Clark Hays's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
Lonely Together
When you have the loneliest job in the world — writing — it helps to have a partner.
Note: Here's something we wrote for the To Read or Not to Read blog. The topic: writing together. The results: the anti-mating call of the writer.
Few professional pursuits are as lonely as writing. A lighthouse keeper comes close. Or a hermit seeking enlightenment. Or possibly a toll booth operator.
It’s not that writers purposefully cut ourselves off from people, it’s just that we tend to live mostly inside our heads — forever spinning out plotlines, testing stories, creating characters, constructing new worlds and constantly, chronically, obsessively observing. And taking notes. It’s not normal behavior, truthfully, and it can make us feel alone, even in crowds.
Most productive writers don’t spend too much time in crowds anyway because we’re generally sequestered away somewhere scribbling in notebooks or pounding a keyboard. So it’s lonely AND boring. Think of the worst tortured artist from some subtitled French black and white film, magnify that by a god complex of biblical proportions and then add years of disappointment and the final product is somewhere near a typical writer. And chances are, that writer is probably single or has a sorely disappointed, long-suffering and very patient partner.
What’s the anti-mating call of the writer? “Not tonight dear, I’m making great progress on my book/short story/screenplay/manifesto.”
We are either lucky or crazy (probably both; about 60/40) because we fell in love knowing full well that our intended had the derangement of the senses that comes with being a writer. Then we went full blown loco and began writing together.
It started with The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance in 1999. At the time, we were trying to figure out how to put the pieces of our relationship back together after a fiery break up and two years in separate seclusion. The strategy worked. We’ve been writing together for more than ten years now and growing even lonelier together.
Now we happily (note: all writers are a little bit depressive) spend those fevered, stolen moments writing together, but apart, and taking comfort in the long silences, the frenzied work and crazed muttering. Instead of trying to minimize the self-imposed mental exile, instead of trying to schedule time to be social and “do” things together, we forged a writing partnership based in our shared loneliness.
Our second book, Blood and Whiskey, was just released and we barely did anything at all while we worked on it except write, talk about writing and then write some more. And it was kind of awesome.
When you have found the person you can be alone with, no matter what you do together, you’ve found the right person.
Note: Here's something we wrote for the To Read or Not to Read blog. The topic: writing together. The results: the anti-mating call of the writer.
Few professional pursuits are as lonely as writing. A lighthouse keeper comes close. Or a hermit seeking enlightenment. Or possibly a toll booth operator.
It’s not that writers purposefully cut ourselves off from people, it’s just that we tend to live mostly inside our heads — forever spinning out plotlines, testing stories, creating characters, constructing new worlds and constantly, chronically, obsessively observing. And taking notes. It’s not normal behavior, truthfully, and it can make us feel alone, even in crowds.
Most productive writers don’t spend too much time in crowds anyway because we’re generally sequestered away somewhere scribbling in notebooks or pounding a keyboard. So it’s lonely AND boring. Think of the worst tortured artist from some subtitled French black and white film, magnify that by a god complex of biblical proportions and then add years of disappointment and the final product is somewhere near a typical writer. And chances are, that writer is probably single or has a sorely disappointed, long-suffering and very patient partner.
What’s the anti-mating call of the writer? “Not tonight dear, I’m making great progress on my book/short story/screenplay/manifesto.”
We are either lucky or crazy (probably both; about 60/40) because we fell in love knowing full well that our intended had the derangement of the senses that comes with being a writer. Then we went full blown loco and began writing together.
It started with The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance in 1999. At the time, we were trying to figure out how to put the pieces of our relationship back together after a fiery break up and two years in separate seclusion. The strategy worked. We’ve been writing together for more than ten years now and growing even lonelier together.
Now we happily (note: all writers are a little bit depressive) spend those fevered, stolen moments writing together, but apart, and taking comfort in the long silences, the frenzied work and crazed muttering. Instead of trying to minimize the self-imposed mental exile, instead of trying to schedule time to be social and “do” things together, we forged a writing partnership based in our shared loneliness.
