An Attack Against the Consciousness of Humanity (or The Angst of Reviewing) (an IWSG post)

Having been the recipient of multiple author tantrums as a result of reviews they didn't like, you'd think I wouldn't be surprised anymore by this kind of behavior. Amazingly, sometimes the meltdowns are so extraordinary that even I'm surprised. Not long after the whole Dilloway Incident was "resolved," a friend emailed me to point me at another author, another indie author, having an even more explosive tantrum about a negative review.

It seems that a reviewer had called his book "pretentious," and he didn't take very kindly to that. Well, he didn't take kindly to the whole thing, especially the 1-star rating, but that particular word, pretentious, seemed to draw particular ire. He called her an idiot who just didn't understand his book. In fact, he called her a lot of things. And, then, he called a lot of people a lot of things as people came to her defense and her right to have not liked his book. He called so many people so many things that goodreads eventually pulled his profile and his books from the site. [They are back, now, which makes me curious as to whether they put them back or if he just made a new profile.]

As the comment thread got longer, he lashed out at pretty much everyone, even people who tried to defend his right to be upset about receiving the negative review. In all of the flailing and raging, two things stood out to me:
1. He said (and I wish I could just go pull the quote but it appears his comments have been removed from the comment thread) that anyone who would give his book a 1-star rating was not anyone whom he would want reading his book to begin with.
2. Giving his book a 1-star rating was an "attack against the consciousness of humanity." [That quote I saved at the time, because it was so outrageous that I didn't want to forget it.] You know, because his book is all deep and meaningful and shhhtuff.

He went on from there to talk about how people who give his books bad ratings, or any indie book, are killing the soul of the world. Personally, I'd say that is a little more than pretentious. All of his comments were like that, lofty and pretentious, so, if his novel was anything similar to his comments, she was probably accurate in calling the book pretentious. [Incidentally, the "misunderstood artist" is one off the asshole archetypes that Aaron James identifies in his book Assholes. This guy who was just "defending" his book fit the definition like a glove. "You just don't understand me!"]

The thing that gets me in all of this is the whole "target audience" idea. The "you didn't like my book, so you're not my target audience and shouldn't have been reading it in the first place" idea.
BULLSHIT!
Unless you, as an author (or any kind of artist), are personally going to hand out copies of your work only to people of your own choosing, people you somehow just know will like it, you don't get to pull that whole "you're not my target audience" crap.

You put your work out for the public, and you live with the results. Period.
Or you don't put it out there.

You want to know what I think is an attack against the consciousness of humanity (and is killing the soul of the world)? All the crap being shoveled out into the marketplace, mostly by, yes, indie authors. Crap that we are then expected to admire and praise.
"Oh, look at the little poopy!"
"It's such a cute little poopy!"
"Just look at the texture and that smell! So exquisite!"
I'm sorry (no, I'm not), but that stuff just hurts my brain. Just, please, call it what it is:
"Dude, that's a pile of shit."

Okay, so, maybe, don't be so crude, but the weight of pretense surrounding indie authors and how good their books are is... well,  it's overwhelming.

And, you know, unlike most of you (almost all, in fact), I've tried. Because I'm an indie author and I want people to take a chance with my books, I've tried to do what I think is the right thing and support other indie authors by buying and reading their books. But I think I've hit my limit.

So far, with only a few exceptions, I have powered through even the worst books because I haven't felt like I should review a book I couldn't finish; however, I've come to believe there is some validity (more than just "some") in saying, "This book was so bad that I couldn't finish it." And, so, this latest indie book that I'm reading is so bad that I can't finish it. But that's not what did it. No, it was not just that it was a "bad book" that was the proverbial straw that killed the camel.

What was it then? Well, when I got to the part where my eyes fell out because I couldn't believe what I was reading (and having your eyes fall out just hurts, okay), I went over to Amazon (after laboriously cleaning the carpet fuzz off of my orbs and working them back into my head) to check the reviews of the book. There were a lot of reviews, close to 100, and more than 90% of them are 4- and 5-star ratings, with only one of them being under a 3. My first thought was, "Maybe, it's just me." But, then, I started reading the reviews and all of the reviews (all the ones I read, and I read seven or eight of the 5-star rated reviews) were... The reviews were not "good" reviews. They were not 5-star rating reviews. They were reviews that said things like:
"The beginning of this book was really hard to get through but it got better."
"I had a hard time accepting the insta-love."
"The characters seemed flat."
And, see, the reviews were all from names I recognize as author bloggers. Clearly, it was a case of not wanting to give someone they knew a bad rating.

That's just wrong. There's no other way around it: It's wrong. It's lying to readers who come in and see something like 70 4- and 5-star ratings and think they are buying something that's quality work when it's obviously not. Just because it is the author's "best effort" doesn't mean it's good or quality material or worth having on the market.

So, yeah, I'm pretty much done with indie authors except for those (very) few that I have found I already like. I'll be putting up a tab (hey, it might be there already as you read this, but it's not there while I'm writing it) pointing out the indie books that I think are worth your time; beyond that, I won't be sifting through other indie books trying to support other indie authors who
1. aren't doing anything themselves to support other indie authors (and)
2. aren't putting out anything worth reading, anyway.

However, if you want to run the risk of having me review your book, I will take requests. (I'll put up a tab for that, too (which may also already be there.)

Look, what I'm saying here is this:
It is not an "attack against the consciousness of humanity" to give a book a bad review (unless you're just doing it to be mean or spiteful). What is an attack against the consciousness of humanity is to lie in a review just to make someone feel good or to keep from hurting someone's feelings. Reviews are not for authors; they're for readers. You are doing an injustice to those readers when you don't tell the truth because you're worried about how the author is going to take it. You're also doing an injustice to the author, but that's a whole other topic (and one I've already talked about (not that I haven't talked about all of this before, anyway)).

This has been brought to you in part by the IWSG.

It's Not Just You (an IWSG post)

I gave my thoughts about Tron way back in this post. It's probably not necessary for this post, but it goes along with what I'm saying here... and it's interesting. Sure, that's me saying that it's interesting, and I wrote it, but still...

Anyway...

My boys love Tron. My daughter likes it, too, but not the way the boys do. We were even watching Tron: Uprising but that got derailed because of school. Now that summer is here, I'm sure we'll finish it up. They were very excited about the sequel to Tron: Legacy that has been in the works and was scheduled to begin filming in a few months.

Look, this is a big deal. The movie was in pre-production. It had stars attached to it. It was getting geared up to start filming... and Disney pulled the plug.

end of line

Dude.

My boys were devastated. Well, okay, that's a rather transitory experience for teenagers, but it lasted at least 10 minutes and no one can mention Tron in the house, now, without hearing "awww..." from one of them.

So what happened? Tomorrowland happened.

Now, see, I liked Tomorrowland, but that doesn't change the fact that it had a rather underwhelming opening weekend. So underwhelming that Disney pulled the plug on a completely unrelated project: Tron 3. I suppose you could say that Disney got a little insecure.

So, see, it's not just you. Even the big guys have moments of doubt and insecurity and, sometimes, it makes people do dumb things because they start focusing on what could go wrong instead of focusing on how to make it work.

Just sayin'.

On Bad Behavior and Author Tantrums: Why It's Bad for the Indie Writer Community (or I Bet You Think This Post Is About You) (an IWSG post)

I live with a fairly harsh critic. Food critic, that is. She's hard to please when it comes to what she wants to eat. She's always been that way, my daughter. The boys were always pretty easy, but, when my daughter was a baby, we'd spend an hour, easy, just trying to find something that she was willing to eat when she was hungry. Talk about a nightmare! We were so glad when she learned to talk and could tell us what she wanted.

