Check it out, peoples: Snarking the Snarky.
Oh snap, we been snarked!
I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard in a long time, or seen so many people afraid to leave contact information.
Didn’t somebody do something similar to Mrs. Giggles a few years back?
This is almost like Ninjas vs. Pirates, but with fewer peg legs and shuriken, and more estrogen and stiletto heels. Oh, and more delusions about the stakes, since nobody sane takes Ninjas vs. Pirates seriously.
>Should they remember that authors are people and that writing is hard work, and thus be more careful how they phrase their complaints about whatever didn’t work for them?
Oh, say what you want about the work (or, hey, my personality)—that isn’t my issue at all! That, in fact, is fair. When you publish, you invite analysis (or plain-and-simple ripping), whether you want it or not. I’ve read books that I have wanted to shred and stomp into little bitty pieces—I don’t have problems with other people doing it, though I do have to bite my tongue when people say things about my books I find silly. (Not when they hate them—that’s different. I don’t get more than very mildly irritated for a very short period of time when people write things like “OH LYDIA JOYCE WHY DID YOU FORCE SUCH DRECK UPON THE WORLD?”—which is, BTW, an almost direct quote from on reader’s blog. I get actually annoyed by things like comments that come from someone not reading the book carefully enough and then complaining about it, like in some of Harriet Klausner’s reviews.)
It was that attitudes were being assigned to people who’d never expressed them that bothered me. This has nothing to do with being an author or not. The CP authors weren’t ganging up. They weren’t being nasty. That’s the “unfair” that bothers me. All’s fair in love and reviews, but in saying that people said/meant things they didn’t…not good.
>I agree that your covers are gorgeous.
I a weird author in that I don’t give a flying flip how accurate my covers are in details as long as A) they’re loverly and B) they get the mood right. Mood trumps accuracy every time. *g*
> I finished VEIL OF NIGHT and liked it—a lot, in fact—with a couple of minor quibbles (I’ll contact you through your website)
Looking forward to it! I talked to a frequent poster at AAR about it just this morning…I’m assuming you weren’t Laura V, too?
>So which people are at the “popular†table in the cafeteria and can I come sit with?
See me? Run away. As fast as you can. *g* (My table in HS table was eclectic—I was the only WASPy-type there. We had two Brazilians, one girl from Vietnam, a half-Saudi girl whose mother converted to Islam to marry her father, a black girl, a first-gen Mexican immigrant, another from Korea…)
>I never assumed that the other Lydia was you, if you can be arsed to go back and read the comments, you will see that the comments preceding mine was by another Lydia.
Then I misunderstood, and I apologize. (I have no problems with apologizing when I’m wrong—it happens often enough that I’m used to it. 😉 People just think I’m a know-it-all bitch.) You jumped at the anon-Lydia by asking why she kept posting and telling her to go back to her own blog—as I was the only other Lydia who’d posted on that topic, I thought you confused the two of us, especially since she had no blog link. So while I knew you were responding to her post, I thought that you assumed we were the same person.
Actually, it wasn’t your *single* post but a whole slew of back-and-forth sequences on your blog and the one you posted about that depresses me—I shouldn’t have followed the link, and once I got the tenor of the other post, I shouldn’t have read further, but I suppose I’m an idiot sometimes. Though I am a fan of vehemence, the gleeful bile and the quickness with which many voices of moderation were squelched was demoralizing. I am the last person to ask anyone to “play nice”…but why all the hatin’?
I STILL don’t think that Shelby Morgan’s “cronies” attacked you. I really, really don’t. Even putting the most malicious spin on their comments possible, the worst that I can come up with is impatience and *perhaps* a tad of condescension, and like I said, that’s reading stuff into their words.
If none of your comments to Lydia-anon were meant for me, that is a classic example of reading things into a statement that aren’t there. It’s possible. It happens. But I try very hard not to do it and, if I can’t help feeling like someone is deliberately going after me, I still TRY to respond with as much generosity as I can possibly manage. I’m not being kissy-kissy—I’m just trying not to be unfair. Because I know I can be, as apparently I was this time. And I know you disagree, but I think you’re reading things into the authors’ comments that were not meant by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe you’ve been hit by frothing authors one to many times—I don’t know. But I’m not seeing what you’re seeing—not bitchslapping and not hunting in packs, with one exception and one half-exception.
If you see every attempt at discussion as “fanning the flames”…erk, well, I suppose I can’t do anything about it, but I did not and do not regard rational discussion—even about sensitive topics—as innately frought with high emotions, much less as being some sort of incipient conflict or grappling of wills or whatever. It’s not inherently an act of hostility to disagree with someone, at least in my view. But if you do think that—and I am not trying to say that you do, since this can be my misinterpretation, and I am merely exploring possibilities, so please forgive me if I’m wrong—I think this would explain a great deal about my disconnect with your interpretation of what happened.
