and then complain that more people aren’t like Brent Weeks or Joe Abercrombie.  It doesn’t work that way.

You certainly can not like a book.  You can even look at a book without reading it and decide it has no interest for you and simply pass it by.  I don’t and never will claim to be the supreme arbiter of taste.  But to not read a book, not like it, then go on to claim not only what it is but what it should have been cheapens the book itself, cheapens the book it was being compared to and cheapens the readership as a whole, giving the impression and reinforcing the impression that we only like the same thing told over and over.

Again, I’m not implying that every book deserves your unending support simply by virtue of having been written.  I’m not suggesting that you need to agree with every book, accept every book or even restrain yourself from criticizing a book.  Criticism breeds discussion and the more discussion there is, the stronger the book is.  I’m not even saying you need to read outside your comfort zone.  If you enjoy Brent Weeks and only Brent Weeks, go right ahead.  He’s an awesome author and his books are great.

But don’t read Brent Weeks, only Brent Weeks, then proclaim other books to be unoriginal D&D clones because they aren’t Brent Weeks.

That’s all I’m saying, directly.

What I’m suggesting goes a little further.

I’m suggesting that diversity does more to help readers and writers than is apparent.  The more readers appreciate diversity and originality, even if it’s not always successful, the more encouragement publishers have to pick up the new and offbeat.  The more writers write new and offbeat, the more diversity readers have to read.  I am suggesting that you never have anything to lose by exploring beyond what you’re comfortable reading.  I am suggesting that you won’t always like what you read, but you’ll have new perspective that enhances your other readings.  I am suggesting that you owe it to yourself, not the author, to go out of your way to appreciate diversity, resist the urge to dismiss and to sometimes be surprised by what you’ve read.

You may like Brent Weeks.  I like him, too.  I like his books a lot.  But I wouldn’t like a store in which every book is a copy of The Night Angel Trilogy.

The only time I want to see more than one Brent Weeks on the shelf is when he finally realizes his dream of opening the super-store franchise, Weeks’ World, your go-to shop-stop for all things Brent Weeks and Brent Weeks-related including home fitness DVDs, haircare products, action figures, effigies of Joe Abercrombie and officially-licensed BrentGrillz, the only portable, indoor, electric grill endorsed by Brent Weeks.

It will happen one day, my friends.

And it will be glorious.