Alan Baxter's Blog, page 64

Judgment Is Coming

After the horrible burn that was Prometheus, I’m very cautious about getting too excited for upcoming films. But there are two things this year I can’t help anticipating. The Dark Knight Rises and Judge Dredd. Based on this new trailer, I have a rising sense of excitement for Judge Dredd. It could actually be very good… Fingers crossed.

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Guest post – The Freebie-Jeebies

Today I have a guest post from “Anonymous”. I’m happy to host the occasional anonymous post when a harsh truth needs to be shared. And the subject of this post is something I’ve experienced myself from time to time over the years. Since Anonymous had a book come out a couple of months ago, they’ve discovered a strange yet not uncommon attitude among many people close to them. Many of their workmates, friends and family have expressed a desire for a copy of Anonymous’s book. The vast majority of those people are wonderful folk who, when told where they can purchase a copy, are more than happy to trot off and do exactly that. But there is a percentage of people, larger than you might think, who expect, on asking, a free copy of the book. Like they simply deserve one for… what? Just being there? Knowing you? Like it’s a favour, in a, “Sure, I’ll take one!” kinda way. But no, that’s very much not the case, as Anonymous eloquently explains below:

The Freebie-Jeebies

Disclaimer:

Simply not wanting a book at all is a totally different matter to asking for a free book. If you don’t want a book, that’s fine, you needn’t buy one. Although I would ask: if a writer can’t rely on friends and family to shell out for their book, who can they rely on?

Similarly, not being able to afford a book is obviously nothing to be ashamed of and not something anyone should apologise for or feel hassled about. If you can’t afford a book, you needn’t buy one.

And lastly, if an author/publisher actually approaches you and says “Here! I’d like to give you this free book!” that is, of course, also totally fine. Take it. Take it and run.

So, we’re working on these assumptions: you know someone who wrote a book, you want the book your friend wrote, you can afford to obtain a copy, and the author/publisher has not offered you a free copy of their own volition – but you want a free copy. You wants it, you wants your precious, and you does not wants to paysies.

Many people I know spend an astonishing amount of money each day on assorted items of whatever (y’know – three lattes, two Sauv Blancs, a burger and fries, a trashy magazine, and a lemon slice later) without batting an eyelid. Now, people may spend their hard-earned money on whatever they like, that’s not the issue – I’m not suggesting people cut down on their caffeine consumption so they can altruistically increase their word intake for the greater good (the greater good).

The issue is: do you know how insulting it is to have your friends (or even just your associates, acquaintances, and that man who just walked past you on the street eating his own navel lint) say to your face that they don’t want to spend a far smaller amount on your book than the amount they spend on trivialities every day; that they want a copy, but that they expect it to be free? Can you see how that might feel a little…I don’t know…rude to the writer whose ol’ buddy ol’ pal is saying such things to them? It says that you don’t truly believe a book has value. That’s what it says. It says that you don’t truly believe my book has value. That’s a horrible thing to say to a writer, and I don’t think anyone would really want to come right out and say that – but they do say it, when they ask for a free copy and express incredulity when said free copy is not forthcoming.

Books do have value. Writing is not something everyone could do if they only had a little more time. It’s a specialised skill, it involves a lot of sacrifice and pure hard work, it contributes much to our society, and it has value. You may have noticed I feel quite strongly about this. Did I mention books have value?

Please also understand that a “free” book is not free at all. Ever. Never ever. Even reviewers don’t get free books. They get books in exchange for payment, just like everyone else (and in the case of ARCs – Advance Review Copies – they accept pre-publication books, warts and all, with possible typos, non-essential bits missing, etc). The difference between their payment and everyone else’s is that their payment comes in the form of them most likely writing a review which may be suitable for use for promotional purposes (i.e. TO SELL MORE BOOKS). Reviewers put a helluva lot of time and effort into what they do. They don’t get free books. They work for their books, just like writers work to write books.

