L’esprit d’escalier

I had the start of a post about newer writers, and how they comport themselves the first time someone turns a critical eye upon their work.  Usually, it’s not pretty.

Usually, it involves a whole lot of drama and flouncing.

Surely, I thought, though there are notable exceptions. Most established authors don’t react so viscerally.

Way to make me have to rethink my whole post, Alice Hoffman.

The short(ish) version, for those who haven’t followed teh dramaz over the last few days:  Roberta Silman published her review of Hoffman’s newest book, The Story Sisters, in the Boston Sunday Globe last weekend.  It wasn’t a ringing endorsement by any means, pointing out what Silman felt were serious flaws in both the writing and the book’s major plot points.  It’s not a mean-spirited review — Silman mentions up front that she’s enjoyed Hoffman’s writing in the past, and this book failed to live up to its predecessors.  That’s not cruel; it’s honest.  Silman expects better from this writer.

Alice Hoffman, however, didn’t see it that way.  She fired off 27 rather angry tweets, (“Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron. How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.”), and supplying her phone number and e-mail address to her followers, requesting that they let her know what they think of “snarky critics”.  (Hoffman’s twitter account has been deleted, but you can see some of the now-infamous tweets screencapped over at Gawker.)

After ye olde interwebs finished their analysis of the event, Hoffman issued an “apology” via The Christian Science Monitor:

I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion. Of course I was dismayed by Roberta Silman’s review which gave away the plot of the novel, and in the heat of the moment I responded strongly and I wish I hadn’t. I’m sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I’m truly sorry if I did.

It’s the “ifs” in there that make the apology mean exactly nothing.  “If I offended anyone.”  “…if I did.”  So close, yet so far.  In addition to the ifs, the suggestion that the situation has been blown out of proportion comes off as scolding rather than being truly contrite. There’s also an attempt at self-justification in there (”Silman gave away the plot.”)  That doesn’t make posting her phone number okay.  Yes, Silman’s review depended heavily on a recap of the book’s events, but honestly, I didn’t see anything that screamed, oh, I dunno, Snape kills Dumbledore! (And you know what? “Snape kills Dumbledore” still doesn’t give everything away.)

Agent Kristin Nelson nails it:

Uh, authors don’t do this. A reviewer is entitled to his or her opinion (hence, the point of reviews).

If you don’t like a review, you don’t like it. Move on. Trust me, mea culpas are not a position of strength. Regardless of whether you are justified or not, this does not put you, the author, in a positive light.

Hoffman reacted poorly, and in a public place.  Is it okay for her to be dismayed by the review? Yes, absolutely.  Is it okay for her to try to incite her twitter-followers to pick up their pitchforks and go after Silman?  No.  It makes me uncomfortable to think she believed it was okay to give out Silman’s phone number to over a thousand people, and encourage them to harrass her over a poor review.  The number she posted, by the way, was incorrect.  Good for Silman, but I have to wonder, if it was a valid phone number, if some poor uninvolved soul spent a day receiving angry sockpuppet calls and wondered what the hell was going on.

And, this just in: yet another author behaving badly.  I’ll let you read for yourselves.

My original post revolved around a newish writer over at Ficly, who posted a story that was… well.  It had a lot of flaws. Other people made the same suggestions I would have.  Some were a bit blunt, but not a one was mean.  The author responded with snark at first and eventually played the “I’m young, be nice to me” card.

Now, the beauty of the Ficly community is the wide range of talent posting there.  Writers who have been honing their craft for years and are bloody brilliant are posting alongside people who are still learning (like, well, me), and offering their suggestions on how the stories can be improved.  No one’s out to get anyone else (or, if they are, they’re trolls and should be ignored.)

It’s very hard to put your work out there, because you don’t know how it will be received.  It’s also hard, when you consider something good enough to show to the faceless masses, to find out that maybe it wasn’t quite ready.  This is the face the world will see.  You’ll be judged by the quality of your work.

How embarrassing — here you thought these jeans made your butt look great, but someone’s come along and pointed out the hole on the left cheek that you didn’t catch when you looked in the mirror.  Thing is, though, the people offering their criticism aren’t pointing and laughing and shouting “I see London, I see France;” they’re saying, “Here, tie my sweatshirt around your waist until we can get that fixed.”

What I’m getting at here is this: when someone responds to your work with the genuine intention to help you make it better, flouncing around shouting “NO U” and “Clearly you just don’t understand my writing” and “You’re so meeeeean” only makes you look immature.  It makes people less inclined to offer help in the future, and then, well, your work suffers for it.

It’s okay to be stung, a bit.  It’s okay to call a good friend and bitch, or to fume while staring at your monitor (or the newspaper article.)  But when you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, brilliant retorts clamoring to fill that white space, that’s when you sit back and take a breath.  Look at the critique again.  What is the person trying to tell you?  Where do they lose interest in your story, what sections are they pointing out that tell more than show? Can you implement any of that advice to make the story better?  Do it.  Try it, even if you don’t keep the changes.