Lydia, I have one, and only one, nick: azteclady. In almost a decade of reading and posting online, I have not found another azteclady. So, no, it wasn’t me at ARR (which I only visit through links from the Smart Bitches, by the way)
You’ve probably got a few new readers as a result of your posts at AAR, Lydia, and miraculously (or maybe it’s not so miraculous and has something to do with Amazon’s delivery times) we’ve finished at roughly the same time.
Sorry, azteclady, I got confused. I was at AAR, and you weren’t.
I only post on romance-related boards under one username. One day, though, another Laura V might turn up, and that will be confusing, like the never-to-be forgotten Day of the Three Robins, which confused a lot of people at AAR.
Chickenshit.
As for readers and how they’re treated…I love the readers. They pay my damned paycheck, and that of my authors. While one can’t please everybody, it never killed anyone to be nice to the people who buy your stuff. Beyond business practice, that’s simple bloody logic: you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Y’all have said everything so well I have nothing to add except for this: Pirates. Not Ninjas. Who even thinks it’s a contest?
Sheesh.
Um. No, Darlene. Ninjas. Why are you even trying to argue?
oh, bah. “she woke up and discovered it was all a dream.”
Or worse, a way to teach a lesson and not a true appreciation of snark.
tchah. here’s my lesson in return.
Rule One for blog hopping: if a blog raises your blog-pressure and you don’t want to have high blood-pressure, stay away from said blog.
That’s why I stopped visiting Michelle Malkin.
It’s snarkaliciously snarkadelic!
Muh-huh? Who are these people? I’m so out of touch. I feel like the dog at the the dog park who comes running up after the big fight is over and everyone is going home mad, and I have no idea what happened because I was too busy eating grass and sniffing squirrel shit.
These kerfuffles are why I’ve vowed never to self-Google after my book is published. I just don’t want to know what people are saying about me.
Plus, I believe there ought to be professional boundaries between readers and authors. If you don’t stand on my lawn with a big JERI SUX sign, I won’t come to your blog and wave my royalty statement in your face (it would just make you laugh harder, anyway).
Besides, like Victoria said, there’s this thing called writing that has to be done, with this thing called time.
I’m like Jeri – I just walked into the party after a major bitch-slapping event has finished up. So I’ll do my best. I followed the link Candy posted for us. This chick posted her ‘farewell, cruel world’ speech, picked up all her shit and went home to have a good cry. Now here’s where my grasp of things may slip but it sounds to me like she’s a writer who doesn’t like readers (like me) to criticize her work. Big-fucking deal. I buy a book, I buy an opinion on it. That’s the way it is. My opinion is just as good as any published writer that’s in her orbit. In fact it’s better because I’m buying or not buying more of her books depending on my opinion. I can speak my opinion to anybody I choose to. I can publish it if I want to, I can blog it, I can even call people on the phone or write them a letter about it. It happens to everybody. You pour your heart and soul into a project to make it perfect and some asshole comes along and says ‘I guess it’s okay’. Again, that’s the way it is. Any author has a problem with me having an opinion on his or her work then email me your name and I won’t buy, borrow, or check your stuff out of the library. No problem. I’m writing a book, I’m going to get it published (just you watch), and a lot of people are going to love it, some are going to hate it, a few are going to be baffled at my success and blog mean things about my work, others are going to come up to me in the supermarket and tell me how I could make my work much better. I look forward to that day.
gah! why can’t I follow my own damned advice?
*thwack* [head against wall]
don’t visit
*thwack*
blogs that annoy
*thwack*
you
*thwack*
ow
Okay, this totally reminded me of the Friends episode (The One Where No One’s Ready):
Ross: No! I’m sick of this. Okay. I’ve had it up to here with you two! Neither you can come to the party!
Chandler: Jeez, what a baby.
Joey: Yeah, Ross, way to ruin it. I was just going to get dressed.
It’s too bad Anonomous (God, I despise cowardice…use your REAL NAME) packed up her toys and went home…we were all just going to get dressed. Probably.
*handing Kate R an ice bag and a couple of pain killers*
I could really CARE about this cover issue. Write your books, keep out of the blogs if you don’t want to hear anything but accolades. This crying foul is childish we are hearing. What? Readers buy the books because of media hype?
I say the pinch is being felt by the authors. Now it has become ugly. If you write bad, readers are savvy enough to find this out before they hand over the big bucks. No matter how much media coverage, web pushing on sites authors engage in, if the book is not holding up, we know, we talk, we read the blogs, we may not buy.
Covers have never sold me on buying a book in my 36 years of reading a romances or any other genre. In all these years, I have tried NOT looking at the covers! These covers were not the picture I wanted in my head while I was reading the book!