Books don’t grow on magical book trees planted in writers’ backyards. Someone has to pay for that copy you want, and if that someone isn’t you, then it will either be the publisher (who, if they’re a small publisher, almost certainly can’t afford it, especially when multiplied by the number of people who want one), or the writer. You’re asking the publisher/writer to buy their own product so that you can enjoy it without paying. Does that sound fair? Does it sound logical within the context of a business model?

If a writer does happen to have copies of their own books lying around, they’ve probably paid for them (aside from the allocated number of copies they got from their publisher as a form of payment for writing the thing, which will probably not be a massive number of books, and which the writer may understandably want to keep for their own purposes or to distribute to reviewers). So no, you can’t just have one for free from their stash. Again, you’re asking them to buy their own book for you to read. Hey, they might choose to gift you one for whatever reason, in which case, yay; but if they don’t, don’t just demand one like it’s your due.

Things I haven’t said often enough yet: books have value. There’s no such thing as a free book.

People seem to think this sort of behaviour is ok when it comes to the arts. It isn’t. If you were a builder, I wouldn’t expect you to give me a free house, especially as a friend. So don’t ask me for free books.

Now go buy my book.

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Prometheus – what a pile of shite

Blade Runner is still the greatest movie of all time. Alien is still the benchmark movie by which all space-horror should be measured. It’s hard to believe that the man who brought us these amazing films is also responsible for the execrable mess that is the long-awaited Prometheus. I saw this movie last night and I’m still angry about it. I had to teach a tai chi class this morning and it was hard because underlying my calm, professional exterior was a seething, unavoidable rage at a film that couldn’t have been more shit if it actually tried to be the shittest film ever made. There will be spoilers here, but don’t worry – you should save your money and not see the film anyway. But I’m assuming most people have seen it already.

From a simple film-making point of view, it was a stunning achievement. The design, the effects, the atmosphere were all excellent. But that matters not when the story makes no sense. Seriously, a script written by randomly pulling letter tiles from the Scrabble bag would be more coherent. Now, before anyone thinks I’m totally missing the point, I know it’s a massive allegory for Creationism with an extremely heavy Christian agenda, brutally mixed with various other mythologies. It is written by Damon Lindelof, after all, who brought us the atrociously unacceptable Christian Shepherd ending to Lost. (Talking of scripts that make no fucking sense.) That allegory would annoy me anyway, in this case even more so as it’s rammed down our throats like a face-huggers egg tube. But I might be prepared to forgive the great exogenesis bullshit if it was tied into a credible story. But it’s not. It’s so far from a credible story that the film should be called The Great Incredible Anti-Story.

It should have been awesome. The cast are one solid bunch of capable professionals, but they can’t be expected to save a film when the script is delivered to them as shit stains carefully shaped into letters on used toilet paper. That’s the only way I can imagine that this script was “written”. The character inconsistencies and plot holes in this film are breath-taking. I’ll just look at the first few things we see:

We open with a possible Earth and a huge, white, muscly alien dude drinking some goo that disintegrates him and seeds the planet with his DNA. Okay, I was prepared to buy that – there are surely better ways to mix their DNA with the goo, but if they use this whole sacrifice method, then sure. It’s absurd, but I’ll roll with for now.

Cut to humans investigating cave paintings. They spot a recurring theme – big dudes pointing at six dots. With absolutely no evidence or explanation whatsoever, this is interpreted by a Christian scientist as an invite by Von Daniken’s aliens to come and visit. Why!? What possible reason could there be to immediately assume that’s an invite? Well, we’re told later in the film, “Because that’s what I choose to believe.” Fuuuuuck!

Anyway, this is enough to trigger a trillion dollar expedition to the planet in question. Wait, they found a planet in the vastness of infinite interstellar space using a cave painting of six dots? Yes, they did. Apparently. Because “plot”.

