Isa K.'s Blog, page 5
April 15, 2012
That One Time I Responded to a Negative Review
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. As authors from various genres run around making asses of themselves, as the publisher run mailing lists I'm obligated to be on fill up with complaints about the frustrations of promoting things on communities I love ... social media is changing the relationship between content creators and content consumers, but we are still holding to the same sort of social patterns.
Ages ago, back when I was working through the first draft of Split Self as a web serial I responded to a negative review, but not because it was negative. And every time there's a shit storm about authors throwing temper tantrums over reviews, I can't help but think back to that. So as there have been a lot of twits who call themselves authors acting up ... it's been on my mind a lot.
Webfiction is an extremely small community. Most people who want to write want the status of a writer to go along with it. The world of webfiction, where you're just posting your stories for free with very little impressive street cred, isn't really appealing. No money, no fame, scared off publishers ... the webfiction community tends to attract pure storytellers, not aspiring authors.
At the time the community was all a buzz about this new website that was reviewing webfiction. We'd had review sites before, but more was always appreciated and this one had a team of reviewers that posted long, in-depth, thoughtful, pull-no-punches reviews. Naturally, everyone lined up.
When they got to Split Self the reviewer completely ripped it apart (and rightly so, I hadn't quite developed a sense for pacing or the difference between interesting-to-me vs interesting-to-anyone-else) which didn't bother me.
What did bother me were a number of statements made in the review about the plot and characters that were completely and totally wrong. I'm not talking about spelling names wrong, or mixing up eye colors ... I'm talking about describing elements of the story that simply did not exist. For example, the review summarized Split Self as a story "about four New York girls meeting in cafes and talking about sex" ... Split Self is in fact a story about a girl entering a polyamorous relationship with two men. The first chapter (at the time, this was later cut altogether for exactly the reason the reviewer bashed it) opened with the MC meeting two of her girlfriends for brunch, but these other characters never reappear nor does the situation ever repeat itself. The MC spends more time at the snarky gossip blog she works for than she ever does with any friends, male or female.
There were lots of errors of this nature. The review painted a picture of a book that was virtually unrecognizable. Split Self had a lot of problems, thinking back on the state of that first draft I often wonder how anyone found it readable at all, but even though it took me a while to get to the point it was hard to imagine how anyone could overstate so many minor elements and leave the actual plot of M/F/M (or M/M/F depending on your point of view) completely unaddressed.
I was a little suspicious and fortunately I was running Split Self on my own server. So I pulled the logs for the week the reviewers were supposed to be reading.
Most of my traffic at the time was from the US, and the reviewer in question lived overseas in an English speaking country that I did not get many visitors from. Actually, I think she was my FIRST vistor from her region which made it ridiculously easy to identify her in the logs and look over her activity on my site.
What I found was horrifyingly simple: she hadn't read it.
Actually she'd read the first chapter and seemed to skim the second chapter. After that she disappeared, never showed up any further than that.
I was outraged ... but not really sure what to do because writers are not supposed to respond to reviewers. I emailed a webfiction friend for advice. Replying directly to the review was obviously a bad idea, but maybe I could email the reviewer privately? Just ask her to disclose that this review was a DNF? (Unlike some writers I think DNFs are completely valid reviews and in some sense even more valuable to readers. If a book is so horrible you couldn't bring yourself to finish it that's something I want to know as a reader) That seemed like it might be okay, I drafted up a quick email (being careful not to accuse her of anything) just asking her to update the review with a note clarifying how much she had actually read. I ran this draft by a couple of people to spot check the tone, then I sent it.
This is where things start to get interesting. I waited about a week, nothing happened. But I kept my eye on the logs and noticed my friend from overseas mysteriously reappear, skim chapter three and disappear again. I may have sent a follow up email after a couple of days, I can't remember to be honest, but in any case by the time the end of the week came I was pissed. I was really really pissed. It looked an awful lot like this reviewer had read my email and decided to ignore me after it seemed unlikely she would be caught.
So I did what writers are never supposed to do, I left a comment on the review basically saying 'I tried to handle this privately but since you're going to ignore me I've got no choice. You didn't actually read this book, please update your review to make that clear.'
