Rob Osterman's Blog, page 9

FFV: More Cosplay Fun

To my friends at  DragonCon, thinking of you:

Review: Extinction Point

I'm a junky for dialogue.  Buffy, Gilmore Girls, Firefly, The Avengers.  Anything with characters verbally jousting is fun for me.  It's my favorite thing to write.  Two, or three people, put in a room, given a few props to throw between linquisitic fencing and I'm happy.

Why do I open a book review with this?

Because there is nearly no dialogue at all in Extinction Point and I still could not put it down.

I also should say that I thought I was downloading a book called "Extraction Point", with the cover art featuring a city and a girl on a bike.  With that title I thought I was getting cyber punk.

But it wasn't.  And that's perfectly fine.

Extinction Point is the story of Emily Baxter as she is one of the few survivors of a cataclysmic event.  My wife saw me reading it and said "oh that's like a zombie story right?"  Well, sort of.  It's not quite a zombie story but there is a lot of suspense and a lot of mystery about what's happening.  I don't want to spoil the experience for a new reader but I will say that I found the pace of information generally very well done to keep me reading.

The entire story is told from Emily's point of view but from a third person narrative.  Honestly, as I've gotten older, I find this style much easier to read.  The traditional 1st person narrative tends to wear on me and I think often looks like a writer's early attempts.  It can be done well (Catcher in the Rye comes to mind) but I think it is really far more challenging to do right than most new authors realize.

I have read some reviews and find myself agreeing upon reflection that the story does start to drag through the final 1/5th of the book.  I think that the author wanted the story to do more, but found himself unable to find a good stopping point so he just kept going until he hit a page number and wrapped it up.  There was a chance to stop the story in a more logical place but it would have pushed the book closer to Novella than novel so I understand continuing.

One small issue I'll make, and this is as a writer, is the use of the term "Tinned food".  At first I thought that this was an East Coast thing as well as an English thing (I knew it was English).  Turns out it is just an English thing and the author is from the UK.

Now why is this an issue?  Well, because even though the writer is British, the story is from Emily's point of view an uses her slang and her thoughts.  She swore in New Yorker (Using the F word a few times) and not in British-English (not one B word in the mix).  This is the kind of thing that a little research might have caught, or maybe an American Beta reader would have.

But that aside, the attention to detail, the specific reactions to the events, the actual overall story were all very well executed.  In fact as far as "extinction" kind of stories this was a play on it I was not familiar with and I thought well done.

I think that as part of a larger body of work it will do very well and make for a good series, though I do think that the intentional "There's more to her story" left me a little wanting.  I highly recommend it and wish my fellow independent author the best of luck!

The Anatomy of a Teapot Tempest: The Emily Giffin Story

So, a few weeks ago there was another lovely case of "ABB", Authors Behaving Badly.  This time it was Emily Giffin, a fairly well established author.  I say that never having heard of her before this debacle, but she did manage to hit #2 on the NYT Best Seller List.

A small interesting side note is that she commented on only getting to #2 on her Twitter and Facebook feeds with that line between pouting and playing.  This alone is worth mentioning as a sign that the internet has no sub-text.  There is no way to know if when you say "we only got to #2" someone is going to grin with you for the irony of pouting about being #2 on the NYT Best Sellers, or if they're going to chastise you for not reveling in the fact that you're, ya know, #2 on the NYT Best Sellers.

Rather than rehash the time line I'm going to direct you to some required reading, specifically the lovely blog Book Googles.  I've read a few blogs about it now and very few come to BG's fair reporting of the events as they played out.  For those not interested in the long story, let me give you the RD version:

Person A did not care for Giffin's latest work and gave it a 1 star review on Amazon.  Person B commented on the review to call the reviewer a psycho, and questioned the validity of the review since it was the only review that person had on Amazon at the time.  Person C enters the fray to call the B a "horrible human being" and accuses B of being Giffin herself.  B admits to being Giffin's husband.  Lots of comments fly around, mostly with B and C beating up on each other.  Person D enters, and defends B.  D is also Giffin's personal assistant.  Things mostly start to die down.

But then they heat up again.  Person E changes her previous 4 star review (she did enjoy the book a great deal) to a 1 star review.  Wackiness resumes.

Perhaps I should have made a flow chart....


Well, here's the thing.  Everyone is quite content to slam everyone else, up to the point where Giffin is forced to issue a public apology and tell her fans to stop commenting on the review.  She goes into full defense mode, deletes all mentions of the incident from her Facebook Fan Page and just wants the drama to die down.