So they fly there and there’s this moon, right, and that’s where they’ve been invited to. So they break orbit, cruise in, see a big mountain and say, “Let’s cruise that valley.” They turn a corner and voila! There’s the alien installation. How do you instantly find the correct valley on a planet the SIZE OF A PLANET!? On top of this, we later learn that this isn’t the homeworld of these big, white, muscly alien sacrificial DNA vendors, but it’s actually a massive production depot for weapons of mass destruction that they intend to use to destroy humanity. Why did the cave paintings “invite” humans to their massive WMD moon? What the fuck possible reason could they have for that? Anyway, back to the timeline. (Bear in mind that I’m only a few minutes into the film at this point.)

The crew immediately decide to explore this installation and send off these 3D mapping drones. Without waiting for the mapping to be finished or for any explanation of why the air is suddenly breathable and not full of pathogens, they take off their helmets and start running around inside, because complete lack of science or any kind of brain.

Suddenly and for no discernible reason, a holographic history lesson starts up and tells them things they need to know, because “plot”. Incidentally, this same inexplicable hologram happens later, giving androidDavid the password flute tune he needs to operate all the things. Yes, you read that right. Aliens with massively advanced technology turn their computer systems on with a quick tootle on a flute. Sure, that could be conceived as a very clever password system, assuming you don’t have a randomly triggered hologram show up and give that password to anyone who happens to come along. Why were there holograms of past events showing up all over the place!?

Anyway, back to the opening twenty minutes of the film. Our intrepid selection of the most unscientific scientists ever assembled discover the fossilised remains of a big alien. The geologist immediately freaks out and says, “I’m only here for money and rocks, fuck this noise” and says he’s going back to the ship. He asks if anyone else is going and the biologist says, “Yep, fuck this noise.” The biologist! The one who is presumably along on the trip because he’s really into biology and that, yet he’s not going to investigate a new, alien species. So off they fuck. And even though the geologist is the one with the mapping drones, and even though those drones are live-feeding a three-dimensional layout of the entire complex to the ship, and even though the ship is in constant contact with everyone and can see on the map exactly where everyone is at all times, the geologist and the biologist get lost and inexplicably left behind.

They end up stuck there as a convenient plotstorm comes out of nowhere and decide to wait it out in a scary room full of inexplicably replicating alien goo. Then a weird alien snake thing appears. The biologist, who was moments ago terrified of a 2,000 year old fossilised humanoid, is suddenly and inexplicably besotted with this up-standing, threatening, hooded, hissing alien snake thing. After all, he’s a biologist, so he’d know you never have to be concerned when a snake thing that pops out its hood stands up and starts hissing at you. That’s completely unthreatening. So he tries to play with it and it kills him. And sprays acid blood on the geologist. All because “plot”, of course. Incidentally, said geologist, who dies facedown in the goo, comes back later as a violent zombie-hulk thing. For no reason at all he travels back to the ship all folded over like some contortion-zombie showing off his crazy, uncanny crab walk, then just stands up and fights everyone like a normal zombie-hulk until he’s burned to a crisp. And just going back to that snake thing – where did it come from anyway? We can only assume it spontaneously evolved from the black goo in a couple of hours because.

Anyway, I’m going to stop now. You’ll have a pretty good idea of just how fucking awful this movie is and I’ve barely scratched the surface of plot holes and character stupidity – people who see worms in their eyes but don’t seek medical help, for example. Or people who die because they can’t turn left or right while running. And so on. Not to mention the complete lack of any consistency in any of the “science” randomly thrown at the film like poo from the monkey cage.

Other people have done excellent work deconstructing this piece of shite from various angles:

This post does an excellent job of exploring the allegory, even though the allegory is senseless and is hammered home at the expense of all story and characterisation.

This post is an excellent exploration of many of the plot holes, including several that I’ve mentioned here.

This post explores the massively mysoginistic plot basis.\

And this four minute video covers a lot, but certainly not all, of the plot holes and nonsensical “story”:

I am so fucking angry with Ridley Scott right now. After being so excited about this movie, it couldn’t have been worse if it tried.