The problem, these days, is that the dinner selection most nights is pretty narrow. As my wife says, "A hunk of meat and some vegetables." If my daughter was rating dinners at our house, most nights would get one star from her. In response, I work with her as much as possible to make her school lunches interesting for her. [On the other hand, the boys take the same thing every day and are more than happy with it.] It's a small price to pay and works a lot better than me throwing a tantrum at her every night because she doesn't want to eat what I cooked.

I've known those parents, by the way. The ones that yell at their kids if they don't want to eat dinner. "This is perfectly good food, and you will eat it!" Or something like that. It makes the kids scared to voice their opinion... even when asked.

And that goes for readers.

But let's look at book bloggers, first. If you travel around to the blogs of book bloggers and take a look at the ones who will not review indie books (which is most of them), you will find two reasons repeated across most of the blogs:

1. The books aren't very good.

2. If you say the books aren't very good, you get attacked by the authors for saying it.

Basically, an author approaches a book blogger and says, "Hey, would you be willing to review my book."

The blogger says, "Yes, but it will be an honest review."

The author says, "Oh, yes, of course! That's what I want! An honest review!"

When the blogger gives the book a 1- or 2-star rating, the author explodes, "How could you do that to my book? My book is awesome! You're just stupid and didn't get it!"

Sometimes it's not actually the author but a friend of the author "sticking up" for his/her friend, but it amounts to the same thing.

From experience, I'm going to say that this happens a lot. I'm guessing I've done about 40 reviews of indie books at this point (no, I'm not going back to count), and I've had that response at least half a dozen times, now. That's significant. It's even more significant if you reduce the overall number from books I've reviewed to authors I've reviewed, which is a considerably smaller number.

And, then, maybe it makes sense as to why readers tend to stay away from indie books. When the author of the book attacks you for a negative review, it makes sense to stay away from that author. Unfortunately, it also makes sense to stay away from all of those indie authors (because traditionally published authors don't tend to attack reviews in the comment section on Amazon (maybe that's because the publishers keep a rein on the authors and prevent them from doing that, I don't know)); you can't tell which ones haven't grown up enough to not act like a 3rd grader over a negative review.

Of course, the whole thing can be even worse if you are another indie author, because many of these tantrum throwing authors will retaliate for perceived bad reviews by seeking revenge against you through the giving of fake, 1-star reviews, including getting their friends and/or family to join in "the cause" of giving that guy "a taste of his own medicine."

And, yes, this is a situation I'm going through, right now, as you know if you follow my blog. The author in question, along with his sister, have been fairly free about 1-starring everything I've published and bashing the cover art done by the talented Rusty Webb. What we'll call the drama around this situation prompted Tony Laplume to ask me "why?" Why review books at all if it leads to situations like this one? I think that's a very good question, because the whole thing seems... well, let's just say it's a minefield, and there's no way through it without setting some of them off.

I think there are three main reasons why indie authors need to step up and give honest reviews to their fellow indie authors:

1. It helps to legitimize the field of indie publishing. Right now, the general view from the outside is that indie writers are all busy shining each other's crap and saying how good it is. Basically, we all go around giving each other 5-stars on our books no matter how bad they are, so you can't trust indie writers. [This is, by the way, the point of contention between me and the other author. He believes that all indie authors (or, at least, the ones who are his friends) deserve the automatic 5-star rating because, in his words, "selling books is fucking hard."] However, when indie authors will step and give real, actual, honest reviews, it shows readers they can trust the field in general. Honest reviews are good for everyone.
2. Following that, it's good for the readers. Your readers deserve to be able to scan through reviews, if they so wish, and use them to reliably choose a book they think they will like. When the reviews are all gushing, fake, 5-star reviews, the reader gets gypped and chooses to not by more indie books. Also, giving the honest review can shine a light on tantrum-throwing authors. Invariably, tantrum-throwing authors attack the reviews in the comments. For readers who use reviews to help choose books, that can serve as a warning of which authors to stay away from. It a lot of ways, it's better for you, as an indie author, to be attacked than an unsuspecting reader.
3. Finally, it benefits you, as a fellow author. If you review one of your friend's books with a less than stellar review and s/he turns into a green rage machine and unfriends you and... well, it can be all kinds of things that happen after that, you will find out who your friends actually are and who of them are just using you because they think they can weasel some good reviews out of you. You don't need those people. Honestly, you don't.

I'm not going to say this is an easy thing to do. It can be especially difficult to just sit and take it. I mean, I want to go and refute every one of those fake reviews posted by Dilloway's sister. I want to do that. But I'm not going to. It looks bad. As I said, readers need to feel safe, and they need to feel safe to leave negative reviews if they so desire and, even though her reviews are fake, if I go and comment, it will look like I'm one of those authors who will go after people for leaving negative reviews. As indie authors, the best thing we can do is support each other in leaving actual, honest reviews and, more importantly, support each other in taking actual, honest reviews.

And, you know, stand up to the bullies who will use their power to retaliate against you with 1-star reviews. There are things you can do together to make what they're doing meaningless. But that's another post... or you can just email me to find out what you can do to help.

It's Time For You To Grow Up (part 1) (an IWSG post)

Let's start with a story:

My wife is a data analyst. It's a job that requires some math skills. Not a lot. Not like calculus or trig or, even, all that much algebra, but it does require some maths. There's a lot of working with percentages and fractions. There are a few months each year when her job is really busy and requires lots of overtime. Last year, not long before the rush, one of the people in her department retired. Like any good company, to get through the busy time, they hired a temp. A temp with the potential to stay on. That was rather than hire someone permanent for the position at the point when they still had time to do that and provide adequate training, but that's another story entirely.

Now, the temp they hired seemed qualified for the job, which was not the full job, just some of the lower level routine stuff that required a lot of time. She looked qualified on paper, anyway, and got through all of the interviews and stuff. However, when it came time to do the job, she couldn't math. At all. It was almost immediately apparent that she wasn't going to work out, and there was still time to hire someone else. But, guess what, that's not what happened.

What happened is that they kept her on. The initial hope, I think, was that if they kept working with her that maybe she would "get it" and be able to do the job they hired her to do. But, no, that didn't happen. She never "got it" and, in fact, for a while, she made more work for everyone as she continued to not get it, because she would spend time doing a task (more time than it should have taken) and, then, someone else (usually my wife) would have to go back and re-do the task because it hadn't been done correctly. Eventually, after weeks of this, she became a kind of glorified filing clerk, because that's the only thing she could do.

I want to point out at this point that she was, as my wife put it, "a perfectly nice person, very sweet." She liked her. Everyone liked her. There was no one that thought she was a bad person or a dumb person or anything like that. But she couldn't do the job. And, yet, the people who should have told her that she couldn't do the job were unwilling to do their job of letting her know that she wasn't working out. Nothing positive came out of the situation.
1. It created more work for everyone involved.
2. It caused the marginalization of the temp as they looked for tasks to keep her busy because they couldn't give her any real work.
3. It created a false sense of hope in the temp as the message she received was, "you're doing fine," even though everyone knew that wasn't the case. But, you know, they kept her on, so she must have been doing something right, right? No...
4. It caused resentment toward the people who should have stepped in and said, "Hey, you're not ready for this work, yet. We need to let you go and find someone else." And, maybe, she never would be ready for it or, maybe, she just needed to get reacquainted with her math skills. No one will ever know, because no one ever told her that she wasn't doing the job. They just kept decreasing the level of the tasks given to her.
5. She was never told in what way she failed at the job. When the time was up on the job, they just didn't retain her. There was never any feedback on what she could have done to be kept on.

And, see, that's the real issue. No one ever told her what she was "failing" at, so she never knew what to get better at. Well, other than my wife explaining the same errors to her everyday, to which she would always reply, "Got it!" in a way that seemed the first few times that she really had gotten it. But that, having a coworker try to show you what you're doing incorrectly, is not quite the same as having your superior, the person who has the ability to tell you they need to let you go, sit you down and explain to you where you're not meeting expectations.

See, no one wanted to be the one to hurt her feelings.

Wow.