Our second book, Blood and Whiskey, was just released and we barely did anything at all while we worked on it except write, talk about writing and then write some more. And it was kind of awesome.
When you have found the person you can be alone with, no matter what you do together, you’ve found the right person.
Writing, and Other Hopeless Afflictions
Tips and tricks from the trenches.
Note: This is a guest post we wrote for Rebecca's Writing Services website.
Writing is the worst thing you can do in the world. For starters, it’s thankless. And chances are you’ll never make any money at it. Plus you’ll be relentlessly critiqued and judged by countless people, some (many?) of whom feel obliged to assassinate your character in the process. And forget about having a social life, or any kind of life, really. You have to spend all of your time writing and all of your spare time marketing your writing and all your spare, spare time reading better writers than yourself. (Note: there’s no such thing as spare, spare, spare time — that’s just called “sleep,” and it’s in short supply).
If you’re still reading this, it’s too late for you — you’re afflicted. There’s no hope. But we do have a few tips and tricks to help you manage the unfortunate condition that will shape the rest of your life.
Be selfish. Writing requires alone time, and lots of it. When people ask you to do anything that isn’t writing, say no. Don’t even make excuses for your action; that just takes extra time away from writing. Related tip: Make sure your significant other suffers from the same affliction; you won’t feel quite as lonely as you sit on opposite sides of the room ignoring each other while you work.
Be social. The only thing worse than not focusing on writing is focusing too much on writing. Over-focusing can blind you from being creative. In order to charge the part of your brain that fuels good writing, you have to get out in the world, see people and do fun things.
Be confident. Writing requires a huge ego. If you aren’t convinced that every single word you write is electric and riveting, better than any word ever committed to paper in history, writing is just a hobby. Try scrapbooking instead. Or pickling things.
Be insecure. Writing requires a healthy dose of insecurity. You have to constantly challenge yourself to improve and you can’t improve if you don’t open yourself to risk. And by risk, we mean feedback. Join a writing group or pay an editor. Do not trust your friends. Unless you friends and family don’t really like you; then their feedback might be helpful.
Be realistic. Writing is hard work and it never gets easier. If your books aren’t selling, you have to write more and better, and market harder. If your books are selling, you need to write more and better sequels and fight for control of your movie scripts and worry about international rights. If you go into this thinking anything about it is easy, or success is guaranteed, you are in for a long, disappointing ride.
Be optimistic. If you can’t envision yourself being wildly successful — like J.K. Rowling levels of success — why bother? There’s always pickling things.
One thing about writers is that they are naturally astute and if you’ve been paying attention, you probably noticed this advice is all sorts of diametrically opposed. That’s because the affliction of writing requires a continuous and long-running, self imposed derangement of the senses, a willful bipolar disorder, a life-long creative mood swing between extremes. Embrace it and learn to make the most of it. That’s the only advice that really matters.
But if you’re still reading and want some actual, practical advice, here it is: try online dating. No, not for yourself — for your characters.
If you really want to get to know your characters inside and out — and that’s the only way your readers will want to spend uninterrupted time with them — they have to be real. Some people write short stories about their characters, others write biographical sketches. To really get inside their heads, write their dating profile for some online hook up site. And not what you think their profile should be — write their profile like they would write it: inflating their good qualities and minimizing their bad qualities, glossing over their quirks and balancing what they really want in a partner with what is socially acceptable to ask for.
Then write the feedback their blind date sent back to midnighthookups.com after their first meeting.
There’s no quicker way to get behind the eyes of your characters than by throwing them into the world of dating.
Note: If you have any more tips, please share them! We're getting ready to start book four and we can use all the help we can get...
The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves
Note: This is a guest post we wrote for Rebecca's Writing Services website.