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Writer’s prompt – phrase book page D

I see things all around me in everyday life that trigger ideas for stories. I’m regularly snapping photos, making notes, recording voice memos and so on. Evernote for iPhone is a tremendous tool, which lets me takes notes as text, attach links, photos, video and voice recordings and sync them to my laptop for later. And I still carry a pad and pen pretty much everywhere, of course. Anyway, I thought I’d start sharing some of those story prompts here. After all, for everything I find inspiring, I’m sure many other writers will find equal inspiration in it. Or maybe not. Hopefully they’ll get something completely different out of it than I do.

So today, it’s a page from a French language phrse book. My wife has been studying up on her French lately and she read out this page of D words and said, “Hell, there’s got to be a story in there, right?” It is a delicious selection of words that immediately got me thinking. So maybe it’ll work for you and your writerly friends too. Enjoy!

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Continuum 8, NatCon 51 report

I have to be honest, this is going to be a fairly lame report. Don’t get me wrong, the con was awesome, the programming stream was excellent and huge fun was had by one and all. It’s just that my brain is jelly and there’s so much to do, but I did want to mention a few personal highlights.

As for my own involvement in things, I enjoyed all the panels I was on. The discussions about ebooks and the future of reading devices were both fascinating debates and I learned a lot along with taking part. The New Faiths For New Worlds panel, where we discussed religion in worldbuilding was perhaps my favourite of the panels I took part in. It was a really interesting exploration of how to get it right and what mistakes people make in weaving religion well into their cultural worldbuilding rather than simply slapping it on the side or rebadging our own religions and shoehorning them into the narrative. As a snapshot example, David Eddings (Belgariad) copped a lot of flack for fucking it up and George R R Martin (A Song Of Ice And Fire) got kudos for doing it well.

My workshop on writing fight scenes was very sparsely attended but good nonetheless, and I hope those who did attend got something from it. I have to admit that I was heinously hungover for that, but I don’t think it showed too much. I also had a fairly savage stomach bug, so the start of the con was hard work indeed, but thankfully I came good by Saturday and all was well.

I was on a reading panel with Kelly Link, Jenny Blackford and Tansy Rayner Roberts which was also good fun. I read last and it’s probably just as well, as the three before me all read things that were not nearly as dirty and grim and sweary as my stuff (I read an excerpt from The Darkest Shade Of Grey) and I think I kinda brought the tone down a bit. But I did get a lot of positive feedback from attendees afterwards, so that’s good. People like the dark stuff.

My other official duty was launching the debut collection by Melbourne writer and very good friend, Felicity Dowker. Her collection of short fiction, Bread & Circuses, which I’ve mentioned here before, is brilliant. It was my first time being the official launcher for a book, so I was a bit nervous about it, but I think it went very well. Jack Dann congratulated me on it afterwards, so I must have been doing something right if the launchmaster himself approved. Felicity gave a great reading and then sold and signed loads of books, so the event was definitely a very well-attended win.

In between all that I got to listen in on a variety of other excellent panels and readings – I was always doing something and kept missing things I wanted to see, which is the sign of a well programmed con.

The awards night was another highlight. Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond did an excellent job of MCing the whole thing and bringing it in under time. I’ll post a list of winners at the end of this post. I was nominated, but I didn’t win. I have no concerns about that, though, as I lost to Joanne Anderton, who is a lovely person and absolutely deserving of the win. I even told her she would win, as I was sure she would, but she wouldn’t believe me till it happened.

Otherwise there was much drinking, eating, talking, drinking, laughing and drinking. The usual con stuff. And, as always, it was all over too soon and I felt like I hardly had more than a few seconds with anyone. Well done to the Continuum committee for a superb event and here’s to the next one!

Following are all the Award winners, taken from the Continuum 8 site.

Congratulations to the all the winners of the Australian SF awards, presented Sunday evening.

