Robert Jackson Bennett's Blog, page 13

The types of online reviews that drive writers totally nuts

The weekend has not brought joyous news in regards to online reviews.

For many writers, online reviews are the primary pulse they can apply their fingers to, because writers receive very little actual feedback regarding their books. So, they have to go online to feed their voracious doubts, like – is my book successful? Is it liked? Does anyone get it?

As we’ve now learned, a lot of the feedback we see online is not trustworthy – some writers can, essentially, buy reviews and attention. This is kind of weird for me, because I treat online customer reviews with the same wariness as I do the comments on a news article – the odds of anything intelligent being said are very low, but the odds of reading strung-together swears and racial epithets are very, very high.

Yea, verily, the internet has become marvelously efficient at bringing frustration right into our homes and pockets. And online reviews are definitely a source of some frustration for writers. After a few years of watching them, trends emerge.

So let’s take a stroll, and discover the breeds of online reviews that slowly and steadily shave off numbers not only from a book’s ratings, but also from writers’ life expectations:

The Poor Packager

This book arrived quite damaged. There were water stains on the box, and some of the water got in the box, and it got on the book, and that’s bad, because I don’t want water on my books. Also, the mailman was very rude and I think he went to Auburn (boo Auburn).

Cannot wait to read the book.

0/5 stars

The Clinically Incapable of Giving 5 Stars:

This was THE BEST book of the year! Absolutely phenomenal! Couldn’t put it down. Loved it, from end to end. Amazing. I cannot WAIT for my kids to discover this book! An instant classic for sure!!!!!!

3.5/5 stars

The Didn’t Finish It But Feels Completely Fine With Rating the Whole Thing

I read about three and a half paragraphs of this, and it just didn’t grab me. I was actually being pretty generous – usually I decide if I’ll finish a book within the first three words. (Books whose first sentences start with a “The” or a proper name are usually just pieces of shit, you know?)

1/5 stars

The This Was Not the Book I Wanted To Read

This book was set in Victorian England, so I assumed that this book would delve into the mechanical complications and innovations brought about in the hackney carriage industry, and the slow modernization into the popular hansom cabs, which revolutionized transportation and urban design in London. However, this book was about a stupid love story, and I have no idea why anyone would want to read about that.

2/5 stars

The Wildly, Innovatively Glib

The plot elements in this book progressed in a natural fashion which I found satisfying to the appropriate degree. There were characters and the actions of those characters were in tune with the nature of the characters. Events occurred. The majority of the words were arranged in a highly readable fashion, and I could hold this book in my hands, and read it with my eyes. On the whole, I read this book, for this book was readable, and was read, by me.

3/5 stars

If you or someone you know has ever left reviews of this sort, please seek help immediately.

American Elsewhere gallies

Wow. The gallies/ARCs/whatever-they’re-calleds of American Elsewhere look really, really cool (that is my agent’s hand in the picture, if you’re curious – my nails are not half as good):

To get one of these babies, all you have to do is be a really cool person who does cool reviews and everyone likes and can skateboard. (Basically I’m saying I don’t know. But you can probably ask Orbit, and if they wind up sending me some, I’ll figure out a way to put them in hands.)

In other news, someone made a Wikipedia article for Mr. Shivers. My favorite part is this final excerpt:

The Daily Express calls the book “memorable”. [3]

Which is one of those excellent noncomments that could mean anything. “This book was memorable because while reading it I discovered my wife had been unfaithful, only one of my three children was actually mine, and directly after I lost both legs in an automobile accident.”

There are all kinds of reviews

One of the ones I like the most is the kind that says, flat out, “I’m not sure what this is, but I liked it.”

Book of the month

THE TROUPE is the “August Book of the Month” over at Book Chick City. If you haven’t read their 5 star review, now’s your chance! (I guess really any time in the future could also be your chance, but shut up.)

How writing works, and how being alive works

I sometimes worry that I would have been a better writer if my life had been more fucked up.

I don’t have a tragic history of abuse. I’ve never had substance addiction issues. I’ve never fought in a war. I’ve never gotten divorced, never been injured. I’ve never really experienced what I consider to be a genuine, significant tragedy in any way, shape, or form.

I’m not, I think, a completely fucked up person. I think I’m kind of stable. Yet I kind of wish I wasn’t, because I wonder if that makes me a bad writer because I’m not enough of a preciously damaged artiste.

But then I remember that that’s stupid. Because it’s not experience that informs imagination: it’s not what your life has contained, but how you look at it, from your perspective and perception and the manner in which you ruminate upon it. After all, a writer whose writing can only be informed by events they have personally experienced is, at heart, a pretty poor writer. Because presumably if they write about things they have not seen and have not experienced, it would not resonate with the reader.