Writing is the worst thing you can do in the world. For starters, it’s thankless. And chances are you’ll never make any money at it. Plus you’ll be relentlessly critiqued and judged by countless people, some (many?) of whom feel obliged to assassinate your character in the process. And forget about having a social life, or any kind of life, really. You have to spend all of your time writing and all of your spare time marketing your writing and all your spare, spare time reading better writers than yourself. (Note: there’s no such thing as spare, spare, spare time — that’s just called “sleep,” and it’s in short supply).
If you’re still reading this, it’s too late for you — you’re afflicted. There’s no hope. But we do have a few tips and tricks to help you manage the unfortunate condition that will shape the rest of your life.
Be selfish. Writing requires alone time, and lots of it. When people ask you to do anything that isn’t writing, say no. Don’t even make excuses for your action; that just takes extra time away from writing. Related tip: Make sure your significant other suffers from the same affliction; you won’t feel quite as lonely as you sit on opposite sides of the room ignoring each other while you work.
Be social. The only thing worse than not focusing on writing is focusing too much on writing. Over-focusing can blind you from being creative. In order to charge the part of your brain that fuels good writing, you have to get out in the world, see people and do fun things.
Be confident. Writing requires a huge ego. If you aren’t convinced that every single word you write is electric and riveting, better than any word ever committed to paper in history, writing is just a hobby. Try scrapbooking instead. Or pickling things.
Be insecure. Writing requires a healthy dose of insecurity. You have to constantly challenge yourself to improve and you can’t improve if you don’t open yourself to risk. And by risk, we mean feedback. Join a writing group or pay an editor. Do not trust your friends. Unless you friends and family don’t really like you; then their feedback might be helpful.
Be realistic. Writing is hard work and it never gets easier. If your books aren’t selling, you have to write more and better, and market harder. If your books are selling, you need to write more and better sequels and fight for control of your movie scripts and worry about international rights. If you go into this thinking anything about it is easy, or success is guaranteed, you are in for a long, disappointing ride.
Be optimistic. If you can’t envision yourself being wildly successful — like J.K. Rowling levels of success — why bother? There’s always pickling things.
One thing about writers is that they are naturally astute and if you’ve been paying attention, you probably noticed this advice is all sorts of diametrically opposed. That’s because the affliction of writing requires a continuous and long-running, self imposed derangement of the senses, a willful bipolar disorder, a life-long creative mood swing between extremes. Embrace it and learn to make the most of it. That’s the only advice that really matters.
But if you’re still reading and want some actual, practical advice, here it is: try online dating. No, not for yourself — for your characters.
If you really want to get to know your characters inside and out — and that’s the only way your readers will want to spend uninterrupted time with them — they have to be real. Some people write short stories about their characters, others write biographical sketches. To really get inside their heads, write their dating profile for some online hook up site. And not what you think their profile should be — write their profile like they would write it: inflating their good qualities and minimizing their bad qualities, glossing over their quirks and balancing what they really want in a partner with what is socially acceptable to ask for.
Then write the feedback their blind date sent back to midnighthookups.com after their first meeting.
There’s no quicker way to get behind the eyes of your characters than by throwing them into the world of dating.
Note: If you have any more tips, please share them! We're getting ready to start book four and we can use all the help we can get...
The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves
Punching the Night in the Teeth: A Crime Scene Mystery
Note: This is a post we wrote for our friends over at OmniMysteryNews.
"Something terrible happened here."
The detective was talking mostly to himself, because the two patrol officers — fresh-faced rookies barely out of the academy and bursting with professional pride — were staring at the carnage, their mouths hanging open like the swinging doors of an abandoned saloon.
After 20 years on the force, the detective had seen a lot, too much, but this was the worst so far. It was 10 in the morning and he needed a drink. Another drink.
He scratched at the salt and pepper stubble on his cheeks and then reached under his rumpled trench coat to adjust the Colt .45 nestled in his shoulder holster. The gun had a name — Brenda — and she was always ready to dance, but this wasn't a shooting thing. Not yet anyway. But the day was young.
Instead, he pulled out his battered notebook, flipped it open and grabbed the dusty pen jammed into his shirt pocket. He clicked it to life, dotting his tongue to start the ink flowing, and then held it like a club over the sweat-stained paper.
