I'm Not Your Girlfriend

The other day I got to thinking about how I started reviewing on GR. This was back when I was working in publishing tech, so I was at BEA gathering piles of ARCs. One of these was The Night Circus, which I picked up just before I went to cocktail party where I was stopped a couple of times by various agents and editors who had bid on the book. They all told me how wonderful it was. Oh they wished they could be me! Discover it all over again!

Intrigued, I started it on the train ride home. About thirty pages in my first reaction was ".....Really?"

I hated it. I really really hated it. I thought to myself "Oh my God this book is terrible...." and suddenly felt compelled to share my opinion with others. So I logged on to my much neglected GR account and posted a review.

Shortly after, all these YA people who had also hated The Night Circus starting friending me and reviewing became a lot of fun. I started moving through my pile of BEA freebies (We the Animals - better than the hype, Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick - okay but poorly researched, Daughter of Smoke & Bone - 1st part Great! 2nd part okay), reading with a mind for later discussion. It wasn't enough to like or dislike a book, I had to figure out a way to express what it was I liked or disliked so that I could talk about these things with others.

Then M/M Romance announced a new reading challenge game: Bingo. I read the rules, it sounded like it could be fun. I signed up. Immediately my Bingo group started comparing reads to see how similar all our tastes were. Except I had no M/M shelved ... no M/M reviews... actually I hadn't really read any M/M. I was strictly a slash fanfiction/doujinshi sort of girl. "Get with the program, Isa" my group told me ... and while I originally planned to post my reviews just on the Bingo thread, I soon found myself having too much fun reading books, picking them apart for better or worse and discussing them with my team.

Since then I have had a lot of fun, met a lot of awesome people, been introduced to some amazing books and to some less than amazing ones, had fun celebrating the good and way more fun poking fun at the bad, but I've also had authors post nasty things about me to their fans: that I'm an attention seeking self-promoter targeting big name authors, that I'm prejudiced against them because of their orientation one way or another, that I'm a troll because I bought their book with my own money and expected to be able to tell my friends what I thought about it. Every word I've posted has been analyzed for hidden meanings like people listening to records backwards for Satanic verses @_@ If I hate a book it's a personal attack on the author, if I love a book, well obviously I am just being passive aggressive and sarcastic...

So, if you haven't noticed, I'm no longer doing public reviews. I'm going to keep on posting public status updates-- because I enjoy them and those seem to be free of drama-- but all my reviews will be private.

What's interesting to me about what's happened in the last couple months is that ... it's never the authors whose work I hate who troll me. There are a couple popular M/M writers that I've made no secret my opinion of ... and often that opinion is so harsh I would not blame them for vowing revenge.

Those are never the people who go after me.

Instead the authors who cause the most drama tend to be authors I like .... as in I've given them a few glowing reviews. And then at some point I pick a book with their name on the cover and find myself less than impressed. It happens. There is no writer on the planet whose every release is consistently brilliant.

And perhaps since I have an author account myself it's not my place to say what should be said here but I feel like someone has to...

Authors, I'm not your girlfriend .

I expect unconditional love from significant others. I expect my boyfriend to look past my flaws and cherish the real me. I expect my boyfriend to defend me and be on my side even when I'm completely out of line. I do not, nor should any writer, expect that from readers. A reader is not a boyfriend or a girlfriend.

I am not your girlfriend. I am not here to stroke your ego for all eternity just because we had that one great hook up over that M/M Erotic Mystery you published three years ago. I am not going to be faithful to you. I will cheat on you with other authors, even authors you hate because-- hello-- I am not your girlfriend, you have no right to ask for that kind of loyalty.

That being said, I'm still out of the reviewing game. It's just not worth it anymore. The drama itself doesn't bother me but the reality of these things is that drama is never about just two people. People who are friends with me are also friends with the authors who misbehave. M/M is not like other genres where big time authors hit bestseller lists and get book deals from big time publishing. Even the most famous of our famous only really get as far as a few thousand sold through small presses. As a result M/M readers and authors active on communities like GR are constantly rubbing elbows.

Every time an author takes issue with one of my reviews a whole bunch of people end up sitting uncomfortably in the middle and that sucks. Authors expect them to be girlfriends and nobly turn their backs on me for betraying the code of absolute loyalty and faithfulness. And while my detractors seem to be fine with playing this "with me or against me" game, I am not fine with it. I hate putting people I genuinely like and enjoy talking to in that kind of position, but I can't really control what authors overreact to.

It has been suggested to me that the problem really isn't what I say, or even how I say it, but that I get a lot of attention for saying it. It's nice to have people appreciate your opinion, but that's not really what I'm trying to do with my reviews. The goal is discussions with friends and that can be achieved without reviewing.

So I've set up a private community where I will be posting my reviews. If you're one of my friends and you didn't get an invite it's probably because 1) we haven't really talked about books that much, 2) I don't really know you well enough to involve you in the potential drama of OMG A SEKRET CABAL!!!, or 3) you should be too busy finishing up Not So Innocent already! (ha~)

I'm admitting it now because ... let's face it, people talk. This is a small community with very few degrees of separation. Plus, I discussed the possibility of doing it with various people in public threads. So, at some point people are going to hear about it and I'd rather you hear it from me first.

Actually, to be perfectly frank, I would prefer to be honest and transparent and not have a hidden community at all, but there are people committed to keeping M/M tiny and fringe so that they can remain big fishes in our pond. Bad reviews of popular books are seen as part of a grand conspiracy instead of a challenge to our best to be better.

So now ... ironically, there actually *is* a grand conspiracy.

As I informed all the members before inviting them: this is not intended to be a bitchy place to talk shit about people behind their backs. When I first started I was worried no one would join. I was worried no one would participate. I was worried I was alone in my frustration.

I was wrong. Suddenly people I had been talking to for months had all these opinions I have never heard before. Finally out from under the eyes of those who expect absolute loyalty, I'm having really interesting conversations with really interesting people about books again!

It's sad... Goodreads is a community for discussing books, but in order to freely discuss books we have to hide within the site itself. It shouldn't be this way. Authors shouldn't feel entitled to demand absolute, cultish loyalty. We shouldn't be expected to play girlfriends. We shouldn't have to deal with naive white-knighters hoping their trolling will improve their rank among rivals for the author's affection. It shouldn't be like this ... but it is and one person can't change that. It has become obvious to me that if I respect my friends and want to make sure that their GR experience remains enjoyable, I have to find another way to get what I'm looking for. And that other way is to retreat back into a private space where I'm not making them targets.

I will continue to support the author's right to use GR the way GR was intended to be used, but I'm out. "Goodnight and good luck" everyone