Hi, I’m KD, and I’m an author who mutters at reviews.
You’ve heard of the authors who made bad choices when faced with a complaint in a review. So have I. And I know better. Nope, if you ever catch me in an internet meltdown, you can assume that the assistance of mental health professionals is needed and has probably already been summoned.
Sometimes, though, I’ve just got to say something. So I mutter at my screen. It pretends to listen.
“You weren’t paying attention. They didn’t integrate quickly they’ve known her for years.”
“Yes, it’s over the top. She does it on purpose as a distraction, and he tells you that.”
“Marriage after four months is unrealistic? Have you ever heard of a place called Las Vegas?”
“Yes, my good person is PC, where PC means respecting the rights of others. Go crawl back under your rock.”
“Cutesy??!? I could take cute, but cutesy??”
“Similar to the world of Knight Errant? Taro trained Joss. It’s the same world.”
And the people complaining the characters are too perfect, and in the next review someone is claiming they are too flawed and awful to be read about, and and and…
So yes. Muttering. I try to be objective, I try to look for the constructive criticism. It’s there, often. Strangers reviewing my work is very useful. And then there are others…
I mean, really. Taro is the narrator of Knight Errant. It’s in his point of view, from beginning to end. His name is everywhere in it. Where on earth did that reviewer (who otherwise was dead-on in her praise of the book >_> ) get “Achan?”
*mutter, mutter*
None of this is meant to imply in any way a discouragement of leaving a review! Reviews make me happy. Honest reviews are the best thing in the world possibly short of Haagen-Dazs Salted Caramel Ice Cream.â€
So please. Leave a review. If I mutter at it, then at least I’ll have amused my cats.
†but it’s close, man, it’s so close.
I feel you. Contradictory reviews are the most frustrating — I mean, it’s people, you can’t expect them to agree on everything, but it leaves me feeling so confused and directionless. I mean, who do you even listen to? How can you tell who’s right and who’s not?
The next most frustrating ones are the ones where I explain The Thing pretty explicitly, to the point I’m dancing on a rooftop holding an LED sign in the dead of night, and someone says, “But you’re terrible because you didn’t explain The Thing!”
??????
Definitely. If I’m lucky enough to get a bunch of reviews of a piece, then I can maybe figure out where the consensus is. But take, for instance, Louder than Sirens. I have nearly two hundred reviews on that. Most of them don’t mention the rock-climbing scenes, but some do. And of those who do, I think it’s about evenly split–half felt it was a meaningless tangent, while the other half LOVE what I did there and find a metaphor for the whole story in that section.
It’s absolutely a balancing act–I want to keep an open mind, but in the end I have to decide do ~I~ like what I did there? Yes? Very good, carry on.