He was probably the last cop in America who even used paper, a renegade, a rebel who couldn't play by the rules, even if those rules made entering, storing and retrieving data so much easier.
All the whiskey and divorces and fights and nights alone came crashing down around his shoulders and he lashed out to avoid even one second of introspection.
"What do you see?" he shouted at the youngest of the rookie cops, a boy in the knight blue armor of all the men who came before him, a child who picked up the badge reluctantly and only to appease his father, the cold and distant commissioner.
"I don't know," the boy said, shrinking back.
The detective grinned like a wolf over a lamb, revealing a row of even, white teeth — even rebels could practice good oral hygiene — and a deep-seated mean streak.
"Useless. How about you toots?"
She bristled at the diminutive hurled at her from the washed-out detective, and raised her chin higher defiantly. She couldn't know it yet, but they would be lovers before the sun came up again.
"I can't explain it," she said. "But with all your many years of experience, you must know what's going on. Enlighten us."
This one had fire, he thought. He couldn't know it, but she would break his heart into 18 pieces and flush them, one at a time, by the end of the week.
His eyes narrowed like a hawk circling a field of blind mice. "They stopped cleaning, that's for sure," he said, pointing at to the dishes mounded and molding in the sink. "A long time ago."
The floor was littered with discarded clothes and empty glasses and the drained corpses of vodka and whiskey bottles that clinked together as he paced though them.
"Looks like they were working some angle." Every flat surface was littered with hastily scribbled pages of text and open books, the pages dog-eared and marred by frantic writing in the margins.
"It's like some kind of horror movie," she whispered.
"Yeah, that's right, only this time it's real," the detective said. "There are no sparkling vampires here, no cowboys to ride in and save the day."
He leafed through his notes. "I called around before we got here. They don't have many friends, but the few people who even called themselves casual acquaintances said they hadn't seen these two in months. The last person to see them alive was the bartender at the local gin joint."
He lit a cigarette.
"You can't smoke at a crime scene," the young cop said. His name was Bart and he was still a virgin.
"The dead don't care about smoke," the detective muttered.
"But it's against regulations."
"Screw your regulations," he said with grimace. "All I care about is closing cases."
"And getting bombed," the beautiful rookie muttered. Her name was Tanya and her eyes were the color of jade at night. He imagined her in candlelight, shaking her hair loose and laying her service revolver on the night stand and handing him a drink.
"Until you've walked these streets as long as I have, seen the things I've seen, don't you dare judge me," the detective said.
He touched the computer. "Still warm. I bet that one is too."
She touched it and then jerked her hand back, frightened, nodding that his hunch was right.
"What does it mean?" Bart asked, his voice on the edge of breaking.
The detective spun to face him, his face contorted in rage and anguish. "Haven't you figured it out yet, junior? Can't you see what's going on here? They're writers and they are so far into their project, they've disappeared from the world."
Tanya gasped and held her hand over her mouth, eyes wide with fear. Bart couldn't hold it together any longer. He snatched an ancient and half-full container of now-petrified Kung Pao and retched violently into it.
"What can we do?" Tanya asked, pale, almost translucent, and shaken — like a martini.
"Nothing," the detective said. "They're beyond all hope now." He snapped his notebook closed. "Let's go get some pancakes."
Note: Kathleen McFall and I are starting book four, so things are about to get weird...
Book One: The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance
Book two: The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey
Book three: The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves
"Something terrible happened here."
The detective was talking mostly to himself, because the two patrol officers — fresh-faced rookies barely out of the academy and bursting with professional pride — were staring at the carnage, their mouths hanging open like the swinging doors of an abandoned saloon.
After 20 years on the force, the detective had seen a lot, too much, but this was the worst so far. It was 10 in the morning and he needed a drink. Another drink.
He scratched at the salt and pepper stubble on his cheeks and then reached under his rumpled trench coat to adjust the Colt .45 nestled in his shoulder holster. The gun had a name — Brenda — and she was always ready to dance, but this wasn't a shooting thing. Not yet anyway. But the day was young.