But no one had to do anything in the first place.  Each and every participant in this Teapot tempest opted in to the process.  And to what end?  Was there really an earnest expectation that their efforts and actions would effect some broader outcome?

The only person, and I do mean the only person, who is guiltless in this mess is the first person who did what you're supposed to do on Amazon:  You leave a review of a book.  It doesn't have to be a professional critique.  It doesn't have to a literary analysis.  It's just your thoughts on the book and a 1-5 rating.

And from where on out we had people choosing to engage for what they thought were great and noble reasons instead of doing what they should have done which is just hit "No this comment was not useful", perhaps hit "Report this" and then walk away.

Giffin's husband absolutely should not have made any snarky comments about this review.  Period.  That was the actual spark that set off this powder keg.  He claims he did so because they had been dealing with harassment and he thought that this particular review had come from Giffin's new stalker/ harasser 

But if that's the case, you don't post snark.  You contact Amazon.  If the harassment is enough that you have law enforcement involved then you contact them and let them do their job.  You definitely to not engage them yourself.

Next up is "UES" the commentor who "called out" Giffin's husband and both called him a horrible person and falsely accused him of being Giffin herself.  What could be the goal here?  If you really believe someone is cheating the system by commenting under a false name, then you contact Amazon.  You don't call out for a public mob to form and throw rocks at them.

Then we've got Giffin's own missteps in saying anything about this discussion to her fans.  No, no and no.  I'm actually going to give her the benefit of the doubt that she did not mean to directly call out the dogs.  I think she acted without thinking.   I believe she thought, honestly, "Haha, look at my husband defending me, I'll tell everyone how sweet he is" and just didn't think about the consequences.

We're back to asking each player that opted to join the fray, "What are you trying to accomplish?"  If we look at the each one so far, I'm quite sure everyone thought they were doing something "good", and something that would have "impact".

It didn't end there.  One reviewer went in and downgraded her review of the book into a review of this incident.  Again I'm left scratching my head.  What was the expected out come?  Did she really think that changing the style of her review would cause Giffin to shift focus?  Or that by making her review about the author rather than the book that she would affect sales?

I believe she did.  I believe that in her heart she was sure that her review had impacted people to buy the book as a 4 star and that she had an obligation to change it to a 1 to better reflect what she thought were the important points in deciding to buy this book and support this author.

And the world reacted as we could expect.

She got slammed by fans of Giffin for changing to a 1 star review.  But she also got slammed for making her review about the author, and not the book, which while I understand her intentions, I'm going to be honest:  I don't think Amazon Reviews should be about the person unless it is highly relevant to the kind of story they're telling.  That's my opinion, it is what it is.  But that said, can any of us be surprised that when she announces she's changing her review that the world goes crazy?

I want to pause here make something clear:  This does not excuse the levels of escalation that followed.  There is a very very thick line between posting a thought on the Internet, even an insult on the Internet, and making threats against a person either through word or through a phone call.  Under no circumstances am I trying to say that anyone deserves to be threatened with physical bodily harm.

Meanwhile people flock in to read her blog and see what was going through her mind, just as the flood to Amazon to see what other people think.  People start to tally how many for and against comments there are, what comments are ranked as helpful or not.  And it continues.

Looking back if we run down the list of the players, their intentions, and the effects it all begins to fit a neat, predictable, format.  Each person believed, I think, that they were acting with noble intent.  I also think that each player felt they "had no choice".  The reviewer says as much, that she couldn't in good faith keep her 4 star review in place and risk it encouraging people to buy books from such a horrible person.  How could anyone ask her to go to bed feeling guilty if that's the case?

But the truth of it is that every player after the first reviewer could have stepped back and done nothing.  The world would have continued to spin, and people would still be wrong on the Internet.  Everyone had a chance to walk away, but there's something about our own lack of impact on the world that we feel drawn to "do what we can".

And I think, now a few thousand words later, that's the real take-away.  People just want to feel like they're "Doing Something", even when there's no reason to believe, for a second, that their actions will actually have a positive impact.  They can sit back and say "No, nothing got better, but at least I tried."

And that's where I really question things because when the situation is left worse for your efforts, was your desire to "do something" really enough?  Or did the action actually create more harm than it healed?

I stand by the bulk of my advice from my post on Bullies.   Engagement is a dangerous option and while we may think it does good, rarely does it.  Everyone after the first reviewer had a chance to stop, step back, and walk away.  The choice not to is what really fuels these Teapot tempests and blows them into full strength hurricanes.