So I'm just going to say this:
Screw your feelings.
And, yes, that sounds more harsh than I really mean it, but, still, screw your feelings.

The problem is twofold:
1. Indie writers who hold their friendship for you hostage in order to get good reviews.

And, man, have I run into this one. I've lost count of the number of "friends" I've lost over negative reviews, but I'll just say this: If our "friendship" is conditional upon me saying that I like what you write, then we have no friendship. If I can't say to you, "You know, I don't like this one," without you yelling, "Well, you're not my friend," then we're already not friends. Or, likewise, if I can't say that about something some friend of yours wrote. It's the same thing. All I have for you is this:

It's time for you to grow up.

2. Indie authors who are unwilling to give honest reviews to their friends because they are scared of losing their friendships.

I know you "think" you're supporting your "friends" by giving them positive reviews of their not-better-than-average books, but, really, you're just making it harder on everyone, yourselves included. Every 5-star rating you throw out there that should have been a 3 or a 2 or, even, a 1 is destroying the credibility of the indie book market in general. You know how I know? Because I see it said repeatedly by book reviewers who refuse to review indie books and by readers who will not buy indie books (sure, they'll download free stuff because who cares if it's free). They see all the false positive reviews out there and have learned that you can't trust indie authors. I'm sorry, but the fact that you are out there lying (because you are lying) about the quality of your "friends'" books is making my job more difficult. And, you know, it's encouraging them to continue to write the same crappy stuff rather than working on getting better. What I have for you is this:

It's time for you to grow up.

 Here's the thing, people say it all the time, "If you want to be a writer, you better develop some thick skin," and that's true. Except it's not about having "thick skin." It's about learning separation. The things people say about your work are not things they are saying about you, and someone can very validly say, "I don't like this thing you made, but I like you." When you flip out about that and do the virtual equivalent of yelling, "Then, I'm not your friend," you're acting like a first grader. At best. And, well, if that's where you are developmentally, then you need to go find something else to do with your time, because, frankly, writing is not for you. Or, at least, writing for anyone other than yourself. You need to do what Dickinson did and store it all in a trunk and leave it for someone else to sort out after you're dead.

But here's the other thing about being a grown up, and maybe this comes from having spent so much of my life as a teacher, you have to be able to tell people when they haven't done a good job. If the only thing you can do is tell people "good job" because you're worried about hurting someone's feelings, you need to grow up, too. This is not a dinner party where you nod politely and tell the host that the substandard food is "wonderful" and "delicious." In fact, that behavior at a dinner party will lead people not to come back and leave the host wondering why. You know, since everyone said they loved the food the previous time. The problem here is that in this "dinner party," we're all responsible for the food and, when we go around telling each other "oh, I love that" when you actually want to spit it out then that's the food that gets served. But, see, we're not the guests. Readers are the guests and, when they keep coming to the indie writers' banquet only to find a bunch of crap food that the all the "cooks" are saying is wonderful, well, then, those readers will decide that ALL indie food is crap.

Basically, if you are unwilling to give a negative review, you shouldn't be giving any reviews at all. The whole thing where you opt out of reviewing the books you don't like and only giving reviews to books you do like would be like me only giving As and, maybe, Bs in my classroom and leaving all of the other kids gradeless. It doesn't help the situation.

So, no, when I read a book that I don't like, for whatever reason, I get to say I don't like it and, even better, I get to explain why I didn't like it. Other people can then come along and figure out if they want to try it. So, if I say, "This one is too sweet," someone who likes sweet things will go, "Oh! I like sweets! I'll try this one." Or, if I say, "This one was too salty for me," someone else has the option of saying, "Oh, yeah, I don't like lots of salt; I'll stay away from this one."

Honesty is important in reviews. Period. It's not about treating my "friends" like they're five and saying, "Oh, it's beautiful!" and hanging it on the refrigerator. So sorry if you think that's what this is all about. There comes a point when even parents quit hanging those things up. Usually right about the time the kid realizes the drawings are actually pretty crappy.

So, just to reiterate, if you're approaching this whole indie writing thing as if it's some weird support system of giving good reviews to your buddies so that they won't feel bad, well, just grow up. Actually, and excuse the language (or not, I don't really care), it's time for you to grow the fuck up.

[This post has been brought to you in part by Alex Cavanaugh and the IWSG.(But, mostly, this one is just me.)]

Going On the Offensive (an IWSG post)

I'm not one for all of that resolution stuff or making lists of goals or any of that stuff. I figure I'm going to do something or I'm not and making a "resolution" isn't going to change that. If I make any kind of list at all, it's only so that I don't forget things (and I'm not really the best at those kinds of lists, either), so don't look at this post as some sort of New Year's resolution thing; it's not. In fact, the idea for this post has been sitting in my notes since October, and I've been thinking about it for longer than that, but this seems about as good a time as any to get on with it.

First, this is likely to be my last IWSG post. Unless something just grabs me and tells me "I am an IWSG post!" it will be. To a large extent (and I've talked about this before), it's because IWSG is completely misnamed. There is no actual support in or from this group. It's an encouragement group, and there's nothing wrong with that other than that it should call itself that. Encouragement says "Good job!" and "You can do it!" and this group is all about those things. Support does more than it says (things like buying indie books and reviewing them rather than only ever talking about the big, mainstream traditionally published stuff), and it's rare to find other indie authors doing things that support indie authors.
Sorry (not sorry), it's just the truth.
Oh, and sporting links and announcements for books you haven't read is also encouragement not support. Yeah, I know some of you are disagreeing with that, but, really, how many people do you expect to buy a book when what you're doing is this:
"Hey! Buy this book that I haven't read and am never going to read! I'm sure it's good because this person I (sort of) know wrote it."
That amounts to "good job" and "I believe in you," not actually doing anything that supports the author.

Disclaimer: Yes, some of you out there do do the actual support things, but there aren't very many of you, and you don't do it because of IWSG. It's just something you do.

Which brings me to what is the point of this post: being more offensive. Yes, there is the part of the title that is going on the attack, and I mean that, too, but a lot of it has to do with not holding back anymore. Conventional wisdom is all about how "we" shouldn't be controversial or do things that could alienate readers or... whatever. It's all about the things we don't say and never speaking our actual minds because we might offend someone. Well, screw that.

Okay, before you screw that, let me be clear about something: I'm not talking about using "honesty" as a tool to be mean to someone. That's just being mean no matter how many people try to tell you it's just "brutal honesty." Those people suck and are liars. There's a difference between saying:
"This manuscript is full of grammar and punctuation issues." (truth) and
"This is the biggest piece of trash I ever read." (brutal honesty)
You should never resort to "brutal honesty" (unless it's at Snow Crash or Peter Jackson). Or unless you're talking about people in general, because general people are pretty stupid.
So, okay, if you're going to be brutally honest just own it and say you're being mean or something. I mean, seriously, I'd really appreciate the opportunity to be brutally honest with Peter Jackson.

All of that said, very often people are offended by the truth, but you should never let the fear of someone's offense stop you from saying the truth, even if that truth is only your own truth. And, really, despite what I was just saying about Peter Jackson, there's a difference between speaking the truth and just being mean (though, with him, I'd make an exception and be mean along with my truth (give me a break, the guy sleeps in money; he can take it)).

Basically, you can expect to see more things which could be seen to be as controversial here on the blog. Or maybe they won't be; I don't know. All I know is that I don't plan on holding back in the things I talk about anymore. Yeah, I know. Some of you out there are thinking, "He's been holding back?" Crazy, right? But it's the truth. But no more of that here!

Oh, and also...
I never really meant to have a schedule here on StrangePegs, not when I started, but I developed one after tracking patterns of page views. I settled into what seemed to be the optimal days. No more of that either! Yeah, that's right out the window. I'm just going to be posting whenever I feel like it from now on, so you'll have to be paying attention, I suppose. That is if you stick around to be offended in the first place. Being on a blogging schedule, though, has been being confining. For a while, now, actually, so it's just time to move on from that. The blogging is not the writing and, when it starts getting in the way of the writing, you have to get rid of it.
Not the blog, just the schedule.