And that’s bad. Because it would mean that your writing lacks empathy and imagination. It means you cannot imagine what it would be like to be a different person, to experience the world through another set of eyes. It means, at heart, that you do not understand your fellow human beings: you only understand you, and what you’ve seen.

So that’s why this article questioning whether a writer would have been better if she’d had a kid is bullshit, on a writing level. To be frank, I don’t even want to mix it up with this on the matter of sexism, or our concept of female life, because to me that’s all so blunt and obviously wrong-headed that it’s almost not worth discussing.

But it is. What this suggests is that a single experience grants validation. Not experiencing that means you are invalid. And the nature of this experience cannot be communicated or known unless you have experienced it.

This goes against every humanistic principle I can think of. It would mean that there are unbridgeable gulfs between us, as people: that we are definitely and permanently separated from one another, foreign, alien, unless we have had that one experience. It suggests we are not One: it suggests we are divisible, divided, and not of the same kind.

I have not ever gotten divorced. I have not ever had a really horrible, awful, depressing breakup. I have never attempted suicide. I have never done heroin. I have never shot anyone, or been shot, or really been in a very serious fight. I have never had homosexual sex, or had sex with multiple partners at the same time. I have never lost my home. I have never lost my child, my wife, my father, mother, or brother. I have never died. And I have never been a mother.

But I will write about these things, perhaps. And I plan to write about them convincingly. Because I can imagine them, and I can imagine them not because I’ve experienced them, but because I’m trying to understand people, and then trying to understand how a person would experience this. I am empathizing with someone who has never been, never existed.

This is the nature of writing. In a lot of ways, it is also the nature of being alive, or even possibly the nature of being good. I hope to do it well.

Listen all I am saying is that after the Olympics the UK should have a new flag

And it should look like this:

Hugo stuff

I’m not on the Hugo ballot. This does not surprise me, because the Hugos are a popular vote, and though my stuff gets some acclaim (select critics and award panels have big oil drums marked ACCLAIM and they pour out little cups and mail them to you through the internet) it’s not, like, I’m on the tip of every person’s tongue from Florida to California (which actually would be pretty gross, right?).

Anyways, Justin Landon over at Staffer’s Musings has generously selected me as the “should have won” for the Campbell Winner. Which is really ducky.

Adventure Time

Adventure Time is pretty popular in my house. Obviously.

(Apologies for the shakiness and the mess – he had just dumped out his block box.)

There are all kinds of shows with various strengths, but Adventure Time’s strengths is that it is just ridiculously fun. Its world is built out of a patchwork of children’s pop culture – Candyland, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering – but it never takes them all that seriously. Moreso, its preteen and young adult characters have some of the most realistic reactions to each other: for example, when Jake attempts to apologize for a genuine slight, Finn’s response is a dismissive, “Shut up, man, I don’t want to hear that stuff.”

Out of all the characters, I think my favorite must be the lace-gowned, pink-haired Princess Bubblegum. I don’t know whose idea it was to make what would normally be the picture of girlhood and make her into a brutally pragmatic, amoral mad scientist, but they deserve several medals.

“To Be Read” review ; or, I am bad at knowing things

“To Be Read Upon Your Waking” is an awkward title to try and shorten, because it often just turns into “To Be Read,” which is the name everyone gives to their pile of books-in-purgatory. But! I also am lazy, so.

The Speculative Scotsman has a nice review of TBR up here.

At 20,000 words, there’s room for Bennett to let his narrative and characters breathe — amongst them the marquis, a particularly memorable madman who may be able to answer some of the strange questions James raises. The setting, too, is terrific: in rural France, as magical as it is mysterious, one senses anything can happen, and at Anperde Abbey – beautiful, foreboding and all but lost to the forest – it does.

So, check it out. And you can, you know – for free.

 

UPDATE:

I am apparently bad at knowing things, because not only is this review 2 weeks old, but also THE TROUPE got a Recommended review from SFRevu, and its Washington Post review also got play in Kansas City. These are all good and happy things that I did not know.

Nina Post Review

There’s an extremely thoughtful (and fairly spoiler-filled) review of THE TROUPE over at Nina Post’s blog. Check it out!

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In other news, I went to Portland last week on business, and reacted quite favorably to the weather, the scenery, the beer, basically everything that makes Portland Portland. After a few pints at Bailey’s Taproom, I asked one of the bartenders there to surprise me. He poured me a beer, I sipped said beer, said it tasted quite good, and asked what kind of beer it was.

“It isn’t,” he said.

“Isn’t what?” I asked.

“Beer,” he said. “It’s malt liquor.”

I can now confidently say that consuming a pint of malt liquor, Billy-Dee-Williams-style, does have drastic, measurable effects on one’s evening.