Instead, he pulled out his battered notebook, flipped it open and grabbed the dusty pen jammed into his shirt pocket. He clicked it to life, dotting his tongue to start the ink flowing, and then held it like a club over the sweat-stained paper.
He was probably the last cop in America who even used paper, a renegade, a rebel who couldn't play by the rules, even if those rules made entering, storing and retrieving data so much easier.
All the whiskey and divorces and fights and nights alone came crashing down around his shoulders and he lashed out to avoid even one second of introspection.
"What do you see?" he shouted at the youngest of the rookie cops, a boy in the knight blue armor of all the men who came before him, a child who picked up the badge reluctantly and only to appease his father, the cold and distant commissioner.
"I don't know," the boy said, shrinking back.
The detective grinned like a wolf over a lamb, revealing a row of even, white teeth — even rebels could practice good oral hygiene — and a deep-seated mean streak.
"Useless. How about you toots?"
She bristled at the diminutive hurled at her from the washed-out detective, and raised her chin higher defiantly. She couldn't know it yet, but they would be lovers before the sun came up again.
"I can't explain it," she said. "But with all your many years of experience, you must know what's going on. Enlighten us."
This one had fire, he thought. He couldn't know it, but she would break his heart into 18 pieces and flush them, one at a time, by the end of the week.
His eyes narrowed like a hawk circling a field of blind mice. "They stopped cleaning, that's for sure," he said, pointing at to the dishes mounded and molding in the sink. "A long time ago."
The floor was littered with discarded clothes and empty glasses and the drained corpses of vodka and whiskey bottles that clinked together as he paced though them.
"Looks like they were working some angle." Every flat surface was littered with hastily scribbled pages of text and open books, the pages dog-eared and marred by frantic writing in the margins.
"It's like some kind of horror movie," she whispered.
"Yeah, that's right, only this time it's real," the detective said. "There are no sparkling vampires here, no cowboys to ride in and save the day."
He leafed through his notes. "I called around before we got here. They don't have many friends, but the few people who even called themselves casual acquaintances said they hadn't seen these two in months. The last person to see them alive was the bartender at the local gin joint."
He lit a cigarette.
"You can't smoke at a crime scene," the young cop said. His name was Bart and he was still a virgin.
"The dead don't care about smoke," the detective muttered.
"But it's against regulations."
"Screw your regulations," he said with grimace. "All I care about is closing cases."
"And getting bombed," the beautiful rookie muttered. Her name was Tanya and her eyes were the color of jade at night. He imagined her in candlelight, shaking her hair loose and laying her service revolver on the night stand and handing him a drink.
"Until you've walked these streets as long as I have, seen the things I've seen, don't you dare judge me," the detective said.
He touched the computer. "Still warm. I bet that one is too."
She touched it and then jerked her hand back, frightened, nodding that his hunch was right.
"What does it mean?" Bart asked, his voice on the edge of breaking.
The detective spun to face him, his face contorted in rage and anguish. "Haven't you figured it out yet, junior? Can't you see what's going on here? They're writers and they are so far into their project, they've disappeared from the world."
Tanya gasped and held her hand over her mouth, eyes wide with fear. Bart couldn't hold it together any longer. He snatched an ancient and half-full container of now-petrified Kung Pao and retched violently into it.
"What can we do?" Tanya asked, pale, almost translucent, and shaken — like a martini.
"Nothing," the detective said. "They're beyond all hope now." He snapped his notebook closed. "Let's go get some pancakes."
Note: Kathleen McFall and I are starting book four, so things are about to get weird...
Book One: The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance
Book two: The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey
Book three: The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves
#50DaysofFiverr - Like the Star Wars Cantina for Marketing
The worst part about writing is anything that’s not writing (that means you, marketing)
At the end of a long day of work (writing internal communications masterpieces for a financial services company), all I really want to do is come home, pour a nice tumbler of whiskey and spend a few hours … writing about cowboys and vampires and death cults and metaphysical energy fields. I would too, if wasn’t for the need to market our books.