All right [And, just by the way, that's the correct way to spell "all right;" it's two words, not one, so quit putting "alright" in your manuscripts.], there you have it. Changes and stuff that just so happen to coincide with the new year, but, hey, as much as I like all (most) of you writer types, you're really not my target audience. I can tell by my sales. Which is not to say that I want you to go away, but I have to start appealing to, well, to people who just read.
Or pissing them off.
Or something.
I guess we'll see how it goes.

$120/hour (an IWSG post)

So let's talk jobs that make $100 an hour or more. According to CNBC at any rate. Well, okay, I'm not really going to talk about them, just give you an example of some of them.
1. Underwater Welder
2. Anesthesiologist
3. Commercial Pilot (the best ones, anyway)
4. the best Tattoo Artists
5. the top Arbitrators
6. half or more Orthodontists
7. the top 10% of Freelance Photographers
8. the top Interior Designers
9. Hand Models or other "parts" models. So, yeah, if you have an exceptional "part," you can make pretty good bank showing it off.
10. Life Coaches. Seriously.
11. big city Massage Therapists
12. Political Speechwriters.
13. my daughter playing her accordion

Let's talk about #13.

Back during October, my daughter got asked to play her accordion at an Octoberfest function. It was just 20 minutes of accordion playing. 20 minutes isn't much. I mean, she practices more than that every day. For her 20 minutes of playing, she made $40. That's $120 an hour! It's kind of sobering. That's more than I've made from my writing for the entire month of November, November was my best month ever.

There are times, evidently, when it really pays to be a cute, 11-year-old girl. Literally pays. At the rate of $120 an hour.

I don't have a real point with any of this. I'm proud of my daughter. She's really good. Her accordion teacher (who's been teaching for... well, let's just say a long time) says my daughter is one of the best students she's ever had. I hope one day she proves you really can play accordion in a rock-n-roll band.

For the moment, though, it's just a little unsettling to be outperformed by a sixth grader.

Well, except at video games.

"You're not my friend anymore!" (an IWSG post)

Remember those days when you were a kid... What? You don't? Well, let me remind you...

You're playing with your best friend, one of your many "best" friends (because aren't they all when you're a kid?), and everything's going fine. For a while. Then, one of you does something the other one doesn't like: had GI Joe kiss a Barbie, won in a game of Checkers, used the wrong shade of blue while coloring Spider-Man and, suddenly, the dreaded phrase rings out, "You're not my friend anymore!" Usually, that's followed by the offended party running away, probably, to go tattle while leaving the unfriended in tears wondering what s/he actually did wrong.

Of course, you didn't do anything wrong, did you? Even when you told your friend that you didn't like the picture he drew. Because, you know what, it's not wrong to have preferences.

And what inevitably happens (at least when responsible parents are involved) is that the kid who yelled "You're not my friend anymore!" is marched back in to apologize for being hurtful, which is as it should be.

[And this is when I would like to talk about being forced to eat horrible things that I didn't like when I was a kid all in the name of being polite, but I don't really have room to go into that.]

Some of you know that I do a lot of reviews ("lot" being a relative term) and that I try to focus on indie authors. Being an indie author, I know how important the reviews are. Yea! for reviews, right? But, also, I don't give any special consideration, which means I give negative reviews, too. I believe honest reviews are better for the community overall than just lying and giving someone 4 or 5 stars. This has the unfortunate result of people (metaphorically) yelling, "You're not my friend anymore!" and running off and unfriending me from all of social media. Mostly, I'm okay with that, because I should be allowed to say whether I like something or not, and I'm not the one exhibiting the bad behavior (unless you're one of those in the camp that says a bad review is bad behavior, in which case, you should yell at me right now and run on off and unfriend me).

Here's the thing, I was checking out the reviews for a book I've been looking at reading and the book only has 5-star reviews and all from people that are in the blogging community. Okay, so right away, that sets my warning bells off. I don't tend to read 5-star reviews, because they usually amount to no more than "Everything is Awesome!" But I was scanning down the reviews for this book and one of them happened to catch my eye. The reviewer had a list of all the things she didn't like about the book. Okay, that intrigued me, so I read the review. Now, let me make this clear, the review only had negative things to say about the book but, at the end, she said, basically, "But it was intense and I loved it," and she gave it 5-stars. This was not a short review, either. Paragraphs and paragraphs about the issues with the book and then gave it 5-stars. Clearly, there is some amount of dishonesty happening here.

One of  my favorite reviews for a book was by a guy who ripped the book to shreds in his review. I mean, he really tore it apart. It was an even longer review than one I mentioned above. He had absolutely nothing good to say about the book but ended with something like "But it was very creative and a good read" and gave it 4-stars. The author actually responded with, "I'd hate to have seen what you would have said if you hadn't liked it." Again, clearly, there is some amount of dishonesty happening here.

All of that to say two things:
1. Reviews are believed to be important. [It's hard to say how important, though, because there is some evidence that suggests that reviews are not as important as we think. I think early in an author's career, though, they are important.] As an indie author who wants to support the idea of doing reviews, I do reviews. We have to learn to be comfortable with giving honest reviews. It hurts everyone when all we do is lie to our friends and give them 4- and 5-star reviews. Yes, that means we have to be willing to risk people yelling "You're not my friend anymore!" at us.

It also means we have to address only the work. For instance, it would be okay for me to say, "I didn't like how the author chose to color Spider-Man's costume green. I believe Spider-Man's costume should be the traditional red and blue." It is not okay for me to say, "This author is SO STUPID! She couldn't even get Spider-Man's costume right! Flaming IDIOT! Don't read this crap!" See, when I say, "I didn't like the green the costume," someone else might see that and think, "Huh? A green costume? That sounds interesting." But, if I attack the author's intelligence, we've moved the discussion away from creativity and made it personal.

2. We have to learn not to yell "You're not my friend anymore!" That's just destructive behavior. Sure, I get that it doesn't feel good to have people not like what you worked so hard on (which is why you have to like it enough to not worry about how other people feel about it (but that's a different discussion (and one I've had before, but I'm not finding that post, at the moment)), but cutting someone off is like kicking someone out of your restaurant because she didn't like one particular dish. Maybe you should try saying, "Well, I'm sorry you didn't like this book; maybe, you'll like this other one better." Or the next one. Or whatever. What I can say for sure, though, is that, in my case specifically, I won't be returning to the particular author who unfriended me because I didn't like that particular book. She's not someone I'll continue to support.

And you might be thinking, "But a negative review isn't support," but I would argue with you that it is.
1. I bought the book, which is, honestly, more support than most of you out there are willing to give (I have hard evidence on that by looking at my sales numbers).
2. I left a review and, even if it's not a 4- or 5-star review, it shows that I read the book, which, again, is more than most of you out there are doing. And there is a component that quantity of reviews are just as important (or more important) than quality of reviews.
3. My reviews mean something. Whether I like the book or not, I give the reasons why I did or did not. Those things are important. They tell other people, like with the green Spider-Man example, whether they think they want to read it.

At any rate, all of this stuff is insecurity inducing, but, as authors, it's stuff we have to learn to deal with. If you want people (especially other authors) to be willing to give your book a review, you need to be willing to do reviews for other people. If you want to get reviews, you need to be willing to listen without unfriending people when they say, "I didn't like this one."

This post has been brought you in part by the Insecure Writer's Support Group.

Great Pumpkins! (an IWSG post)

Last IWSG, I was talking about how late it was that we planted our garden this year. And it was. Very late. You can go read about that here.

As late it was planted, though, it is doing very well, now. Sure, we didn't get things like tomatoes as early as everyone else, but we're getting them faster than we can eat them, now. In fact, it's time to start making and freezing sauce.

