Feh. I took my morning Topamax, and now I am all la la la look at the astral plane. When you combine that with my morning disinclination to suck mightily at writing, you come up with an absence of productivity that would impress Peter Cook.

Teppy, lovely poem. Thank you so much for sharing it here. I be proud of you!

(cereal)

Betsy, big hugs.

(Peter Cook, btw, is one of my favs)

I love my editor.

She's been trying to cheer me up about the PW trashing, and I got this from her in email this morning; a funny for anyone dealing with a bad review.

There's no point in telling you you can't win 'em all. Here's a story:

Tom has an author named Rosamund Pilcher; she writes what would be described, I guess, as "women's books," but they are way, way ahead of the usual; she's a very good writer and her characters are real. Well, after publishing a bunch of stories that had nice but hardly spectacular attention and sales, Tom convinced her to write a "bigger" book, and she came up with The Shell Seekers, which hit the best seller lists immediately and stayed quite a long time.

Some years later, when her next "big" book was published, Sally Richardson, our publisher, gave a party at her Central Park West apartment for Roz, who was here promoting the book (she's English) and seeing one of her married children who lives on Long Island. It was a crowded party, and I found myself talking to an elderly woman who turned out to be one of the couple that at that time owned the Kirkus Reviews.

She said to me that she wanted to go up and talk to Roz, but that Kirkus had given a bad review to Shell Seekers, and she would be embarrassed. I said Roz got so many, many reviews of that book, just about all of them very good, that I didn't think she'd remember one bad one.

So up she went, and after a brief and what looked like a pleasant enough exchange, she came back to me and said, "She remembered."

Heh. Can I pass that on to a friend of mine, Deb? She's devastated by a bad Kirkus review at the moment.

Betsy, you bet. Also, point her at Katharine Weber's amazon page for "The Little WOmen" - that PW review is a personal hate letter and it sat up there for three months prior to the book's release, with nothing other than that to go by.

Those who can, write/act/do, those who can't...

critique for a living. Critics have an inordinate amount of power, and they often wield it for maximum carnage. One never forgets a bad review, and one bad one can taint a hundred good ones. I don't know why, it just seems to be human nature. But often enough, a bad review does come from envy and inability to perform, so take that for what it's worth.

A very sensory poem, Teppy, my favorite kind. Congratulations on having it recognised!

Those who can, write/act/do, those who can't... critique for a living.

Ahem. Elvis Mitchell. Pauline Kael. Wossname Agee.

Some critics shine a bright light into the recesses of your cranium.

one bad one can taint a hundred good ones.

Whenever somehting like this happens, my mom likes to say that "it's against the 'evil eye'".

I have no idea if such an expression or a similar one exists in English. It's a word-to-word translation from Hebrew, where "the evil eye" is some sort of superstition, created by jealousy of other people, and a person should better have one bad thing in the pool of good ones in order to divert it. Like making one silly mistake in an exam, for example.

Not much of a comfort, I'm afraid.

Evil Eye is pretty much a global concept, sweetie.

Some critics shine a bright light into the recesses of your cranium.

Yes, but I don't think Bev was saying all critics were failed writers; just that a lot of would-be writers who suck at it themselves turn to crit as an outlet. And I agree. For every Pauline Kael, there's a Roger Ebert: he writes very nice crit, but what, precisely, is his screenwriting cred?