Amazon, for good or bad, did start the clean up.  as of this writing several posts and reviews were gone, deleted.  The above review that was a 4 star for the book and changed to 1 star for the author has been taken down by Amazon.  My money is that it was deemed to violate their terms of use, and thus they did what they do when that happens.  I feel a little bad for everyone who railed one way or the other over that review because in a few days it is all as though it never happened.

FFV: We're NASA and We Know It

Save the Date: Book Signing

If I haven't talked your ear off about this yet, I'm going to be doing my first book signing a week from today, August 31st, at 21st Century Comics and Games in East Lansing.  The store's located at 515 East Grand River and is in the upper level.  It's also right across from Berkey Hall and Olin Health Center.  I'm going to be there from 2 until 8 so come and by.

Some Linkage:
The Event on Facebook
21st Century Comics and Games Home Page

Movie Review: Brave - A snippet

I finally saw Brave.

Wow.

Just Wow.

From a gripping story (for me at least) with well done characters, amazing animation, and a musical score that should be a gold standard for all future Disney releases.  I was practically in tears with joy during the opening third of the movie as Merida embraced her passions and chased after her loves.  It was heart lifting on levels I cannot put to words.

But let me try:  I can only pray, and I mean Pray, that I see that kind of joy in the eyes of my beloved little Kaylee.  I can only hope against hope that she feels so free to be the woman she knows in her heart she is.

But before I really get into a review I'd like to revisit something I posted on several months ago, specifically the scandalous implications that Merida might be the first Gay Disney Princess


I'm serious.

How slow of a news day was it that you decided that you needed a scandal so you could bash on something and have a topic of discussion?  What is wrong with you that you would take a wonderful story about a Princess who wants to chose her husband rather than be forced to marry one that happens to be a good shot with an arrow and try to tar it by saying that it was all some big leftist agenda?

We can fix a lot of things, folks, but we can't fix blind hate nor can we fix stupid.

How many times have we seen those same stories, of a Princess forced to marry against her will only to soften the heart of her father so that he relents and she is free to marry for love, rather than tradition?

"I decree that from this day forth the princess will marry whom ever she chooses!" - The Sultan in Aladdin

It's not a new trope and the only difference is that at the end of Brave we don't know who that Prince will be.  But we do have a woman who is not afraid to follow tradition and establish that she will marry for love and for no other reason.  Then we add to it that she also has to learn that there is more to life than just following whims.  Tradition has its place.  Family has a place.  Supporting and loving each other has its place.

At the end the story was powerful and compelling and showed surprising depth.

I've often defended the talking heads as having a "point of view".  I admit that once up on a time I wondered about The Little Mermaid glorifying teenage defiance.  But this time, no.

Merida was portrayed as a real woman would, with real conflicts and real choices.  To claim it as anything else, I'm sorry to say, is nothing but ignorance.

Guest Writing on Tears of Crimson

I was lucky enough to be invited to write a guest post for Tears of Crimson, the blog of one Michelle Hughes, author of "A Night at Tears of Crimson" and other vampire tales.  Feel free to sneak over to her neck of the woods for my take on what makes for a good vampire.

Fellow Authors: How to Deal with Bullies

Okay, I was a nerdy kid.  Socially awkward, nervous, shy and a little behind the game thanks in part to the limited social circles available to me at my first school.  Needless to say I got bullied.  I've got some experience.  It didn't stop with middle school and there were even a few moments in college I look back at painfully.  I remember when a classmate approached me at our 10 year reunion.

"Rob," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.  "I realize I was an A*****e to you in high school and I want you to know I'm sorry.  Really, really sorry."

"That's okay, dude," I said.  "I don't think about that stuff any more."

"No, no," he insisted.  "I was just watching Billy Madison the other day and I thought, 'Man, I should apologize to Rob.'"

Gee, thanks.

Okay painful anecdotes aside, I want to talk about some ideas on how to deal with the kind of bullying that is often feared by independent authors.  These are cases where a user leaves a personal attack as a review, sometimes going so far as to look up personal information to embolden the attack.  It can include a group that rates the negative review as "helpful" and all positives as "not" so as to push the vitrolic review to the top of the list.

It's frustrating.  It's annoying.  It's painful, especially when that one or two reviews knocks you out of an average that got your new work noticed.

But, there are ways to deal with it and ways not to.


First let's dispel with a common myth about Bullies.

Your typical after-school special will have you believe that bullies are the way they are because they're just looking for attention.  If you can engage them in some kind of act of kindness they'll go away.