If you’re responding, be polite.  Be gracious.  Ask for clarification, if you need to, but do it nicely.  Even if someone was blunt, or said something that made you wince, vitriol only exacerbates the situation and draws attention away from your work and onto you — most times in a very negative way.

The opening phrase you’re looking for — whether it’s the very first time you’ve shared your work or whether you’re a New York Times bestselling author ten times over — is thank you.

A lot of the time, the best response is to be like Thumper: if ya can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nuttin’ at all.  However, if that’s impossible, grace and good humor go a long way.

I’ll leave you with one of those bestselling authors whose book really did get panned pretty harshly, and an example of how he Did It Right and turned the bad reviews into a humorous ad for the book in question.  Ladies and gentlemen, Brad Meltzer (h/t to Lilith Saintcrow):

Here, have a story!

(originally posted on ficly)

—

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Go read the rest.

For the longest time, I’ve been making noise about turning one of my ficlets (from the now-defunct AOL ficlets site) into something longer.  This afternoon, I finally sat down and did it.  Then I stepped away from it for awhile, to eat dinner and watch an episode of Jeremiah. When I came back, I expected it to have morphed into some kind of gibberish on my screen, and, upon rereading, to go “What the hell was I thinking?  I’m such a hack.”

Except… it hadn’t and I didn’t.  There were parts of it that needed shoring up, certainly.  Words needed to be rearranged, sections moved around here and there, things added and subtracted for clarity and flow.  But I didn’t close it in despair.  I don’t hate it.

I think I might submit it somewhere.  Not right away, not tonight.  I need to throw it at a few people and see what they think.  But, yeah.  I have a better feeling about this one than I did with “Kate,” (which, yes, I know.  I still need to revise and resubmit.  That probably won’t happen until Hill and I finish our other project.  SO THERE.)

Anyway.  Victory.  I think.

(Oh, also.  Ficlets is gone, but some hard-working people have resurrected it as ficly.  I’m there.  One story up so far, a repost of my first submission to ficlets.  Huzzah.)

We just had a very brief rainstorm.  Just before it ended, the sun broke through the clouds.  Self, I thought, go see if there’s a rainbow.

And lo, there was.

Shiny!

My grandmother, much to the fury of my aunts and cousins, wins every family bake-off with her icebox cake:

Ingredients:

1 9 oz package of Nabisco’s Famous Chocolate Wafers
2 cups heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla extract

—

Add vanilla to heavy cream, whip.

Take the chocolate wafer cookies and add about 1 tbsp to the backs, kind of like you’re making an oreo. Only STACK them on their sides. Make little log of cookies and cream until you’re out of cookies.  Take leftover whipped cream and frost that bad cat. Stick it in the fridge for four hours or so, then cut on the diagonal to serve.  If you want, you can garnish it with cocoa powder or shaved chocolate.  Mmmm.

Bonus: there will inevitably be broken cookies in your package.  Clearly, you need to scoop the last vestiges of whipped cream up on them after your icebox cake is in the fridge.

Pictures of the ingredients, because the Nabisco wafer cookies can be really hard to find (they’re usually up on one of the top shelves in the cookie aisle at our supermarkets.)  (Also, please to ignore the lack of backsplash behind my stove.  It’s on the list of Projects to Get Done This Summer, No, Really, We Mean It This Year):

You can’t see them, but there are broken cookies inside the box that were gleefully consumed moments after this picture was taken.

Schoolhouse Rock left out the part where anyone can tack a completely unrelated amendment onto any bill.  It’s been a very long time since I’ve studied how the government works, and what the lawmaking process entails, but this has never made any kind of sense to me.  In fact, in the past few years, I’ve seen some damned good bills voted down because of unrelated amendments — ones that seemed to be tacked on at the last minute for the express purpose of keeping said bill from being passed.

Is there a good reason for allowing these things that I’m completely missing?  In what way is it better to add an unrelated amendment onto a bill rather than make it a bill of its own?

Anyone out there with better lawmaking knowledge who can explain the logic behind this to me, or point me to a good source so I can find out for myself?

First of all, have you gone and voted for Ian Gibson’s Stuff of Legends yet?  No?  Shoo!  Gogogo!  Today’s the last day.

Next, there’s a rant forthcoming on a big bookseller DOIN IT WRONG, but I’m in a good mood today, so instead I will share awesomeness rather than working myself up to the point where I’m foaming at the mouth.

I’ve had a Jonathan Coulton song in my head all morning, and because it makes me grin and sniffle at the same time, I thought I’d share.  Fellsie linked “I’m Your Moon” to me originally, and I heard it without accompanying video.  The conversation, as I listened to the first verse and the chorus, went something like this:

me: …is this about Pluto? Fells: It is. And how awesome is it. me: SO AWESOME Fells: I knoooow me: omg geek music ftw
It is the sweetest song about the de-planeting of Pluto you’ll ever hear (I don’t care if it might be the only song about the de-planeting of Pluto.  Shut up.)