Sadly, at least for indie authors, marketing is almost as important as creativity and foundational writing skills. Without a marketing plan, you can’t connect with readers and even the best books may languish in obscurity.
That’s why many (most?) nights find us working on marketing plans and studying website trends and designing ads.
Kathleen and I really don’t like marketing, but if we ever hope to achieve our goal of having our creative works contributing to financial self-sufficiency, we have to do it. A lot. Which is why we’re constantly on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and forever thinking about ways to make our limited marketing budget work harder for us.
Then we stumbled across Fiverr.
It’s a website that connects artists, graphic designers and creative types of all stripes with customers in need of logos, testimonials, writing help, graphics, illustrations and more. It’s like the Star Wars cantina, only for creative types, and yeah, we’re Luke in this scenario.
The trick is that the starting price for any service is just $5. You can add more sophisticated components that send the price up a bit, but not much. And they can be delivered crazy fast.
Being thrifty-minded authors (read: broke), Kathleen and I came up with a crazy idea: What if we pooled our limited marketing budget and spent it on fifty $5 products and shared them across our social media channels?
#50DaysofFiverr was born.
It's part marketing campaign, part experiment and all fun. We’re using the considerable talents of the Fiverr community to do the creative work for us – focused on cowboys, vampires and our books (and we've received some truly epic deliverables) – and then we’re going to share it out with the world and see what happens.
Come along for the ride.
I’ll share a few things on Goodreads (check out my photos for a fun caricature), but the best way to participate is by connecting with us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire), Twitter (@cowboyvamp) and Instagram (@cowboyvampire). And remember, it’s #50DaysofFiverr.
When it’s all done, 49 days from now, we’ll have some fun stories and hopefully a few lessons to share.
Oh yeah, and there’s a contest. Share your favorite pieces of work to be entered into a drawing for a $50 (of course) gift card.
At the end of a long day of work (writing internal communications masterpieces for a financial services company), all I really want to do is come home, pour a nice tumbler of whiskey and spend a few hours … writing about cowboys and vampires and death cults and metaphysical energy fields. I would too, if wasn’t for the need to market our books.
Sadly, at least for indie authors, marketing is almost as important as creativity and foundational writing skills. Without a marketing plan, you can’t connect with readers and even the best books may languish in obscurity.
That’s why many (most?) nights find us working on marketing plans and studying website trends and designing ads.
Kathleen and I really don’t like marketing, but if we ever hope to achieve our goal of having our creative works contributing to financial self-sufficiency, we have to do it. A lot. Which is why we’re constantly on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and forever thinking about ways to make our limited marketing budget work harder for us.
Then we stumbled across Fiverr.
It’s a website that connects artists, graphic designers and creative types of all stripes with customers in need of logos, testimonials, writing help, graphics, illustrations and more. It’s like the Star Wars cantina, only for creative types, and yeah, we’re Luke in this scenario.
The trick is that the starting price for any service is just $5. You can add more sophisticated components that send the price up a bit, but not much. And they can be delivered crazy fast.
Being thrifty-minded authors (read: broke), Kathleen and I came up with a crazy idea: What if we pooled our limited marketing budget and spent it on fifty $5 products and shared them across our social media channels?
#50DaysofFiverr was born.
It's part marketing campaign, part experiment and all fun. We’re using the considerable talents of the Fiverr community to do the creative work for us – focused on cowboys, vampires and our books (and we've received some truly epic deliverables) – and then we’re going to share it out with the world and see what happens.
Come along for the ride.
I’ll share a few things on Goodreads (check out my photos for a fun caricature), but the best way to participate is by connecting with us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire), Twitter (@cowboyvamp) and Instagram (@cowboyvampire). And remember, it’s #50DaysofFiverr.
When it’s all done, 49 days from now, we’ll have some fun stories and hopefully a few lessons to share.
Oh yeah, and there’s a contest. Share your favorite pieces of work to be entered into a drawing for a $50 (of course) gift card.