The A Bertram Chandler Award: Richard Harland

The Norma K Hemming Award: AA Bell, for Hindsight, and Sara Douglass, for The Devil’s Diadem

The Peter McNamara Award: Bill Congreve

The Chronos Awards:

Best Long Fiction:
The Last Days of Kali Yuga, Paul Haines (Brimstone Press)

Best Short Fiction:
The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt, Paul Haines (in The Last Days of Kali Yuga)

Best Fan Writer:
Jason Nahrung

Best Fan Artist:
Rachel Holkner

Best Fan Written Work:
Tiptree, and a collection of her short stories, Alexandra Pierce (in Randomly Yours, Alex)

Best Fan Artwork:
Blue Locks, Rebecca Ing (Scape 2)

Best Fan Publication:
The Writer and the Critic, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond

Best Achievement:
Conquilt, Rachel Holkner and Jeanette Holkner (Continuum 7)

The Infinity Award, for overwhelming contribution to Australian SF: Merv Binns

The Ditmar Awards:

Best Novel
The Courier’s New Bicycle, Kim Westwood (HarperCollins)

Best Novella or Novelette
“The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt”, Paul Haines, in The Last Days of Kali Yuga (Brimstone Press)

Best Short Story
“The Patrician”, Tansy Rayner Roberts, in Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Collected Work
The Last Days of Kali Yuga by Paul Haines, edited by Angela Challis (Brimstone Press)

Best Artwork
“Finishing School”, Kathleen Jennings, in Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (Candlewick Press)

Best Fan Writer
Robin Pen, for “The Ballad of the Unrequited Ditmar”

Best Fan Artist
Kathleen Jennings, for work in Errantry (tanaudel.wordpress.com) including “The Dalek Game”

Best Fan Publication in Any Medium
The Writer and the Critic, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond

Best New Talent
Joanne Anderton

William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review
Alexandra Pierce and Tehani Wessely, for reviews of Vorkosigan Saga, in Randomly Yours, Alex

 

Snapshotted

The Aussie Spec Fic Snapshot has taken place three times over the past eight years. In 2005, Ben Peek spent a frantic week interviewing 43 people in the Australian spec fic scene, and since then, it’s grown every time, now taking a team of interviewers working together to accomplish. In the lead up to Continuum 8 in Melbourne, the team will be blogging interviews for Snapshot 2012.

Read all about where to find the Snapshots here. There are also links there to excellent memorial Snapshots of Paul Haines and Sara Douglass, to open this year’s series.

I’ve been Snapshotted myself, and you can find my interview here. Enjoy!

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Launching Bread & Circuses

Further to my NatCon update post below, the cat is out of the bag that the reason I’m attending the launch of Felicity Dowker’s debut collection, Bread & Circuses, other than because she’s a very good friend of mine, is because I have the honour of actually launching the book. And that might be the longest opening sentence to a blog post I’ve ever written.

It really is an honour to launch this book and I just got myself a real, actual copy of the thing in the post this morning. Lookit, it’s lovely:

So Sunday 4 until 5pm in the Drummond Room at Continuum 8. Be there!

(I better work on my speech…)

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Continuum 8, 2012 NatCon – my timetable

I can’t believe it’s only a week till Natcon. Time is flying at a furious rate this year. But I’m very excited because I’ll get to hang out with some great mates, soak up the whole con vibe, take part in and enjoy some excellent panels and, of course, drink. The program this year looks fantastic. Here’s where I’ll be:

Workshop: Write The Fight Right Friday 14:00 until Friday 16:00, Drummond Room

This is my workshop about writing good fight scenes. Seems like people are still enjoying it and I’m happy to run it as often as people want it.

I Flunked Physics: Hard Science Versus Accessible Science-Fiction Friday 17:00 until Friday 18:00, Faraday Room

Closed time-like curves? Light cones? Multi-dimensional manifolds? Or just reverse the polarity and beam us up? How important is accurate science in your science-fiction?

New Faiths For New Worlds Saturday 10:00 until Saturday 11:00, Lincoln Room

Love it or hate it, religion plays a huge role in our society. When creating a new society from scratch, what part will religion play? How do you create a convincing set of beliefs, and what are the pitfalls you need to avoid?