This is, generally, false.

Bullies, generally, treat people like dirt because they can and because the enjoy it.  They like the feeling of power they get over others.  They like having people fear them because somewhere they learned that fear meant respect.  One or two gestures of respect can't undo that.  It might spare you for a moment but unless you're talking a bully of the age of 9, it's probably too late for you to redirect them to other ways to get respected.

Second, let's knock out another myth about bullies.

Bullies will not run away when you stand up to them.  They'll hit you harder.

They won't run away when people rally against them.  They'll just hit all of you in rapid succession.

What bullies will run away from is a bigger bully.  He can break your face open.  But a cop can break his.  Now this isn't true for all bullies and I'm sure that the advice dispensed at the end of GI Joe is probably accurate for some of them;  just not many.

So, writers, what do you do when you feel you've been the target of a bully, someone who has decided that thanks to the anonymity of the internet he (or she) can lay into you, make personal attacks on your spouse, or family, and trash you in the court of public opinion?

Solution 1:  Do not engage them.

When a bully takes a swing, he would love for you to swing back.  Not because it's finally a "real fight."  If he wanted a real fight, he'd go after someone that he did not perceive as weaker.  We don't call guys who want a fair fight bullies; we call guys who want a fair fight boxers.

They love the counter swing because it ~prolongs~ the abuse.  If you ignore them, yes, eventually, they will go away.  The difference between reality and those TV shows though?  You're going to get your face smashed before they do leave, but they will leave.

Here's the real reason: you can't win swinging back.  Unless you're a bon fide brilliant writer, any response from you will come off as weak, whiny and unprofessional.  Some people can pull this off.  Some people are experienced, talented writers who can take a few poisonous barbs and sling them back in a way that cuts deep to the bone.  These people are rare.  Remember the internet bully isn't beating up on you because he's clever; he's doing it because He Can and because It's Fun.  That's it.

So if you take a swing back, remember that you're as likely to look bad as you are to look clever.  Safer route?  Take a deep breath, turn off the computer and let it pass.

Solution 2:  Report it to the Site Management.

Every site has a terms of service or terms of use policy.  There are rules for how people are supposed to interact.  Some are very strict, some are very lax.  Some are enforced with fierce regularity, some as though it's all by the moderator's whim.  But this is a powerful resource you can use.

But use it quietly.  Don't post "I'm telling".  That never ends well.  Instead simply send a note to the site owners, and then go see Solution 1.

It is sometimes helpful to parse the negative post for specifics that are likely to get the comment pulled on principle.  While personal attacks are often allowed, threats of violence, profanity, reference to previous acts of violence, etc, are not. And by going to the site, you are free to let him believe anyone could have reported him.

Solution 3:  Comment to your friends but never issue a call to arms.

This is another fine line.  It's one thing to tweet "Man, got slammed with neg review #KeepCalm&CarryOn". It's a totally different to say "Jerk left horrid review, I need everyone to come vote it down".  Everyone knows and expects bad reviews to hurt.  How you express this makes all the difference.  Trying to rally a counter army of bullies to come blast them back won't end well and it reduces you to their behavior.

If there's any doubt how you're handling this, see solution 1.

Solution 4:  Be Professional.

Independent authors spend months, years, cultivating reputations.  But all that can be destroyed in a few moments by slipping down into the mud with the filth of the earth.  Ask yourself, constantly, what will this action accomplish?  If you don't get a positive response instantly, then you probably should just let it ride.

It's hard.  It's painful.  It's going to sting.  But that's the price of being an independent author.

FFV: Gilmore does Star Wars

We were discussing the art of writing dialogue over on Goodreads and I remembered this lovely exchange of banter from Gilmore Girls.

I think Luke has a fair critique though really there are lots of other things to get steamed about in that movie....

The Hunger Games Release Rant

Well it's that time again.

The Hunger Games has had its impact at the box office and made a mint for everyone attached to it.  And just when you thought it was safe to go back out into public without seeing preteens running around pretending to kill each other, and then make a three fingered salute over the corpse of their once friend, now mortal enemy, it's time to return to the dystopian land of Panem and their bloodlust.

I saw the fliers up at Walmart (don't judge) for the Midnight Release Party, and I had to ask the gentleman who helped me pick out a printer (Wifi enabled with reasonably priced replacement ink) if they were planning blood sports to see who would get the first copy.  Straight faced, he looked at me and said "Just about."

To date I still have not read the book.  I know I should, and maybe, just maybe, I'll hunker down with it.  For now though, I'm quite content to continue my Sturm und Drang over the whole affair by focusing on the movies.