The above picture is the first three pumpkins to come off the vines. There are three more I'm going to get soon (in fact, by the time this posts, I will probably already have gotten them). AND the vines have suddenly put out all kinds of new growth, so there may be more pumpkins next month! Or early November. And here, that's a totally doable thing, because they're not going to freeze.

The picture above, still showing the pumpkins, also shows "the monster." Or, shall I say, "the attack of the killer tomato vine." [My kids totally accused me of making it up when I told them about the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!] Let me just make it perfectly clear: We did not plant this particular tomato vine. It grew there all on its own.

You can't really see the placement of the vine in the picture, but it's right next to the front door of our house. Back behind the "the monster" is the gate to the backyard. My daughter hates this tomato plant, because it keeps growing over the sidewalk leading to the front door (no matter how often I cut it back), and it has grown up and through the lattice by the front door, so it attacks people is they go in and out of our house.

Now, I just want to be clear, here. We are in the middle of the worst drought on record in California. I did not water this plant for the entire month of July and most of August. I was hoping that by not watering it, it would, you know, scale itself back. Not grow so crazily. But it did grow crazily even without the water and, today, when I was picking tomatoes, I got as many off of it as I did off of all of other vines, the vines we actually planted and took care of, combined. In fact, I didn't finish picking from it, because I ran out of storage space, so I got an equivalent amount and left A LOT behind. It is The Monster.

When the vine first started growing, my wife wanted me to pull it up. "It's in a bad place; it will never survive; we don't even know what kind of tomato that is." But I didn't see any reason to just pull it up. My idea was to just let it grow and see what happened. Of course, since then, my daughter has been the big advocate for killing it, but my wife doesn't want to do that anymore. Mostly, I think, she is just amazed at it. I know I am. What a huge success from such an unexpected source.

Which is the point. We don't ever really know what's going to take off and be successful and what's, despite our best efforts, just going to sit there going nowhere. Or just piddle along. Or whatever. It's like when you work really hard on something, something you think is great, and show it to someone and he just shrugs at it and says, basically, "So." But, then, you have this other thing that you just threw together and don't think is anything special and someone comes along and really loves it. Really loves it. As in, "This is great!"

So you nurture your ideas and let them grow, even the ones you don't think will go anywhere, because you may just end up with something huge. As I mentioned recently, that is how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started out.

And you may end up with some pumpkins, too. Things that take a lot of work, that look doubtful for a while, but yield a nice prize at the end. By the way, between the beginning of this post and now, I did go out and pull those other three pumpkins. They're in a nice pile on my table, at the moment, and we have big plans for them. It's all a matter of keeping your options open and not closing off ideas just because you don't think they will amount to anything. I mean, "the monster" grew out of rocks, basically in a completely inhospitable environment, with people trampling on it and no water. And, well, my daughter's scared of it because it wants to eat her. That's what she says, anyway.

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This post has been brought you in part by the Insecure Writer's Support Group.

Time Enough? (an IWSG post)

"People assume that time is a straight progression of cause to effect but, actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff."

Of course, what I want to do is get all philosophical about time, about how time is finite, about what it would be like to be able to step outside of time... Except I can't really imagine that. My view of time is kind of like a painting. Or, maybe, a movie. Time only exists within the movie and, if you could only step out of it, you could see the whole thing at once, be in any part of it. That kind of thing. Except, conceptually, as soon as I remove myself from the movie, I put myself in another one, because I still imagine a sequence of events and, without time, there can't be a sequence, so it's not something I can properly imagine.

None of that is what I really want to talk about anyway...

Sometimes, there are events that remind us of the finite-ness of time, that there will be an ending. At least, for us. Well, for all of time, but I expect TIME to go on much for much longer than I will. At any rate, the sudden departure of Tina Downey of Life Is Good from TIME has served as a reminder. Time is, after all, finite. There's a deadline on the things I want to accomplish in life.

I suppose most people have all sorts of things they want to accomplish and that they all feel like they have plenty of time in which to do it. There's always tomorrow, right? But there's not always tomorrow, and, sometimes, tomorrows quit coming sooner than we think they will.

I know that Tina was writing a book. Mostly, though, I think she was working on the writing skills she would need to really write the book. What it means, though, is that I'll never get to read the book. Neither will you. And, you know, maybe it wouldn't have been any good and, in the scheme of things, it doesn't matter, but, maybe, it would have been life-changing. For me. Or for you. Or for someone. That book that really inspired a life and changed its course.

We'll never know.

I have a lot of books like that. Unfinished ones, I mean; I'm not claiming that I'm writing great, life-changing, works of literature. I have PROJECTS! The idea that I could leave TIME with them unfinished... well, it kind of panics me. I don't want to leave things unfinished. Well, I don't want to leave these things unfinished. I'm sure I will always feel that way about whatever projects I have in the works, but other projects are in the future, and I have nothing invested in that stuff yet. These things, these things I have going on now, I know I don't want to leave still in progress. Especially the stuff that relates to The House on the Corner. Too many people ask me when the next when will be finished for me to be okay with just not doing it.

None of this is meant to change the focus from Tina's passing out of TIME, but it was one of the first things I thought of, "I'll never get to read her book." Which, then, has applications for all of us. Not just writers, all people who are doing things. Who have projects of whatever sort. Some of which sit around and sit around and are left abandoned for months or, even, years on end with the thought, "I'll get to it. Sometime." But "sometime" doesn't always come.

So... I am reminded to look at the things I want to do and evaluate them on the basis of what it's okay with me to leave unfinished. Like, I would like to spend time painting, but it won't really bother me if I leave TIME and there are big stack of unpainted miniatures in my garage. It's not like I'm the only one that could paint them. But no one can write the stories that are in my head. Even with notes about them, no one can write them the way I will, so that's the thing I need to get busy with, working on the things that only I can do so that they're not left unfinished should I have to leave.

And that's what I'm going to go do...

How Doesn't Your Garden Grow? (an IWSG post)

We were late planting our garden this year. There were issues with softball, softball that I've been mentioning on and off since March and which started in February, softball which still has two weeks to go.

That's a picture of my daughter hitting a double.
Basically, since March, we've had no weekends, so the garden didn't get planted when it should have. We had the last weekend of May and the first weekend of June, the interim between the spring season and the travel ball season, and that first weekend in June is when we finally got everything planted, a full two months late.

Some of you are probably wondering what would be the point, at that point?
It's a good question.
I mean, here we are in August, and our garden still really hasn't started producing. I didn't pull the first tomatoes from it until July 23.

Yeah, that was the first of our harvest, all five of them. There was one very early and overly ambitious pepper, back in June, right after I planted it, but there haven't been anymore since then, but they're working on it. This year, I'm also trying watermelons and pumpkins for the first time in my experimental garden area. I think I missed the watermelon window. That or the birds keeping eating my baby melons, because they keep disappearing. The pumpkin has become a monster.
Here it is a week after I planted it (that's it in the lower right):

And not long after that:

And now:

And you might think that looks great, and it does... except that everyone else already has orange pumpkins. And we haven't had our tomatoes, which are a big thing for us during the summer. Tomatoes everywhere. All of which brings me back to the question: Why bother with the garden at all when we started it so late?

Fortunately, the area of California where we live has a long growing season. I think I was still pulling tomatoes off the vines in October, last year, so, even though we planted late, we should still actually get a pretty decent harvest. Eventually. Not that that makes it easier to look at everyone else's gardens with all of their abundance of produce. I mean, I actually accepted tomatoes from someone else last week, something I've never done before because we've always been overflowing with tomatoes at this time of year.

All of this is how I sometimes feel about my writing career. That I planted it too late. My sales are like those few little tomatoes in the picture. I'm just hoping I prove to have a long growing season like the area where I live!

Forget-Me-Not (an IWSG post)

Photo by  Sedum and used under the linked license.