The Future Is Now Saturday 14:00 until Saturday 15:00, Pelham Room

eBooks, iDevices, apps etc are changing how we write and read. What’s out there, what’s worth using, and is all this technology a help or a hindrance? And where to from here?

What’s It Worth? Sunday 11:00 until Sunday 12:00, Faraday Room

The eBook industry is on the rise, but for many consumers price is a sticking point. Why do we undervalue eBooks? What are the potential consequences for books and authors if the mindset continues? In short, what’s it worth?

Readings Sunday 14:00 until Sunday 15:00, Faraday Room

14.00 Kelly Link
14.15 Jenny Blackford
14.30 Tansy Rayner Roberts
14.45 Alan Baxter

Bread & Circuses by Felicity Dowker, book launch, Sunday 16.00 until 17.00, Drummond Room

And that’s only the things I’m actually taking part in. There’s so much more good stuff on the agenda. These things might change a bit, as there are always hiccups along the way. Watch the official site and LiveCon for last minute details. For the rest of the time I’ll be milling about the con, attending panels and catching up with friends. By which I mean, I’ll be in the bar. Come and say hi.

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State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award 2012

Are you a budding writer?

Are you aged 18 to 25 and live in Queensland? Enter your short story of 2,500 words or less in the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award 2012 and you could win $2,000 and career launching opportunities.

Submissions close 13 July.

The competition

The judging panel will select the winner of the Young Writers Award 2012, the first runner up and four highly commended entries.

The judging panel consists of The Courier Mail Arts Editor Nathaneal Cooper, Brisbane Writers Festival Director Jane O’Hara, author Sue Gough, and novelist and former Young Writers Award winner Alasdair Duncan.

Prizes

The Young Writers Award winner, first runner-up and four highly commended entries each receive prize packs.

Prizes include: 

$2,000 to the Young Writers Award winner$500 to the first runner-up recipient12 month youth membership to Queensland Writers Centre12 month membership to Australian Writers Marketplace onlineAdmission to a Queensland Writers Centre workshop/Industry seminarAdmission to a Brisbane Writers Festival workshop

 

Hop to it! All entry details here.

EWF Presentation: On responding to reviews and social media etiquette

This past weekend I had the honour of presenting at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, down in Melbourne. As ever, it was an inspiring and entertaining weekend, and it continues on for the next week. All the details here.

The panel I was involved with was all about Post Publication; what to do and what to expect after you’ve got that elusive first publication. I spoke a bit about how to respond (or not) to criticism of your work and a little bit about social media etiquette. As ever when I present, I strayed a bit from the script. I learned long ago that I’m not much good at sticking to the presentation I write and I tend to get distracted and freestyle my way to the end. But I think I pretty much covered all the stuff I’d planned to talk about.

I thought it might be worthwhile to post my presentation here, as a recap for those at the festival and as something hopefully useful for everyone else. Bear in mind that this isn’t an actual article, but more a series of points as reference for verbal delivery, so it’ll be a bit choppy. I’ve tidied it up a bit into a more coherent (I hope) blog post. I hope you find it interesting.

EWF 2012 Presentation

I’m going to talk about making the right noises. Or, more importantly, not making the wrong noises.

So you’re published and you should be very proud of yourself for many reasons, not least of which being that you had the guts to put your work out there in the public eye.

Where it will be judged.

Where you will be judged.

So what are you going to do about that?

Nothing.

That, at least, is your default position.

If you think about saying something in response to someone’s critique of your work, stop and think. Double think. Do you want what you say to be out there forever, and forever gilding your career. Because it will be. Even if you delete it, it’s cached. And people will have shared it.

It’s a given these days that if you’re published in any form, it behoves you and your publisher if you have a social media presence.

Right now, you don’t have to have an online presence, but it benefits you enormously if you do. I would argue that before long a writer will have to have an online presence.

The reason we need that is primarily due to noise.