Oh boy did the shit hit the fan ... but not entirely in the way you'd expect. Yeah, there was the high and mighty 'the reviewer is absolute HOW DARE YOU' stuff, the eye-rolling 'typical author' sneers, the people vowing to never read my stuff (that they had never read in the first place and were never going to read anyway) ... but then other writers started coming forward too and it turned out that this wasn't the first time this reviewer had skimmed two or three chapters and then posted a review that implied she'd read the whole thing.
What I didn't know until much later is that this reviewer was also an aspiring ~*~professional~*~ writer and (it seemed) had come into the webfiction community in order to build a following for her writing blog. But still the whole thing got wildly out of control for such a tiny community and within a few weeks the review site was shut down.
I was not happy about that. I felt vindicated that people had come forward both publicly and privately to confirm that, yes, this had happened to them too and they were too afraid to speak out. I was happy that many in the community agreed that writing reviews for stuff you haven't read was unethical, but I was not happy about the outcome.
To begin with a valuable resource for a community I cared about had gone down in flames. That wasn't good. Also, to be honest, even though the review was full of inaccuracies it did help me turn a critical eye to my own work. Why did this person find my writing so boring and so tedious that she was even TEMPTED to do something like this? A lot of her critiques, ironically, became very useful in the major revision that preceded Split Self's formal publication. I cut most of the random stuff that she had falsely assumed *was* the story, restructured the plot so that it moved faster and rewrote over a third of it completely. If someone was going to make up a review based on the first ten pages, I wanted to make sure they at least made up something close to what I'd actually written.
In retrospect I regret my actions, not because the reviewer didn't deserved to be called out for her unethical behavior and not because all the reviewer's friends took meaningless vows to never read my stuff, but because I caused everyone a great deal of aggravation over basically a nonissue. PEOPLE ARE SMART. We writers look at bad reviewers and think that potential readers will accept them immediately, without question. But that's not true. People don't see one bad review and think "oh that's it, nevermind." They skim a number of reviews before making a decision. If they see one that is particularly snarky, mean-spirited or nasty ... there's not a person in the world who doesn't consider the possibility that the reviewer is a bitter failed writer, has a personal grudge or just has no taste.
I've noticed this with my own book buying habits, after reading a few positive reviews from my GRs friends I will try to seek out a negative one. I want to know what's the worst thing someone can say about this book. If that criticism seems unfair, ridiculous or petty it makes me want to buy the book MORE, not less.
So I regret my actions because I was giving my audience too little credit. Anyone who looked at the two or three other reviews of Split Self at the time would see the disconnect. It would have been obvious to everyone. I didn't actually have to say anything about it.
Moral of the story: Readers are smart people, save yourself some angst and give them more credit.
Ages ago, back when I was working through the first draft of Split Self as a web serial I responded to a negative review, but not because it was negative. And every time there's a shit storm about authors throwing temper tantrums over reviews, I can't help but think back to that. So as there have been a lot of twits who call themselves authors acting up ... it's been on my mind a lot.
Webfiction is an extremely small community. Most people who want to write want the status of a writer to go along with it. The world of webfiction, where you're just posting your stories for free with very little impressive street cred, isn't really appealing. No money, no fame, scared off publishers ... the webfiction community tends to attract pure storytellers, not aspiring authors.
At the time the community was all a buzz about this new website that was reviewing webfiction. We'd had review sites before, but more was always appreciated and this one had a team of reviewers that posted long, in-depth, thoughtful, pull-no-punches reviews. Naturally, everyone lined up.
When they got to Split Self the reviewer completely ripped it apart (and rightly so, I hadn't quite developed a sense for pacing or the difference between interesting-to-me vs interesting-to-anyone-else) which didn't bother me.
What did bother me were a number of statements made in the review about the plot and characters that were completely and totally wrong. I'm not talking about spelling names wrong, or mixing up eye colors ... I'm talking about describing elements of the story that simply did not exist. For example, the review summarized Split Self as a story "about four New York girls meeting in cafes and talking about sex" ... Split Self is in fact a story about a girl entering a polyamorous relationship with two men. The first chapter (at the time, this was later cut altogether for exactly the reason the reviewer bashed it) opened with the MC meeting two of her girlfriends for brunch, but these other characters never reappear nor does the situation ever repeat itself. The MC spends more time at the snarky gossip blog she works for than she ever does with any friends, male or female.
There were lots of errors of this nature. The review painted a picture of a book that was virtually unrecognizable. Split Self had a lot of problems, thinking back on the state of that first draft I often wonder how anyone found it readable at all, but even though it took me a while to get to the point it was hard to imagine how anyone could overstate so many minor elements and leave the actual plot of M/F/M (or M/M/F depending on your point of view) completely unaddressed.