So You Got a Bad Review
Here's an article I posted recently on LinkedIn.
Practical strategies for dealing with the inevitable.
Writers, generally speaking, are narcissists—not so secretly infatuated with ourselves. We have to be pretty confident and slavishly self-interested to believe our words are worth someone else’s time and energy. And we have to be blindly, annoyingly optimistic in order to internalize and move beyond the tsunami of rejections, critiques and lagging sales.
Like most narcissists, writers—generally speaking—are also deeply insecure, even though we usually hide it pretty well. Every suggested edit, every lukewarm review, challenges the aforementioned optimism and wound us deeply.
Confidence and insecurity make for a bad combination. Like boxers with glass jaws, we are narcissists with glass egos, and every bad review is a ten-pound hammer.
Negative reviews can be devastating and disheartening. They pierce that bubble (shell?) of optimism and create the kind of existential angst that can make even the most accomplished writer question their skill and sanity, and send the less emotionally sturdy into a paralyzing funk. Kathleen McFall and I have been writing professionally and creatively for more than 15 years now. We’ve never received a negative review, not once, but it’s not uncommon in the industry so we did the research and developed a list of effective coping mechanisms for those not quite as fortunate:
1. Retaliate in print. Write a carefully constructed and pointed rebuttal that takes apart the bad review line by line, challenges the reviewers grasp of literature and mocks their clumsy writing skills. And then delete it. Immediately. Better yet, print it out and burn it. Never engage.
2. Clear the negative energy by smudging some sage—cleansing herbs can be very powerful. Even better than sage, find some distillate of juniper and other select botanicals in a potable solution to help clear the bad energy internally. It’s called gin, and it’s the writer’s friend. But Don’t discriminate, many forms of alcohol can help soothe the sting of a horrible review. Make a drinking game out of it so you can keep score.
3. Kill them off in imaginative ways. Name a character in your current work in progress after the reviewer, and kill that character in some slow, horrible, gruesome way. Like, for example, how a character named Dennis might drink drain cleaner, catch on fire and fall into a chipper shredder.
4. Lie to yourself. Like we did at the beginning of this article. The worst review we ever received came out in Publisher’s Weekly for the whole world to see. Ironically, it was in the issue that featured a full-page ad for our new book on the back page and landed at the same time a glowing and almost diametrically opposed review appeared in Booklist (from the American Libraries Association). Cold comfort. It felt awful and now, 17 years later, we’ve completely forgotten about that sick feeling it caused, like a punch in a gut, and don’t hold any grudges, Dennis. But in the end, we believed in ourselves (there’s that blind optimism again) and trusted the work, and the response from (most) readers bore that out for all four books in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection. Not all readers, to be sure, but that’s ok—we needed plenty of victims for the hungry vampires.
5. Learn from them. Seriously, this is the only one that really matters. Bad reviews suck, but they are a fact of writing, and the hardest part is figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to find usable feedback in bad reviews that are often vague or seem to miss the mark (or worse, are written by folks who clearly didn’t even read the book). Honest reviews from engaged readers always have something to teach writers, something that can make the next piece of work even better.
Writing professionally means, at some point (usually many points), bad reviews are forthcoming. Our job, as writers, is to salvage any usable critique from those reviews that helps us to improve and engage more deeply with readers in our target audience. Cowboys and vampires are not for everyone, so a review that maligns the genre may not provide much practical insight. But review from a paranormal romance fan who found certain types of “blood play” off-putting is certainly worth thinking more about.
Not all bad reviews can make us better writers, but even if they can’t help us think more critically about our work, they can help us develop better coping mechanisms. We’re just getting warmed up on a new alternative history series that reclaims and rehabilitates the legend of Bonnie and Clyde, recasting them as protectors of the American dream. It’s highly likely we’ll be learning a LOT from reviews in the coming months. And also highly likely we’ll be buying gin in bulk.
