Big Sister Games

The room is absolutely dark. It's almost as dark as what's going on in the pit of my six-year-old stomach.

My sister, nine years my senior, is an experienced sadist, when it comes to expressing her resentment at having to temporarily share my bedroom. Her voice is dramatic, menacing, laden with threat.

"...just a hand, with claws, no face or body, and when little girls go to sleep, they come out from under the bed and they grab and..."

I won't give her the satisfaction of crying or whimpering. But I'm not sleeping tonight, either.

I stare the night away.

I got your message, Deb. Will read and respond tomorrow. Ironically, I've been beta for somebody else tonight.

Kewl! I'm sort of in limbo until I figure out where I'm parking my vampire couple, damn it all.

deb--backsent.

If this asshat can get a book deal, we should all be very, very successful.

Is she mad at the nice people too, for only being lurkers?

Allyson, she's hitting an old, old argument - we had one like it in, I think, Literary? last year. It's extremely boggy ground, and down in the bog, there are leghold traps.

One of my main complaints about her rant is that she leaves out the obvious reason to be edgy about those Amazon reviews: publishers read the damned things, and they pay attention, and the reviewer doesn't have to sign his or her name. I've written two Amazon reviews myself; one was a first-novel boost for my friend Meg's book, "The Language of Light", and the other was for Kristin Ohlson's stellar non-fiction memoir "Stalking the Divine". Meg's was a quickie, a two line review; I love her writing, but it isn't the kind of book I'd usually read. The second was a full-page take on the book. Both of them were written with a few objects in mind: I wanted to provide feedback to both women, I wanted to clarify for other readers what it was I liked about both, and I wrote them in the full knowledge that their respective editors were likely to read the reviews. Plus, I signed my name to it.

That last one, by the way, is a deciding factor for me, the fact that the editors read it. If I genuinely can't find a single resonance in the book, but I don't want to damage the author, I won't review it. (Not true for non-fiction, because if a think non-fiction is bogus or badly researched, I'll rip the writer a new one publicly, with glee.)

Yvonne's bitch about the "personal taste" reviewer? I don't understand what she (Yvonne) is pissed about. Seems to me that the reviewer couldn't stand the story, said so, said very clearly that it was just personal taste, and moved on. So Yvonne's rant on that bit sounds sulky and dumb, and she needs to get over it. People are going to hate your stuff sometimes; that's how it works. The "personal taste" reviewer did exactly what I think someone ought to do in an Amazon review; she stated her opinion, and she clarified why she held it.

I did find myself agreeing with Yvonne on the "think it's easy? Try it!" take, but then, that's one of the foundations of my fanatic loathing of most "crit" people. So, you've got a masters or a PhD or whatever, and you get paid to talk about other peoples' work? Let's see some of yours, before you rip other peoples' stuff to shreds, babycakes. It pings my "I want cred, I have no or minimal creativity, so I'm-a grab onto Tolstoy's coatails and ride him like a painted pony, to glory!" loathing, to the nth degree. It's why I'll read Roz Kaveney's crit - I'm one of her editors and beta readers for fiction, and I know she *is* creative. Her opinions hold some weight with me. She's not just talk.

But yeah, I'm with you on about 90% of the rant; Yvonne's being a sulky dick. Also interesting that she doesn't see proof-pages; I get two sets, and two chances to make changes and catch errors, before it goes to press. But it might not be the case for things like the Buffyverse books.

Conclusion: I am really fucking glad I told my agent no when I was approached to do Buffy and Angel books.

edit: oh, and her bitching about the emails she gets? What the hell? Does she only want to positive ones? Weird.

I don't know that I agree, Deb. A lot of the complaints are about spelling, grammar, typos. If I take my car to the mechanic, and he does a shitty job, and I bitch, and he says, "You think this is easy? YOU TRY IT!" I didn't put myself out there as someone who fixes cars, yo. I DRIVE my car, and if it doesn't work, I know it.

If you're an author who has written a shitty story, as a reader I can say, "You wrote a shitty story." I don't have to be a writer to comment, just a reader.

Also? After telling Fury that he sucked, once, he pulled the, "you have no idea how hard this is" rant. Because he was talking to me as a friend, and not whining so much as explaining, I thought it was a fair statement. I didn't know how hard it was. So I tried. I put myself in his shoes, and tried to break a story that fit in with a given arc in the season, and write it in a weekend.

Aside from the fact that I'm a shitty writer in that particular medium, I couldn't even write a shitty script in that given time. It made me appreciate the process, more. It made me appreciate the fact that he sucked far less than thousands of other television writers who might have a meltdown in that circumstance (Tim has rewritten scenes on set that have gone right over the green monster, and that's why the man has a development deal).

Still, the story he wrote sucked. It didn't speak to me, it was messy, it was nonsensical, and moved the series into a wonky place. And Buffy totally wouldn't have said that bullshit, or done that thing.

A lot of the complaints are about spelling, grammar, typos. If I take my car to the mechanic, and he does a shitty job, and I bitch, and he says, "You think this is easy? YOU TRY IT!" I didn't put myself out there as someone who fixes cars, yo. I DRIVE my car, and if it doesn't work, I know it.

Oh, I agree - no argument there, at atl. I'm separating the "This storee SUX!" things posted at Amazon, signed "Spike's Love Slave", from the rest of what she's bitching about.

And the rest of what she's talking about? She's being bitchy and silly, all right, and the idea that she's complaining about the emails she gets? Makes me want to smack her one. Yo, Yvonne, that's private stuff. Your editor isn't getting to read them, that's between you and the email writer, and the only reason the rest of us know about it at all is that you yourself are choosing to make it public by telling us about it. So, for me, that's a piss or get off the pot thing. Why wave dirty panties at the world and then rant because the world can see them?

Literally, I'm splitting the 5% or 10% of what I think she's even borderline right about - the faceless crazies at Amazon - from the rest of it, about which I think she's being a whingey little prat.

I like the car repair analogy, but truth to tell, I have never been willing to take my cars to people who don't show me that they love and get my particular babies. I'd better get the sense from them - this was especially true in my Jag-driving days, where a screwup could mean way more money than I had to waste - that they knew my car's family, that they'd driven the things, that they'd crawled under the hood, and basically loved the things. And the other thing about that car repair deal, if they tell you the wrong thing, they're liable for it. You know their name.

But I'm still glad I looked at the proposals for what was needed for Buffyverse and Angel novelisations, and ran screaming. No proof pages? Ouch.