I was a little suspicious and fortunately I was running Split Self on my own server. So I pulled the logs for the week the reviewers were supposed to be reading.
Most of my traffic at the time was from the US, and the reviewer in question lived overseas in an English speaking country that I did not get many visitors from. Actually, I think she was my FIRST vistor from her region which made it ridiculously easy to identify her in the logs and look over her activity on my site.
What I found was horrifyingly simple: she hadn't read it.
Actually she'd read the first chapter and seemed to skim the second chapter. After that she disappeared, never showed up any further than that.
I was outraged ... but not really sure what to do because writers are not supposed to respond to reviewers. I emailed a webfiction friend for advice. Replying directly to the review was obviously a bad idea, but maybe I could email the reviewer privately? Just ask her to disclose that this review was a DNF? (Unlike some writers I think DNFs are completely valid reviews and in some sense even more valuable to readers. If a book is so horrible you couldn't bring yourself to finish it that's something I want to know as a reader) That seemed like it might be okay, I drafted up a quick email (being careful not to accuse her of anything) just asking her to update the review with a note clarifying how much she had actually read. I ran this draft by a couple of people to spot check the tone, then I sent it.
This is where things start to get interesting. I waited about a week, nothing happened. But I kept my eye on the logs and noticed my friend from overseas mysteriously reappear, skim chapter three and disappear again. I may have sent a follow up email after a couple of days, I can't remember to be honest, but in any case by the time the end of the week came I was pissed. I was really really pissed. It looked an awful lot like this reviewer had read my email and decided to ignore me after it seemed unlikely she would be caught.
So I did what writers are never supposed to do, I left a comment on the review basically saying 'I tried to handle this privately but since you're going to ignore me I've got no choice. You didn't actually read this book, please update your review to make that clear.'
Oh boy did the shit hit the fan ... but not entirely in the way you'd expect. Yeah, there was the high and mighty 'the reviewer is absolute HOW DARE YOU' stuff, the eye-rolling 'typical author' sneers, the people vowing to never read my stuff (that they had never read in the first place and were never going to read anyway) ... but then other writers started coming forward too and it turned out that this wasn't the first time this reviewer had skimmed two or three chapters and then posted a review that implied she'd read the whole thing.
What I didn't know until much later is that this reviewer was also an aspiring ~*~professional~*~ writer and (it seemed) had come into the webfiction community in order to build a following for her writing blog. But still the whole thing got wildly out of control for such a tiny community and within a few weeks the review site was shut down.
I was not happy about that. I felt vindicated that people had come forward both publicly and privately to confirm that, yes, this had happened to them too and they were too afraid to speak out. I was happy that many in the community agreed that writing reviews for stuff you haven't read was unethical, but I was not happy about the outcome.
To begin with a valuable resource for a community I cared about had gone down in flames. That wasn't good. Also, to be honest, even though the review was full of inaccuracies it did help me turn a critical eye to my own work. Why did this person find my writing so boring and so tedious that she was even TEMPTED to do something like this? A lot of her critiques, ironically, became very useful in the major revision that preceded Split Self's formal publication. I cut most of the random stuff that she had falsely assumed *was* the story, restructured the plot so that it moved faster and rewrote over a third of it completely. If someone was going to make up a review based on the first ten pages, I wanted to make sure they at least made up something close to what I'd actually written.
In retrospect I regret my actions, not because the reviewer didn't deserved to be called out for her unethical behavior and not because all the reviewer's friends took meaningless vows to never read my stuff, but because I caused everyone a great deal of aggravation over basically a nonissue. PEOPLE ARE SMART. We writers look at bad reviewers and think that potential readers will accept them immediately, without question. But that's not true. People don't see one bad review and think "oh that's it, nevermind." They skim a number of reviews before making a decision. If they see one that is particularly snarky, mean-spirited or nasty ... there's not a person in the world who doesn't consider the possibility that the reviewer is a bitter failed writer, has a personal grudge or just has no taste.
I've noticed this with my own book buying habits, after reading a few positive reviews from my GRs friends I will try to seek out a negative one. I want to know what's the worst thing someone can say about this book. If that criticism seems unfair, ridiculous or petty it makes me want to buy the book MORE, not less.