When I was a kid, my best friend was from a rather large, blended family. He was the youngest of, like, seven or eight kids (I can't actually remember now). His oldest brother was about 20 years older than him, and he was my favorite of Cory's brothers. Billy, the older brother, would do things like play football with us in the backyard. It would be Cory and me against Billy. At some point during any game (multiple points, actually), we'd end up on each of Billy's legs trying to tackle him while he dragged us through the yard toward the goal line. He was a lot of fun.

Somewhere in there, Billy developed some mental instability. I don't remember or know everything about what happened -- I was only eight or so -- but I know there was an aneurysm involved and a subsequent stay in a mental ward. And an escape.

Yeah, one night, he escaped, and he came to my house. I'm really not sure why he came to my house other than that sometimes he and my dad would play guitar together or, maybe, we were just closer? Whatever the reason, we let him in, because, well, he didn't know he'd escaped; we just thought he was dropping by. Or something. Even if it was kind of late.

So we all sat around together, and he talked about what it was like to be in a mental institution and what it was like to be crazy. Because he could remember some of what it was like to be crazy. Sometimes, he only remembered the things he did but, other times, he remembered the emotions and urges driving him to do the things he did, and he talked about all of it. Some of which I'm sure was quite inappropriate for me to hear. The thing that stayed with me, though, is how he'd no control over himself during those episodes. Like he was outside watching his body do things that he couldn't keep it from doing.

Somewhere in that conversation, and he was there for hours, he started talking about how he'd escaped...

But the rest isn't really important. The important thing is that I developed a "fear" of mental breakdown, and that, I think, was the beginning of it. The actual is more inclusive of a failure of mental capacity, which includes forgetting things. I used to keep all kids of little notes to myself about things when I was in high school and college so that I wouldn't forget those things. I never, later, needed the notes, but that was probably because I made the notes in the first place.

And all of this is coming up now because, last month, I forgot my IWSG post. I mean, I completely forgot it. I forgot it so much that I didn't remember it until Alex said to me, "Is this [emphasis mine] your IWSG post?" about a post which was definitely not an IWSG post. Man, I HATE forgetting things.

Because of my fear of forgetting, I keep a lot of notes about stories and story ideas. I have a file for them and add to them as I think of things so that I can continue with whatever I'm working on. So far, it works pretty well. The file system I'm using now is important, though, in that before I was using it, back when I was writing "The Evil That Men Do," I made a lot of notes about the world that would be for Shadow Spinner and then... lost them. When I started on Spinner and couldn't find my notes, I panicked because I couldn't remember any of what I'd written down, so, well, I started over. Later, much later, when I was almost finished with Spinner, I found my original notes and, amazingly enough, what I'd done held to what I'd originally had down almost 100%. But, still, I don't trust that, especially when I do things like forget IWSG.

So I make notes.

However, I'm still not very good at making grocery lists. I can't even begin to tell you how many things I've forgotten just this week at the store. Maybe I need to make myself a note to make myself a list...

Anyway...
All of  that to say  that my greatest insecurity, both as a writer and as a person, is that I will become mentally deficient in some way, especially in a way that would mean I could just forget things. That I am smart has always been a defining characteristic for me and losing that as I age is a way worse thought than any physical deterioration. So it's about time someone develops that anti-aging serum. Or something.

This post has been brought to you in part by Alex Cavanaugh and the IWSG.

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Also, make sure you stop by Indie Writers Monthly today for information about the July issue and part six of my series "Lies Writers Tell... To Other Writers."

Encouragement Does Not Equal Support (an IWSG post)

We have a very supportive household. Mostly, it's my wife's doing. She's the one that instituted it, at any rate, but I think it all came out of a discussion we had years ago about the lack of support I had when I was growing up and the abundance of support she had. So, back then, I couldn't really see the importance of support because I'd never had it.

We'll skip over the parts where I wasn't allowed to play sports or learn a musical instrument and go straight to high school. During my junior year, I talked a buddy into learning some Abbott and Costello skits with me for some thing or other we had to do at school. Initially, it was just "Who's on First?" but, we were so good, we got asked to perform at some function or other and did that, too. Which led to other performances and learning other skits (including my favorite, "Costello's Farm"). We had quite a number of performances during our junior and senior years. And my parents didn't come to a single one.

During college, I was in a drama group and we frequently performed in the area, and my parents never came to any of those performances, either. In fact, the only performances my parents ever came to were when the youth choir at my church sang at church because, well, they were already there and, actually, they often missed those, too.

So... We, my wife and I, made an actual decision, a conscious decision, to support our kids in their endeavors. Even when it's not easy. Even when giving them a little "Break a leg!"-do-a-great-job encouragement would be so much easier. So that means we go to things. We go to lots of things. We go to softball practices and softball games. We go to accordion lessons and accordion performances. We go to choir concerts. We go to plays and musicals. We go to improv shows. We spend money on tickets to a lot of these things. We make the effort to show our kids we're there for them, supporting them (and the organizations they're with), even when we'd rather say, "Okay, that's enough. We hope you do a great job tonight, but we're staying home." And trust me, when you have a week like this one where you're only home one night of the whole week because there are performances and games every other night, it can be tempting to skip the support and just go for the easy dose of encouragement.

And that's the thing: Encouragement is easy. It's the support that's hard to do.

Encouragement is nothing more than patting someone on the back and saying "good luck." It really doesn't take anything to do. There's no real effort involved. Now, don't get me wrong; encouragement can be nice: It feels good, but, really, it's completely insubstantial. It doesn't do anything real.

Support requires an effort. To put it in another context, support is more than just wishing fellow authors "best of luck" with their releases. Support is more than just cover reveals and blog hops. Support is more than just adding someone's book to your "to read" list on goodreads.

Actual support is buying the books of your author friends. And, sure, I get that not everyone can buy every book by every person just like we don't go to every performance of the same show (but we do go to at least one performance from each show); most of us just don't have the money for that. But I make an effort to pick up at least a "book" or two a month from someone I know (even if I know that I'm not going to have time to read it soon) and, really, with so many people using the $0.99 price point, it's hard to legitimately say you can't afford it (skip one Starbucks latte a month, and you can support three or four different authors!).

Actual support is reading the books that you've picked up from your friends. This is kind of a big one for me, right now, because I've been being tired for a while now of seeing on the blogs of indie authors the constant chatter about traditionally published books like Divergent and The Hunger Games. When you're an indie author but can only ever talk about traditionally published books -- and not just books but best sellers -- it really sends a wrong message. It's an unintentional message, but it's there all the same, and that message is "only traditionally published books are worth talking about." I make an effort to always have at least one indie book that I'm reading. [In fact, I just ordered a Kindle (my first portable device) to facilitate, specifically, reading indie books, because I haven't had time lately to do that while sitting at my computer.]

Actual support is, after having read someone's indie release, leaving a review. A real review. Not just a "yea! I loved this!" (which I've actually seen left when it's apparent the person didn't read the book at all (my favorite being "I went to high school with this guy and he wrote this book. It's good. You should read it."))
Just to say it, I review every book I read. I believe in supporting the authors.

This stuff has been bothering me for a while, the fact that there is kind of this constant talk about how "supportive" the blogging community is when what it actually is is encouraging. The blogging community is great at encouragement. There's no lack of "good luck!"s to be found. But actual support has proven to be few and far between. Since this is a "support" group, I thought I'd mention that encouragement does not equal support.

Abandoned Places: Bodiam Castle (and IWSG)

Bodiam Castle was built during the middle of the Hundred Years' War by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge (say that three times fast; actually, just say that one time) to, theoretically, keep out the French. However, the castle didn't see any "action" until the War of the Roses, that is if you can call being surrendered to avoid a seige "action." By that time, the castle had passed to the Lewknors, who owned the castle through the 1500s but, by the time of the English Civil War in 1641, it was owned by John Tufton. Tufton was forced to sell the castle to pay fines against him for, basically, being on the wrong side of the war. Bodiam was dismantled and left in ruins for 200 years. Restoration began on Bodiam during the 1800s, and it is now considered one of the most "romantic" castles in England.