I’m loathe to use the often-touted term author platform, because I think that carries all kinds of unnecessary connotations, so I’m just going to refer to it from here on as “the presence”.

I’m a horror writer, among other things, so standing up here to talking a room full of people about The Presence amuses me.

There are various social areas of engagement: micro- and macro-arenas, if you like. This here, a room of people, is actually a micro-arena of social engagement.

You could conceivably interact with pretty much every one here over the course of a day or two, in small group conversations, the occasional one on one chat in a queue, perhaps an awkward, strangely polite few words beside each other at urinals or adjoining cubicles. It’s not intimate – well, the urinal thing might be, but overall, this event is not especially intimate, but it is micro.

This is where things have changed. This used to be the macro-arena. An event like this over several days or even weeks, used to be the biggest interaction a person could have. Not any more.

Now we have the internet.

Something like today, this event, has become a micro-arena because the mother of all macro-arenas now exists.

The thing about this relatively new super-macro-arena of social engagement is that it’s hectic. You want The Presence, your presence, to be there, because if you have your work out in the world, you need people to know about it and the internet is brilliant for that..

But getting noticed in that digital maelstrom is like trying to have a civilised chat at a heavy metal gig. And you need to make the right noise. Don’t be noticed for the wrong reasons.

There’s an old Chinese proverb – The empty vessel makes the most noise.

The usual example is a jar of beans. If there are only a few beans in it and you shake it around, it makes a huge racket.

Fill it to the brim with beans, shake it and it’s pretty much silent.

Of course, the point here is that you achieve through quality content – being a full jar – and you get noticed that way, rather than only having a few beans and shaking your jar as loudly as you can.

Sadly, the internet often favours those with few beans and a vigorous shaking arm.

We all have to play in that sandpit. And it can get pretty crappy in there.

While we’re busily filling our jar with beans and trying to make people notice it, all the other people out there will be judging us and our work.

And not everyone will like our stuff and through the unfiltered ease of the internet, they’ll tell us so.

I’m sure you’ve all seen someone immolate their career in a furnace of righteous outrage when they get a bad review, thereby getting noticed by making all the wrong noises. If you haven’t, you will now, because you’ll go looking for it. There’s plenty to choose from. (Edit: There’s a small one right here at The Word.)

And so, when you and your work are judged online:

DO NOTHING!

Here’s a freebie for you. Got a notebook? Write this down. The only response you should ever give to anyone who reviews your work, if you give any response at all, is this:

Thank you very much for taking the time to read and review my work.

That’s it. Nothing else.

If they called you a talentless hack whose work should be used in high school as an example of how not to write, you respond:

Thank you very much for taking the time to read and review my work.

That’s if you respond at all. You don’t have to. You can simply let everyone else do the talking. Of course, if they’re nice to you, you can thank them for that, though again, you don’t have to.

But you must never respond negatively. Never try to defend your work or get drawn into an argument with someone over their review.

It’s their opinion and they’re entitled to it, even if they’re clearly a brain dead slug who wouldn’t recognise quality literature if it rolled them in salt.

Never get caught up in shitfights about opinion.

Engage with social media, use The Presence to draw attention to your stuff, but don’t always and only talk about your work. If you’re constantly on the hard sell, people will quickly tire of your used car salesman persona and ignore you. Talk about all kinds of stuff, engage and interact, but never negatively, and occasionally mention your work among all that.

If you try to present yourself as something you’re not, if you act like a dick, regardless of how good your work might be, people won’t want to work with you or read you.

It’s just like real life. Act online like you would face to face and you’re off to a pretty good start. Unless you actually are a dick, of course. There’s no help for you then.

My philosophy when it comes to social media engagement is four simple points, and I’ll wrap this up with them:

• Be yourself;
• Don’t be a dick;
• Promote the good stuff;
• Ignore the crap and the negative.

Keep working on filling your jar with beans and doing your best to make sure people know about it, without constantly beating them over the cyber-head with it.

Everything else takes care of itself.

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