To add to what's been said before, and taking as truth the "conventional wisdom" that the average American reads at the 8th grade reading level, I wonder how much of this is that novels written at the YA reading level are simply accessible to a wider audience and thus find themselves with a more mature collection of themes.  We have what would have been YA-level prose coupled with Non-YA themes, but it's still labeled YA because we don't categorize on content, only on writing level.

To categorize by content ("Oh that's too mature for kids to read") would sound too much like a form of censorship and we don't like that.  And speaking of children I've also commented on the "reaction" to Jennifer Lawrence being sexualized in the media materials.

I've also laid in a little to the over the top heart string pulling moments and completely transparent emotional manipulation of the audience in the movie.  We know what's going to happen in the movie long before it happens because we can see the film makers setting us up.  Oh, and of course, I reviewed the movie too.

But here's my latest rant:

The more I've talked about the movie (the movie, not the book; I saw the movie so I get to talk about it), the more I see people trying to tell me that the plot holes are all closed up in the book.  Things make more sense in the book.  Periodically I get the reminder that I'm not even supposed to like (or understand) the story because I'm not a teen-aged girl.  I usually ignore that last comment.

But getting back to the plot holes, I'm left with a running frustration about what is becoming the new media juggernaut:  The Hyper-Popular Book to Movie and Franchise.

And you know, I've got nothing against taking a popular novel and making it a film.  I'm anxiously hoping for Peter Jackson to do just that with His Majesty's Dragon, which I heard a rumor he had optioned.

But what bugs me is that more and more people are pushing out these movies that are really not movies but visual mockups of key book scenes and the audience loves it because they're not going to see a movie, they just want to visualize the book better.  It's not relevant that key plot points are left out because the intended audience already knows all of them.

For example:

They completely mismatch the ages of Tributes to garuntee that some are going to executions, not games.

Now this is explained in the books, in a way I don't find overly appealing but I understand.  As children get older they can ask for food and supplies to live on, and each time they do their name goes in the bucket, making it mathematically more likely that they'll get picked for the games.  It's a system that mostly favors taking older kids as they've had more time to ask for help surviving and thus have more tickets in there.

The problem is that NONE of this is communicated well in the movie, and instead we see children, starting with Primrose and ending with Rue, lined up for the slaughter in some kind of odd show of force and punishment following the civil war.

Now why does it matter?  Because I can see a society being more okay with Katniss and Peeta and the nearly adult tributes going at it.  I see the curly haired boy who was cut in half at the Cornucopia as being the hallmark of the ritual sacrifice rather than blood sport.  I see that if too many kids were so slaughtered that the events of the later books would have happened long before.

The failed revolt in Rue and Thresh's home district.

From what I saw there was full scale revolt happening.  Mobs were pulling down the barricades. The "Peacekeepers" were getting overrun.  They were going to take control of their district.  And then.... they stopped.

Now I understand that this was better explained in the book.  I can understand that they brought out the gunships or other big weapons.  But here's the fundamental problem based just on the movie:

If this district provides so much food and has such valuable land as to grow food, why would you risk your ability to eat by threatening to slaughter the people who provide it?  If they're in full scale revolt, how many of them do you kill off knowing that you need their hands to work the feels to feed you?  At what point do you risk losing your comfortable way of life by cutting off your own food supply?

In short if any district has the most power to revolt and still have bargaining rights, it's the ones that feed the rich.

That is unless they don't know that they're just feeding the rich.

No one knows how rich the rich are.

Again, seeing the starvation at District 12, then coupled with the opulence of The Capital, I just was stunned that everyone seemed to know how great it was but was all very okay with it.  I'm told that in the books there are threats of death for revealing just how nice the Capital is, and that one of the great victors, Haymitch, can't say anything because they'll kill him if he ever lots on about it.

That's the real reason he's a drunk.

For all the hype and hoohaa about the Hunger Games, I can see the appeal in the story.  As an adult I find the concepts interesting and really not that offensive.  But seeing it promoted as the girl power story of the year, I have to wonder what kind of power we're encouraging.

Is it that we have a story where the girls get to murder and kill and rend as much as the boys have until now? That gender equity is at hand in that we allow girls to be callous machines of death and therefore we should celebrate them moving from sex object to executioner?

In many ways it's a shame that the movie did not have characters 5 years older, and had done a better job of telling it's own story without required reading ahead of time.  That would have been a sci fi/ dystopian classic I could get behind.