Cooking for Your Audience (an IWSG post)

I am the cook in my house. Not the baker, the cook. I get up every morning and cook breakfast for my wife and, usually, my oldest son, sometimes my daughter, and rarely my younger son. I also cook dinner every night. That one's for everyone (except for my oldest son who is rarely home because of his ultra busy schedule). I'm just gonna say it: I am a good cook.

Of course, my mom is a cook, but it's not like she ever taught me to cook anything. My earliest forays into cooking were because I was home alone (or, maybe, with my brother) and needed to eat. I started with mac 'n' cheese and tuna fish. Not that you need to cook tuna fish. Well, unless it's in the mac 'n' cheese. Oh, and deviled eggs. That was actually the first thing I ever made on my own. I think they showed how to make them on an episode of The Electric Company (or something), and I decided I wanted to do it. That was my thing for a while. I was probably around seven but certainly not more than eight, because my brother was still a toddler. He loved the deviled eggs and would shove them whole into his mouth getting egg goo all over his face.

The fact that I am good cook does not, however, mean anything to my kids, especially my daughter. She likes a more processed type of food, and we just don't do that in our house. It can make meal times challenging, to say the least. It is a rare occurrence when all three kids like the same meal and on regular nights they will sub in various vegetables so as not to have to eat whatever I cooked. For my daughter, that's generally carrots; I keep a large bag of them in the fridge for her, basically, at all times. My younger son has taken a liking to yams, which I often cook for my wife and me. And you can never tell with the oldest one. Sometimes, he'll eat whatever we stick in front of him as if he's never seen food before; others, it's "I'm not hungry," which translates into "I don't want to that crap."

For a long time, a couple or three years, probably, after we dropped all the processed stuff from our diets (something like six years ago, now?), I took it, well, kind of personally when my kids didn't like what I cooked. It was distressing to me. In my head, I knew it wasn't about me, but that's not how it felt. Eventually, possibly because of having to deal with it so much, I did come to a place where it quit being an insult to me when the kids didn't like something I cooked. It was about the food, not me. They still loved me no matter what I cooked. We could go from "I don't care if you like it! Just eat the food!" to cuddling on the couch and watching a movie within moments.

And, after years, I have managed to find a few things that they all like and would rather have me make than go out for, like hamburgers. Thought that one's still kind of iffy, because my daughter loves to go to Super Burger, but that's more because of the shakes (they have something like two dozen flavors) than the hamburgers. That's why I am King of Hamburgers!

Writing is rather the same way, which is why it's important to remember that when someone doesn't like something you've written, it has nothing to do with you or whether that person likes you or not. So you didn't write something that person liked or, maybe, even most people, but it still doesn't have anything to do with you.

The sad thing is that I have seen negative reviews of books cause rifts in friendships or, even, destroy friendships.

Here's the thing, if you cook something and you like what you cooked -- you taste it and say, "I like this!" -- it doesn't matter if anyone else likes it or not. If you do like it (and aren't just telling yourself that because you're the one that made it), chances are there are other people that will like it, too. You just have to find those people. People who don't like it can find something else to eat. But it's really not fair to hold it against someone (especially a friend or loved one) if they don't like what you cooked. That would be like me getting upset with my younger son for night liking the fish dinner I cooked (when I know he doesn't like fish).

There's a decision you have to make as a cook (or a writer): do I think this food is good enough to let other people taste? If you think "yes," then you have to decide to not take it as a personal insult if other people don't like the food. If you really want to share your food with other people, that means you go back to your recipe, figure out what people didn't like about it, and try again. Writing is really that same way. Getting upset about it would  be like me getting upset that so many people eat at McDonald's when my hamburgers are so much better.

So, remember, it's about the food, not about you. Or, um, it's about the book. And it's really unfair for you to expect people to grin and say "I love it!" while they're spitting it out behind their napkins. Or, maybe, they will love it, but it needs to be up to them to decide apart from any expectations on your part.

Special Bonus!
FREE! today: Indie Writers Monthly: Vol. I, Issue 2! Go pick up your copy NOW!

I talk about "Jack" (not the Jack that is my cat).

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Part 2: Why Bother To Blog (That's Not a Question) (an IWSG post)

After a month of extremely low traffic (like February was for me (see part 1)) or a drop off in comments or a failure to generate sales from blogging or any number of other things, you might wonder, "What's the point? Why should I spend my time doing this thing; it doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere."
I can't say that's not a legitimate question.

So let me give you an example of why a blog can make a difference for even a well-known author.

John Scalzi is kind of a big deal in the science fiction world. His first (traditionally published) novel, Old Man's War, was nominated for a Hugo in 2006. Red Shirts won the Hugo for best novel in 2013. There have been many other nominations (which I'm not going to go try and figure out). He was also the president of SFWA for a while.

But, see, despite the fact that I read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy, I'd never heard of John Scalzi. Not as a writer. I discovered him through his... wait for it... blog! His blog is, in fact, great. I didn't find his blog until well after I'd started blogging myself, and I didn't realize, right at first, except in a very vague way, that he was a writer of books. I mean, he doesn't spend much time talking about the process of writing, so, just from his posts, it's not always apparent. Which is fine. I don't really need more author/writer advice, and I didn't go there looking for that stuff. Why would I when I didn't know about any of the books he'd written?

I went there because he has interesting posts about actual things and, more importantly, he has real things to say about those things, whatever those things happen to be, and we, evidently, have a very similar way of looking at those things. So far, I haven't disagreed with him about any of the things, at any rate. Though I'm not likely to wear a dress. (And you can just go check his blog to figure that one out.)

Eventually, though, he mentioned a thing he had coming out ("The B-Team," part 1 of his serialization of The Human Division), which caught my eye since I was serializing Shadow Spinner at the time, and I really took a look at his books and decided I wanted to read Old Man's War, which I haven't actually done, yet, but I will. And I also, now, want to read Red Shirts (which is going to be a TV show, so I really need to get on that). So, in me, he has a fan, and I haven't even read any of his books, but, see, I like him.

And all of that was because of his blog.

There's also Demetri and the Banana Flavored Rocketship, my favorite read of 2012, by Bryan Pedas, whom I found through his blog. And Briane Pagel and the very many things he's written (which, actually, includes his blog, which is like some vast, scrawling art form); do you want to guess how I discovered him? I bet you can't. No, seriously, just guess.
Okay, you got me. It was his blog.

I could go on.

Actually, I kind of will. If you have a blog and, for whatever reason, I go to it, and I see that the last post was November 27, 2011, guess what I'll do. If you're thinking that I'll explore it anyway, you'd be wrong. I'll close it up without bookmarking it and never bother to go back. I won't go poking around and I won't find out what you may or may not have written. Which is not to say that if you're an author you need to have a blog, but, if you do, you should keep it updated. If you're not going to do that, take it down. All the way down. Or archive it somewhere as a "look what I used to do" kind of thing.

Look:
Blogging may not be the thing anymore, but it is a thing, and it can be a big thing if you use it well. Most of my new reading (other than authors I already follow (like Gaiman, Lawhead, and Russell)) is coming from things I'm finding from blogs. That someone may be following along here and later decide to read one of my books makes me want to do a good job with the blog, which, granted, can mean a lot of different things and is a much longer conversation, but the intent is still there.

All of that to say, sure, blog traffic will dip and sway and be fickle and passive-aggressive or, even, aggressive-aggressive (I've had some of that, too) and it will come and it will go, but that doesn't mean that I should decide that it's just not worth it. How do I know when someone like me might come along and decide to check out one of my books? I don't, so I need to make sure that no one comes along sometime in 2016 and finds March 5, 2014 as the date of my last post.

This post has been brought to you in part by the IWSG.