My expectations about the book in my hand I just received by whatever means is I will lose myself in a good story. Sorry authors, it is not the norm. It was not ever the norm in 36 years of reading. I always consider a good read, or an exceptional one, a gift. I am always pleased I found another one to pass on, put on my keeper shelf, or just talk about if anyone wants to know about a book worth “opening up” in IMHO.
BTW, I have NEVER said to someone I was discussing books with, “Oh you
have to read this book,(or don’t bother with this book) the cover was just great( just awful).” Please , how damn dumb would that be? As dumb as all this I think brouhaha.
Well damn. And just when the frustration of days of sitting on my hands while muttering the mantra “Leave it alone, do not fan the flames” had finally driven me beyond the point of no return. I was all ready to let caution fly to the winds and post my review of their review site of sites that review this morning. Owing to the tied hands, I had to type it with my nose and everything. Beaucoup snotty.
Then hopefully someone else would have reviewed my review, and that review would have been critiqued on someone else’s blog which could have been snarked by another writer on another forum. This would have been met by a flurry of outrage culminating with a poster who hadn’t read all the comments mistakenly calling the wrong poster a cheap handbag without matching shoes.
Then a group of anonymous writers of Barbara Cartland fanfic would have banded together, formed a blog called “The Vicariously Impulsive Runaway Gypsy Ingenue Nun-brides of Sheikh Rodrigo’s Uber-Snark and colonised the Isle of Wight. V.I.R.G.I.N.S.R.U.S. would have declared a pulchrocracy and given all able-bodied men between the ages of 25 and 45 peerages and six-packs. In the face of this new threat, Beth, Slayer of Foley, would have signed a battlefield truce with the Ladies of Lallybroch and re-enacted Culloden with Gaelic subtitles in Maili’s back garden.
SB Sarah would have kept her top-secret meeting with Mrs. Giggles in a shady bar in South America (Montana? – I don’t think so). As the mysterious “Read Barons”, they’d have taken off from a jungle airstrip in a modified Fokker Dr.I with secret baby wings and launched an aerial bombardment on Avon HQ. Their attack would have been backed up by ground forces made up of ancient half-naked vampire Roman warriors in teeny leather skirts awoken in the nick of time from their enchanted sleep by Snarkling Clean, Dear Author and the Book Bitches.
Meanwhile, resolved to go on the offensive, HQN and Zebra would have formed an uneasy alliance with seven (lookee: mystic number!) e-pubs and spear-headed a subliminal message campaign in ladies’ restrooms all over the world. But one of the editors with an ex to grind would play a double game and so the message, “Fabio is a dream-hunk. You want and need the burning love of DeSalvo” would be recorded backwards over an old copy of “Living on a Prayer” and played in men’s toilets in three American states and Botswana.
In the ensuing chaos, MJD and a team of fellow-authors would have pawned her diamonds in Amsterdam and used it to successfully push through emergency legislation setting out specific IQ requirements and/or other chosen standards for any potential reader. New experimental technology would have developed books that could give any unauthorised reader a graded series of electric shocks for each successive violation, from “frizzy hair” to “(femme) fatale”.
In the interests of literary freedom Candy and Bam would have modified oven gloves and earthing boots for illicit readers and sold them on the black market. Having made their fortunes, Candy would have self-published a series of photographic essays on tinned cat food and Bam would have retired to a secret underground lair built by aliens and grown giant hydroponic watermelons.
And now, my dreams are but ashes. *sniff*. But at least Harriet loves us all.
::rises from her seat clapping::
Brava!
Brava!!
Brava, EvilAunitePeril!!
(But you know I only applaud because I am a slavish follower of the Smart Bitches. It had nothing to do with your eloquent prose.)
if we can’t be as brilliant as EAP (and who can?) we might take our cues from the political world.
Check out this response to a critic.
so much for trying to do fancy stuff in YOUR comments.
Here’s the link to the blogger repartee.
http://whiskeyashes.blogspot.com/2006/06/lee-siegel-self-portrait-civilized.html#links
Naw, you just forgot to close off the link with a second quotation mark, Kate. I’ve made the same error loads of times. Link fixed!
As one who remains anonymous when I snark, I can say that I am a coward. Too often, reviews are not truthful. If something is awful (in the reviewer’s opinion) then snark ought to be able to occur. But careers can be stunted by snarky comments about big name people.
So, yeah, I’m a coward. I don’t trash anyone to be mean. It isn’t personal. But that’s why it’s fun. It ISN’T personal. The minute that it becomes about personalities, it’s not fun anymore.
Very interesting subject. I, too, am worried about free speech. Maybe we’re too snarky too. I don’t know.
Bravo EvilAunitePeril! Braaa…vvvvoh!
I adore your reviews, whether you praise or rip into the book. Please keep them coming. 🙂