So I regret my actions because I was giving my audience too little credit. Anyone who looked at the two or three other reviews of Split Self at the time would see the disconnect. It would have been obvious to everyone. I didn't actually have to say anything about it.
Moral of the story: Readers are smart people, save yourself some angst and give them more credit.
March 16, 2012
February 27, 2012
January 22, 2012
Romance Readers -vs- Fanfic Readers
Lately I've been caught in kind of a reading rut. Nothing seems interesting, I skim sex scenes rather than drool all over them, I'm bored and annoyed by other people's characters.
Then yesterday a piece of fanfiction popped up on my friends list and WHOA OMG~~ It was like realizing I wasn't broken *lol* It was HOT. It was PERFECT, but oddly it was something I knew immediately would NEVER work in romance.
That got me thinking about the difference between romance readers and fanfic readers.
As some of you may know: I started out as a fanfic writer and have since started dabbling in original romance. The Dressing and There's Cock In This Book have made it clear to me that transitioning between the two is more than working with original characters. I've had to make certain style adjustments in order to please the romance crowd. This isn't a bad thing really, it's just interesting to think about how different genres might execute the same thing differently.
Here are a few things I've noticed so far:
Fanfic Readers like open ended conclusions, Romance Readers prefer everything is tied up and settled.
Probably the most striking difference to me. In fanfiction, endings that leave things up to interpretation are not seen as bad endings. I suspect this is because the reader already has a number of fantasies they like to mentally play with, they just add the specifics of your HEA to their stable.
Romance readers, on the other hand, expect endings that leave almost nothing unanswered. I always thought the difference between HEA and HFN was that HFN must have overtones that suggest the relationship is an imperfect compromise, but after reading discussions in the romance boards for a couple of months it seems that HFN is actually an ending where PerfectSoulmate1 and PerfectSoulmate2 swear eternal love and hook up but you don't get to see the wedding and the six kids they have later (or in the case of m/m the two dogs and the fabulously successful hipster business).
Romance Readers want happy endings, Fanfic Readers actually prefer tragedy
In both genres angst is king, but if there isn't a happy ending Romance Readers feel like they've wasted their money.
Even in cases where a happy ending doesn't make any sense. Look at Anchored, fifty pages of graphic and disturbing rape porn followed by a HEA (or to be fair probably more HFN, but STILL) ... seriously? Doesn't that seem slightly ridiculous? The trajectory of the two MCs should have set the stage for an epic greek tragedy style death-fest, not a sappy, fluffy resolution.
Fanfic Readers do like a HEA, but when they've signed up for the angst fest they expect you to follow through with it. If Romance Readers put a bit too much stock in the power of love to make-everything-okay-again, Fanfic Readers tend to swing just as radically in the other direction ... favoring a world where people NEVER recover from rape and the only solution to psychological trauma is DEATH.
In fanfiction, falling into the "healing sex" trope will get you tarred and feathered. In romance there's seemingly nothing wrong with your MC falling in love with his rapist as long as the rapist loves him back ^_^;;;;
Romance Readers prefer that love is love, Fanfic Readers like more shades of gray and complications.
I think part of the reason why I struggle as a reader to get the same satisfaction from romance that I do from fanfiction, is that there's no risk to romance. I know I'm guaranteed a happy ending, I know the MC will have discrete and easily identifiable love interests and that he absolutely will end up with them (I say discrete because in the case of menage it might not be ONE love interest ... but in any case, the point is there are never any serious rivals in romance, never any question who will hook up). Without a real possibility of things not going the way I want the story becomes BORING.
That fanfic I mentioned in the beginning? Wasn't even a pairing I LIKE. If you had asked me before if I was interested in CharacterA/CharacterB I would have said "Ew, No!", but nevertheless the story drew me in because I didn't immediately know what was going to happen next. Most of the time in romance I feel like I know exactly how things I going to happen, I just have to find a way to crawl through 200 pages to get there >.>
I realize this list (so far) seems biased on the side of fanfiction right now. That's not very fair. Romance has some huge advantages over fanfiction (quality if nothing else) ... but I'll have to save that for another post ... or in the comments of this one *lol*
Discuss~
Then yesterday a piece of fanfiction popped up on my friends list and WHOA OMG~~ It was like realizing I wasn't broken *lol* It was HOT. It was PERFECT, but oddly it was something I knew immediately would NEVER work in romance.
That got me thinking about the difference between romance readers and fanfic readers.
