Raeden Zen's Blog, page 522
August 1, 2012
Rant of the Day
There’s nothing like getting home from work, logging into Goodreads, and finding this delightful prose regarding your brainchild:
Via Goodreads.com:
“This was easily the worst book I ever read. Reading Flexon Vale was like watching a train wreck- it was so horrible, I couldn’t look away.
I couldn’t stop reading this book, I was so stunned by the awfulness of this book. I had to see if it would get worse….
This pseudo writer is a joke. He has NO conception of sentence structure, plot, character development- really ANYTHING.
If this ridiculous jumble could be published, we are really in tough shape….the positive reviews on this site must have been posted by the writer. No one could have really enjoyed this awful book.”
RZ:
p.s. So far, none of my personal acquaintances have reviewed my book.
July 31, 2012
"As long as our souls remain strong, that is all that matters; as long as they don’t decline. Because..."
- Nikos Kazantzakis (18 February 1883 – 26 October 1957) was a Greek novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher. (via avinalaf)
aburato:
Great Princeton 2012 Baccalaureate Remarks by Michael...
Great Princeton 2012 Baccalaureate Remarks by Michael Lewis. For those who prefer reading it, here it is. Love the story, and love the bottom line:
All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.
Never forget: In the nation’s service. In the service of all nations.
July 30, 2012
Rant of the Day
Some of you may wonder, why on Earth is Zen publishing the link to a scorching review of his book? Why would he want to show something on his blog, to his nearly 500 followers, that makes him look so darn bad?
For one, I’m not totally biased that I’m only going to post the glowing 4- and 5-star reviews. Plus, as we have seen with books like 50 Shades of Grey, the negative reviews are usually far more entertaining. In my case, there’s just something about a reviewer who feels a need to (1) point out that I published a book while he hasn’t and (2) defend the fact that he is about to utterly rip and destroy my novel by prefacing something on the order of, “See, look, I’ve given good reviews before…” that made the opus very interesting, even for yours truly.
Are you not entertained by my nonsense?
Anyway, I had a few small snafus in the book. I wrote viola instead of voila. I wrote desert, rather than dessert. I described a TV as being caddy cornered, rather than catty cornered. My bad. I cursed my editor friends, fixed the errors, and republished to Amazon. That’s the beauty of self-publishing. And your worst case is you wasted $0.99; think about all those oh-so-perfectly edited books that you paid $19.99 for only to be utterly pissed when they sucked (e.g. The Secret.)
More importantly and consistent with the view of other top Amazon Reviewers, I think the ultimate message of the story is clear: the Federal Reserve’s out-of-control printing is going to positively, absolutely, 100%, lead to runaway inflation.
In 5-10 years, they aren’t going to say, “Zen meant to write Voila!” They are going to say, “Holy fucking shit, how did no one see this coming?” And Flexon Vale will be there. Ron Paul’s work will be there. Peter Schiff’s work will be there. And there are others.
I’m not trying to compare myself to those men but there are many of us who believe there is an important message that needs to be told. Flexon Vale isn’t about a writing career. It’s about conveying an important message to this country: if we don’t change course, nobody is going to like the result. Voila!
July 29, 2012
"So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But..."
- Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (via bookmania)
