Drawing deadline and reviews

[solarbird]

Rosemary and Rue author Seanan McGuire, on her Livejournal, pointed at this article by Michael Melcher called, “What to Do When Your Friend Writes a Book.” The subject is pretty well handled by the title! She linked to it as part of a post on negative reviews. I got a negative review this week, myself; it had some positive things in it, but the reviewer hates my singing voice, at least in these tracks. He liked the instrumental (Cascadia), so I suppose it’s only 75% negative! That’s something, at least.

But I’m not sure what to think of the Melcher article. I mean – changing “book” to “CD” – he’s right about what all this feels like, what people want to hear when they put something out there into the world, and so on. But I think having the sorts of expectations he seems to have is really kind of asking for it. (And maybe also asking a lot. I dunno.) Don’t get me wrong; it’d be nice, but it doesn’t exactly strike me as realistic. What do you think?

Oh, don’t forget, if you want to do a review of Sketchy Characters to be entered for the drawing, the deadline is this Sunday evening at midnight. I have two good reviews and one bad one so far, and not all of those want to be in the drawing, so your chances in the drawing are pretty good!

• 

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil.

Comments

[unexpected_finn]

Here, have a pico-review, courtesy of the munchkin: http://maellenkleth.livejournal.com/214947.html

[solarbird]

yay! thanks ^_^

[shadesofmauve]

I come from a design background, and when you study art or design you're taught over and over again about the value of accepting (and giving) meaningful criticism, so maybe I'm not a good representative...but it seems the author of the article is a bit of a special snowflake.

What I'd want is to have people read/listen/view it, , and have people I know spend enough time with it to be able to honestly tell me what they thought. I hate it when someone says "Oh, that's so nice!" in a passing, enthusiastic kind of way about my art. "I love your use of color" or "Your composition doesn't work for me" are both BETTER.

Also, what's with it being NOT okay to offer to buy a copy straight from the author? I have a few author friends who've encouraged it -- they have a certain amount they sell at book-talks and things, and I'd always been lead to believe they make more per book that way. In fact, what I usually ask is "How should I buy this so you see the most of my pennies?"

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

ha, in case you ever wondered what you were getting away with, not having to respond in any way to the werewolf novel :)

[solarbird]

I come from a design background, and when you study art or design you're taught over and over again about the value of accepting (and giving) meaningful criticism
Oh I have a full, and I do mean full history of critiques. So I'm totally onboard here. (One of my degrees is studio art/design emphasis, which is lameass undergraduate speak for "as close as we have to a design minor.")

it seems the author of the article is a bit of a special snowflake.
Yeah, I was getting a lot of that feeling too. But otoh it is putting yourself in a pretty emotionally fragile situation, and the support of your friends could make up for a lot. (Or at least the interest.) So, I dunno. Mixed bag and all that? Hence my ambivalence.

Maybe I'll make more sense when I'm less sleepy. ^_^

[solarbird]

But I did respond! With great enthusiasm!

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm a special snowflake too (oooh, pretty snowflake! ... okay, probably not me then), but I have to admit, personally what I'd WANT is for everyone to say it was great. what I'd also then want is for me to believe them, which might be much harder to achieve. :) (Actually, even when - on reflection - people probably did honestly like something I did, I'm usually not able to believe that.)

I think it's easier if you're a successful professional. If I were a writer and my last 3 books had sold well then I'd be absolutely fine if somebody told me, yeah sorry, I tried to read your book but it sucked and I gave up half way through. (Or obviously they could give some more helpful but still negative criticism.) Either way it obviously wouldn't kill my self-esteem.

But if I'm an amateur and somebody reads my book then unless I really say explicitly that I want an honest opinion as to what the problems were (or as to whether it's good enough to try to publish or whatever), or unless it seems like I have a way-unrealistic opinion of my own work that might encourage me to do something stupid like quit my job, then the no-real-answer-but-positive replies there seem like a polite approach.

Even if I did ask for an opinion, it would probably be a good idea to adopt one of those namby-pamby techniques they've been trying to push at my work for appraisals and crap. Like where you say 3 positive things and one or two negative - ooops, did I say negative - I mean, things where you could improve. You know, 'lots of things about you are great! you often turn up at work, you're always ready to voice an opinion, and you're definitely a great team player! in future it would be good if you could try to less frequently incite the whole staff to torch the factory'.

By the way I did write a novel. It was shit. :)

[solarbird]

Yeah, I think a lot of this. I mean, mostly, in terms of the people I know well enough to have done things with socially, Sketchy Characters was met with some combination of the first item in Column B ("I remember you were talking about that") and no acknowledgement whatsoever, with "no acknowledgement whatsoever" being a strong majority. (Same with my art exhibitions, now that I think about it - even with my big show downtown, I think I had one or maybe two people I knew show up for the opening. So mostly I was dealing with strangers, sometimes hostile strangers - I got accosted by a couple of street artists attacking me for having a show when they didn't - so that was fun like razor wire.)

So, yeah. I have severe ambivalence about the article, with a whole lot of, "wow, you are expecting way too much" and a bit of "if people read this and think that's what they're going to get, they're in for a serious disappointment."

[shadesofmauve]

I've also had art shows with no acknowledgement. Perhaps that helps me not mind the critisism -- they're saying "Wow, your work SUCKS!" and I'm saying "Oh, I'm SO glad someone NOTICED it was there!"

[solarbird]

Yeah, totally this. Even negative reviews get listeners and some of them might like what they hear!

Also, strangers notice, even ones not doing reviews. I try to be content with that. It doesn't work very well all the time, like now, when it's not working much at all, but it's something. People I know almost never come to my concerts, but strangers do, so at least I know they really are there for the music.

Heh, gallery openings. Want another gallery story? My graduation show at art school... that was hard. The poster series I designed and then executed with my co-exhibitor became an art event all by itself. People actually talked about just the posters. The gallery staff - who saw all the shows - said it was easily the best student show of the year. And I think we had nine people show for the opening. My own advisor blew it off.

I need to figure out either how to stop caring about this or stop letting people get away with this shit. Either would do.

Same shit, different year, I guess.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

point, though not with a public review, which is kind of current context. or if you did i forgot, for which i apologize; i'm bad at remembering that kind of thing but i can't find a pointer to it....

[solarbird]

True, tho' back then you weren't asking for those (or I missed that) and I didn't think you wanted one - just personal response. Sorry if I had that wrong.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

no, you were correct -- i just made a special exemption for you in case you *didn't* feel like responding. your actual response was much appreciated though!