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Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall have written four books in the award-winning The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, beginning withThe Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance. Their newest book is Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road. Learn more at PumpjackPress.com.
Practical strategies for dealing with the inevitable.
Writers, generally speaking, are narcissists—not so secretly infatuated with ourselves. We have to be pretty confident and slavishly self-interested to believe our words are worth someone else’s time and energy. And we have to be blindly, annoyingly optimistic in order to internalize and move beyond the tsunami of rejections, critiques and lagging sales.
Like most narcissists, writers—generally speaking—are also deeply insecure, even though we usually hide it pretty well. Every suggested edit, every lukewarm review, challenges the aforementioned optimism and wound us deeply.
Confidence and insecurity make for a bad combination. Like boxers with glass jaws, we are narcissists with glass egos, and every bad review is a ten-pound hammer.
Negative reviews can be devastating and disheartening. They pierce that bubble (shell?) of optimism and create the kind of existential angst that can make even the most accomplished writer question their skill and sanity, and send the less emotionally sturdy into a paralyzing funk. Kathleen McFall and I have been writing professionally and creatively for more than 15 years now. We’ve never received a negative review, not once, but it’s not uncommon in the industry so we did the research and developed a list of effective coping mechanisms for those not quite as fortunate:
1. Retaliate in print. Write a carefully constructed and pointed rebuttal that takes apart the bad review line by line, challenges the reviewers grasp of literature and mocks their clumsy writing skills. And then delete it. Immediately. Better yet, print it out and burn it. Never engage.
2. Clear the negative energy by smudging some sage—cleansing herbs can be very powerful. Even better than sage, find some distillate of juniper and other select botanicals in a potable solution to help clear the bad energy internally. It’s called gin, and it’s the writer’s friend. But Don’t discriminate, many forms of alcohol can help soothe the sting of a horrible review. Make a drinking game out of it so you can keep score.
3. Kill them off in imaginative ways. Name a character in your current work in progress after the reviewer, and kill that character in some slow, horrible, gruesome way. Like, for example, how a character named Dennis might drink drain cleaner, catch on fire and fall into a chipper shredder.
4. Lie to yourself. Like we did at the beginning of this article. The worst review we ever received came out in Publisher’s Weekly for the whole world to see. Ironically, it was in the issue that featured a full-page ad for our new book on the back page and landed at the same time a glowing and almost diametrically opposed review appeared in Booklist (from the American Libraries Association). Cold comfort. It felt awful and now, 17 years later, we’ve completely forgotten about that sick feeling it caused, like a punch in a gut, and don’t hold any grudges, Dennis. But in the end, we believed in ourselves (there’s that blind optimism again) and trusted the work, and the response from (most) readers bore that out for all four books in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection. Not all readers, to be sure, but that’s ok—we needed plenty of victims for the hungry vampires.
5. Learn from them. Seriously, this is the only one that really matters. Bad reviews suck, but they are a fact of writing, and the hardest part is figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to find usable feedback in bad reviews that are often vague or seem to miss the mark (or worse, are written by folks who clearly didn’t even read the book). Honest reviews from engaged readers always have something to teach writers, something that can make the next piece of work even better.
Writing professionally means, at some point (usually many points), bad reviews are forthcoming. Our job, as writers, is to salvage any usable critique from those reviews that helps us to improve and engage more deeply with readers in our target audience. Cowboys and vampires are not for everyone, so a review that maligns the genre may not provide much practical insight. But review from a paranormal romance fan who found certain types of “blood play” off-putting is certainly worth thinking more about.
Not all bad reviews can make us better writers, but even if they can’t help us think more critically about our work, they can help us develop better coping mechanisms. We’re just getting warmed up on a new alternative history series that reclaims and rehabilitates the legend of Bonnie and Clyde, recasting them as protectors of the American dream. It’s highly likely we’ll be learning a LOT from reviews in the coming months. And also highly likely we’ll be buying gin in bulk.
****
Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall have written four books in the award-winning The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, beginning withThe Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance. Their newest book is Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road. Learn more at PumpjackPress.com.