As some of you may know: I started out as a fanfic writer and have since started dabbling in original romance. The Dressing and There's Cock In This Book have made it clear to me that transitioning between the two is more than working with original characters. I've had to make certain style adjustments in order to please the romance crowd. This isn't a bad thing really, it's just interesting to think about how different genres might execute the same thing differently.
Here are a few things I've noticed so far:
Fanfic Readers like open ended conclusions, Romance Readers prefer everything is tied up and settled.
Probably the most striking difference to me. In fanfiction, endings that leave things up to interpretation are not seen as bad endings. I suspect this is because the reader already has a number of fantasies they like to mentally play with, they just add the specifics of your HEA to their stable.
Romance readers, on the other hand, expect endings that leave almost nothing unanswered. I always thought the difference between HEA and HFN was that HFN must have overtones that suggest the relationship is an imperfect compromise, but after reading discussions in the romance boards for a couple of months it seems that HFN is actually an ending where PerfectSoulmate1 and PerfectSoulmate2 swear eternal love and hook up but you don't get to see the wedding and the six kids they have later (or in the case of m/m the two dogs and the fabulously successful hipster business).
Romance Readers want happy endings, Fanfic Readers actually prefer tragedy
In both genres angst is king, but if there isn't a happy ending Romance Readers feel like they've wasted their money.
Even in cases where a happy ending doesn't make any sense. Look at Anchored, fifty pages of graphic and disturbing rape porn followed by a HEA (or to be fair probably more HFN, but STILL) ... seriously? Doesn't that seem slightly ridiculous? The trajectory of the two MCs should have set the stage for an epic greek tragedy style death-fest, not a sappy, fluffy resolution.
Fanfic Readers do like a HEA, but when they've signed up for the angst fest they expect you to follow through with it. If Romance Readers put a bit too much stock in the power of love to make-everything-okay-again, Fanfic Readers tend to swing just as radically in the other direction ... favoring a world where people NEVER recover from rape and the only solution to psychological trauma is DEATH.
In fanfiction, falling into the "healing sex" trope will get you tarred and feathered. In romance there's seemingly nothing wrong with your MC falling in love with his rapist as long as the rapist loves him back ^_^;;;;
Romance Readers prefer that love is love, Fanfic Readers like more shades of gray and complications.
I think part of the reason why I struggle as a reader to get the same satisfaction from romance that I do from fanfiction, is that there's no risk to romance. I know I'm guaranteed a happy ending, I know the MC will have discrete and easily identifiable love interests and that he absolutely will end up with them (I say discrete because in the case of menage it might not be ONE love interest ... but in any case, the point is there are never any serious rivals in romance, never any question who will hook up). Without a real possibility of things not going the way I want the story becomes BORING.
That fanfic I mentioned in the beginning? Wasn't even a pairing I LIKE. If you had asked me before if I was interested in CharacterA/CharacterB I would have said "Ew, No!", but nevertheless the story drew me in because I didn't immediately know what was going to happen next. Most of the time in romance I feel like I know exactly how things I going to happen, I just have to find a way to crawl through 200 pages to get there >.>
I realize this list (so far) seems biased on the side of fanfiction right now. That's not very fair. Romance has some huge advantages over fanfiction (quality if nothing else) ... but I'll have to save that for another post ... or in the comments of this one *lol*
Discuss~
January 10, 2012
How to have a Book Review Blog without having one
I'm a lousy blogger and I'm always frustrated by how pubs don't value GR reviews as much as they do reviews on low traffic blogs. Seems counterintuitive.
Lately though I've been working on a solution using hacker darling ifttt
It's actually really simple:
1) Sign up for a Tumblr or Wordpress account (your choice)
2) Sign up for a ifttt.com account
3) Grab the RSS feed of your Read shelf (to do this pull up your read shelf and scroll to the bottom, you will see the RSS logo right next to the pagination links)
Ifttt stands for If This Then That and it's a website that basically lets you set up useful triggers automatically. For example I can tell Ifttt IF I tweet a photo THEN save a copy of that photo to another service (thereby backing it up automatically)
In this case you want to tell ifttt IF there's a new item in the RSS feed THEN create a new post on Tumblr (or Wordpress) using the RSS data. Tumblr used to have a built in feature for this but (it was lousy) they've discontinued it.