Part 1: February Was Weird, What the Heck? (an IWSG post)

February was a weird month. Not that February isn't always weird, but this one was especially weird. Don't get me wrong, I like February. It's my birth month; I'm obliged to like it. And I like that it's weird. I like that it doesn't know how many days it ought to have and all of that. But none of this February's weirdness has to do with the number of days it contains.

To be fair, the weirdness sort of started in January. That was when I finally broke down and joined that whole twitter thing (that's a link to me on twitter, by the way, not just a link to twitter (like you'd need that)). Twitter, just by itself, is weird. Seriously, I fail to see the appeal of speaking with this arbitrary 140 character cutoff, especially when people then just tweetspam (Is that a thing? That should be a thing.) a dozen times so that they can say the 1500 characters they wanted to say to begin with. That's like making mini-cupcakes so that you will eat less but, then, eating all of them.
Because they're so tiny.
You know.
Anyway...

So I'm on twitter, but I don't really know if I'm doing it correctly, because no one tends to respond to anything I tweet unless it's, in and of itself, a response to a tweet. Am I the only one actually reading what other people say? I don't know. Plus, twitter adds this unexpected pressure on me of coming up with tweets that at least approach the 140 character cutoff. Because why use just 50 characters? And it feels like they, the tweets, should be profound in some way. But once I throw it out there, no one responds, so it feels like I'm one of those guys walking down a crowded street talking to himself that everyone stares at and moves away from.

Of course, most of those people these days are just on the phone, but that weirds me out, because I'm never quite sure if the person is on the phone or just talking to him/herself.
But I digress... really, way off target here.

The weirdness started when John Scalzi replied to a tweet. I mean, I was replying to one of his tweets, but he replied back, which was kind of a jaw dropping moment. I had to tell Rusty about it just so someone else would know and, well, make it real. If that makes sense. Still, it's not quite the same as Offutt having Neil Gaiman tweet at him (which has happened more than once, if I'm remembering correctly), but it is something.

That was at the end of January, and, for a while, the most exciting thing happening on twitter, unless you count Nathan Fillion announcing that he was learning to play Magic, was the push up competition going on between Briane Pagel, Rusty, and myself. Yeah, I know. I'm sure all of you were waiting with held breaths to see our tweets on that subject. But, then, one day, I sat down at the computer to find that Jim Butcher was following me. Wait, what? I know! What the heck?! Again, I tweeted Rusty about it. But what the heck?

As it turned out, the heck was that Butcher's account had been hacked and, for whatever reason, used to follow back about 1000 of his followers. When I got home later that night, he was no longer following me. For a few minutes, though, I thought I was one of the cool kids.

However, a real thing did happen: Howard Mackie, a longtime writer for Marvel Comics and the writer of one of the best runs on any comic ever, dropped by my blog and commented. That, in many ways, is an even bigger "what the heck?" moment than the thing with Butcher. I mean, I've mentioned Butcher here on the blog on numerous occasions, but I've never mentioned Mackie. At least, not by name. I only talked about Ghost Rider and, that, only in passing. So I'm still wondering how he ended up on that post. I'm sure there's a lesson here, somewhere...
Oh, but we'll get to that.

On top of everything else, February was my lowest blog traffic in a year. Way below my current average. Way below. Way more than can be accounted for by the loss of a couple of days from the month. It's one of those things that makes you stop and go, "Whoa... what the heck?" And without wanting to you're suddenly wondering if blogging is actually worth the time it takes. Or if you did something wrong and offended a bunch of people. Or... something. It doesn't matter that your head is telling you all sorts of rational things:

• It's just a fluctuation.
• Blog traffic in general is slowing.
• It's not about you.

Because your head is also telling you all sorts of irrational things, and you can't help hearing those things.
So... why blog?

And that's what we'll talk about next time. See you on Wednesday for "Part 2: Why Bother To Blog (That's Not a Question)"

This post has been brought to you in part by the Insecure Writers Support Group.

Reading in the Cracks (an IWSG post)

I've always been one of those people that carries a book wherever I go. It started in elementary school, actually, when I would finish assignments way before the rest of the class, and the thing I was allowed to do was read. Well, or sit quietly at my desk. I don't think teachers realize how difficult it is for an eight-year-old to just sit quietly anywhere when everyone else has something to do. So I started filling in those cracks with reading. Of course, at the time, it was from books in the classroom; it wasn't until middle school that I started carrying books with me. Probably so that I'd have something to read on the school bus. But I discovered that having a book with me was a good thing because it didn't matter where I was, when I was stuck waiting for anything, stuck in a crack in time, I had a book to read. By high school, I was the guy with a book. Not that anyone ever called me that, not to my face, anyway, but people would comment. And my friends would ask me why: "Why do you always have to have a book with you?"

They never really understood the answer. Even that I liked reading didn't suffice as an answer. I suppose that was too foreign a concept for most of them. I know they didn't get it, because the same people would ask that question over and over, like I was lying to them, "But why...?"

When I was younger, those cracks in time where I would slip some reading in were often large and happened frequently. Actually, thinking back on it, now, it's amazing how much time kids have to just... waste. And, mostly, that's what they do with it. Yeah, yeah, I know it's part of being a kid, but, still...

The biggest crack was at bedtime. That was like a grand canyon of time every night when I would spend a couple or few hours reading. Man, that was so luxurious, and I didn't even know it.

The problem is that those cracks get smaller and smaller as you get older, especially once (if) you have kids. In fact, some of those cracks get filled in completely. There's no sitting around in class reading because you've finished whatever everyone else is working on. I'm thinking that behavior is mostly frowned on at most jobs, at least most of the jobs I've had. And bedtime reading is nearly non-existent. There is just too much tiredness. Whereas I used to read at least an hour every night, I'm doing good to get in 10 minutes these days (which is why it took most of the last year to read The Casual Vacancy). My reading cracks have been reduced to waiting for my kids after school, a yield of about 20 minutes a day, and waiting in line at the bank, which I generally don't do more than once a month.

All of that means that I need to restructure the way I read. Reading in the cracks just isn't good enough anymore. But there's a bigger reason for that.

The way I read, or have been reading, requires that I have something I can carry with me, which means an actual, physical book (because I have no mobile device for reading), but what I really need to be doing is increasing my e-reading (which requires that I sit at my computer (not entirely pleasant after sitting in front of my computer all day already)). And why do I need to do that, you might ask.

One of the things that really bothers me as I bounce around to blogs by other indie writers ("indie" encompasses (by definition) self-published authors and traditionally published authors published by any publisher that is not one of the "big" publishers) is that, when they talk about the books they "love," they are almost exclusively talking about books from the "Big Six." In fact, there are frequent posts that just gush over books like Gone Girl (being the one that I ran across the most this week (half a dozen separate posts about this book)), which is not the problem. The problem is that there is a deficit of posts like that about other indie writers.

The implied message (which I'm sure is completely unintentional but is there just the same):
I am an indie writer and you should read my books. Yes, I am that good. However, other indie writers out there are not as good as me, which you can tell because I only read books published by the Big Six traditional publishers.

Yes, this bothers me. As an indie writer, I do my best to support other indie writers by reading their books (and reviewing them, but that's another discussion) and letting people know what indie books I've read that I really like (see that reviewing thing, again, which is still another discussion). It doesn't mean that you have to give up reading books by the Big Six, but, if you are an indie writer, you probably ought to be giving something close to equal time to other indie writers. That message says:
I value what you do as much as I value what I do.

That's an important message to be sending. Not to the other indie writers (though that is important) but to readers. Readers need to know that indie books are no less good than Big Six books, and the only way to let them know that is by showing that we are reading them, too.

For me, specifically, this is going to involve some changes in the way I do my reading (at least until I get some kind of portable device). No more just reading in the cracks. I will have to set aside deliberate time in which to do reading at my computer so that I can start working on, really working on, my TBR list of indie authors. It's important.