There is also a very cool fan video of it up on the site, which I now embed for your viewing pleasure.

This thread is officially about geeky songs.  Share away!

Last night, I found out something really, really cool about one of Feathermoon’s own.

One of our favorite Boomsticks, Homrend, is not only the guild leader of an awesome group of RPers, he’s also a FINALIST in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel contest.

Should he win, he gets a $25,000 advance and a publishing contract from Penguin USA.

What can you do?  Why, I’m glad you asked!  The voting is open until May 21st.  The excerpt from his book, Stuff of Legends, is here.  You need an Amazon account and can only vote once.  Hie thee on over to the site and cast your vote for Ian Gibson.

(I know, I know.  I’m usually railing against Amazon here.  But something to understand — this is about an author’s big break, not about Amazon vs. the Indies.  While they are related topics, I will always root for an author’s success.  That’s part of what being a bookseller is — discovering new books to love and championing those authors so they can write more for us to devour.)

So, there’s this new website, “The Society for Geek Advancement.”  They made a video.  How cute!  In it, a smattering of geeky icons (Wil Wheaton, LeVar Burton, and Jonathan Coulton among them) proudly declare their love for geeky things alongside some people who… I don’t know.  They’re pretty, and they use Twitter and Macs, so hey, they can be geeks too!

Are you wtfing at your screen, too?

Yeah.  A bunch of people did.  Wil Wheaton got a bunch of backlash for it, and mused a bit about how the project had morphed from what he’d originally understood it to be.  It really does seem like some kind of marketing ploy.  All through the video (I typed ad, originally, that’s how much it feels like one), I expected to see some sort of  “GO BUY THIS NAO” at every new celebrity.

There is apparently a purpose to it, though it’s not all that evident on the site.  The creator, Shira Lazar, wanted people to use social media for good causes and to make a difference.  Proceeds from sales of “I Am A Geek” t-shirts go to Room to Read, which, hey, reading and education is an excellent choice, made even more awesome by the fundraiser they threw benefitting six girls.

However, it still seems to sneer a bit at things that are, traditionally, pretty geeky — Wheaton declares that he doesn’t speak Klingon.  Someone else burbles proudly that they don’t play Dungeons & Dragons.

…wtf?

Now, in his defense, Wil says he meant the Klingon thing as inclusive, in a sense:  “Geeks don’t have to speak Klingon.” Which, okay, I’ll give him.  I’m guessing it’s one of those things where, the meaning of it was clear to him, but when it comes out in a two-second sound bite makes the ones who are fluent in Klingon boggle.

Bridget McGovern at Tor sums it up perfectly.  Go read the whole article, but let me quote my favorite part:

One of the greatest strengths of geek culture is its remarkable inclusivity, its creativity, its ability to encompass and combine disparate ideas, modes of thoughts, and areas of interest without having to worry about keeping up appearances or maintaining the conventional status quo. To be so dismissive of traditionally maligned geek interests and so incredibly smug about our apparent technological superiority at the same time doesn’t celebrate geek culture—it’s just a cheap way of buying up some nice property in the mainstream, at the expense of the quirks, the playfulness, and the ability to be comfortable being different that is the essence of geekdom.

If there is one stereotype we should be moving away from, it’s the geekier-than-thou, Comic Book Guy-style sense of smirking superiority that only serves to alienate individuals from one another within and without the community. The creators of the SGA seem to think the best way to empower geeks is to ditch the nerdy comic books, hand the Guy an iPhone and a Twitter account, and make him over into an Ashton Kutcher clone, while retaining the obnoxious, supercilious attitude. This plan has the stink of a bad 80s movie all over it, and as someone who’s seen Can’t Buy Me Love more than a few times, let me tell you—it doesn’t work, my friends.

That.  Right there.

I know it goes against the idea of geekery-as-inclusive when I want to shout “YOU ARE NOT A GEEK” at so many of the participants in that video.  But I dunno, I get the sense that more than a few of them would be quick to sneer at con-goers, WoW players, tabletop roleplayers, and members of the SCA.

Hooray for you — you have a popular blog, you have a million followers on Twitter, you played Guitar Hero that one time and it didn’t totally suck.  Sometimes you forward LOLcats to your friends, and you even went to see the new Star Trek/Spiderman/Terminator flick!

I’m all for geekery going mainstream.  Hey, that means that more of the things I like might get the recognition they deserve!  More sf/f books?  More shows like Firefly, Lost and Fringe?  Kings getting put back on the air?  Hell. Fucking. Yes.

But if the idea is for sleek marketing people to redefine what makes a geek, make it hip and cool, pretty it up by taking away certain elements so the Cool Kids can still have people to snicker at, then count me the hell out.