Bingo, instant blog :D
Lately though I've been working on a solution using hacker darling ifttt
It's actually really simple:
1) Sign up for a Tumblr or Wordpress account (your choice)
2) Sign up for a ifttt.com account
3) Grab the RSS feed of your Read shelf (to do this pull up your read shelf and scroll to the bottom, you will see the RSS logo right next to the pagination links)
Ifttt stands for If This Then That and it's a website that basically lets you set up useful triggers automatically. For example I can tell Ifttt IF I tweet a photo THEN save a copy of that photo to another service (thereby backing it up automatically)
In this case you want to tell ifttt IF there's a new item in the RSS feed THEN create a new post on Tumblr (or Wordpress) using the RSS data. Tumblr used to have a built in feature for this but (it was lousy) they've discontinued it.
Bingo, instant blog :D
November 3, 2011
Congratulations, It's a Romance Novel!
I write strange books. Tomes about the normal social lives of vampires who are neither immortal nor have cool super powers? Done it. Spy thrillers where CIA agents spend more time playing Farmville than causing explosive car crashes? Yup, been there. Tales of startup class warfare? …Working on it.
I wouldn’t really characterize myself as an aspiring novelist. I never thought about publishing. I was perfectly happy to give all my work away for free; it seemed preferable to ripping my hair out playing the edit-submit-reject-repeat game only to end up with maybe pennies strapped together for royalties and never knowing if anyone who read my work actually liked it. I believed working under an editor would make me better, I just didn’t want to spend half my life proving myself in order to get that opportunity.
But, as everyone keeps telling me, the world of publishing is changing.
Read More
I wouldn’t really characterize myself as an aspiring novelist. I never thought about publishing. I was perfectly happy to give all my work away for free; it seemed preferable to ripping my hair out playing the edit-submit-reject-repeat game only to end up with maybe pennies strapped together for royalties and never knowing if anyone who read my work actually liked it. I believed working under an editor would make me better, I just didn’t want to spend half my life proving myself in order to get that opportunity.
But, as everyone keeps telling me, the world of publishing is changing.
Read More
October 8, 2011
Overhead on LJ
Person A: Hating on America is a great sport abroad. It is a great way for Americans to make friends. (Or at least in some parts of the world.)
Person B: Yup, it's an awesome way for Americans to make friends in the fickle world of most of Europe. Ah, to be accepted by the people who enslaved most of the known world and yet judge everyone for not being liberal enough. I for one can't wait to disparage my country in front of other people so that I can be looked upon as acceptable by the masses.
Person B: Yup, it's an awesome way for Americans to make friends in the fickle world of most of Europe. Ah, to be accepted by the people who enslaved most of the known world and yet judge everyone for not being liberal enough. I for one can't wait to disparage my country in front of other people so that I can be looked upon as acceptable by the masses.
October 2, 2011
Don't Tell Me It's Love
The last couple of books I've read have all had this nasty habit of stopping the plot to TELL ME how deeply in love Character A and Character B are. Long paragraphs describing their conflicted feelings, the intensity of their passion, and the total, all-consuming influence of deep inescapable ~*~tru luv~*~
Well I'm not one for mushy stuff really. I like romance— intense burning passions and all that— but I've always felt that if your characters have to say it or explain it, then you haven't done your job as a writer.
I like to make a habit of writing characters that almost never say "I love you" in stories where characters' feelings for each other are rarely spelled out. Perhaps it's a consequence of cutting my teeth in fanfiction but… I've always felt that it wasn't my place to tell the reader who was in love with whom. That takes all the fun out of it.
Curiously, a couple of weeks ago I posted to a romance group asking for recs. Something with a plot … preferably a plot that was not love-them-lose-them-get-them-back-repeat and did not include any over the top "OMG MY TRU LUV I WILL DIE WITHOUT YOU" fluffyness
While there were some good choices in the responses I couldn't help noticing that a lot of them had BDSM themes. Which *lol* well I don't mind but that's a funny juxtaposition isn't it? As a reader you can either have GRAND EPIC TIMELESS TRUE LOVE or…. bondage.
August 28, 2011
"Procatalepsis, also called prebuttal, is a figure of speech in which the speaker raises an objection..."
"Procatalepsis, also called prebuttal, is a figure of speech in which the speaker raises an objection to his own argument and then immediately answers it. By doing so, he hopes to strengthen his argument by dealing with possible counter-arguments before his audience can raise them."
- Procatalepsis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Procatalepsis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
