RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//Financial emergencies and other downsides of earning one’s living as a creative. How the demands of monetization affect creativity – and how being a fulltime writer isn’t the idyllic, dreamy, artsy life we envision.
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Here’s a little tease of the cover of ROGUE FAMILIAR, book 2 in Renegades of Magic, releasing at the end of February. Cover reveal coming soon!
This week at the SFF Seven we’re talking about the Mentality of Negative Reviews. Specifically, the person who posed the question asked: do you recognize your fight-or-flight response to negative reviews and do anything to stop it?
I’m including the full text of the question because I’m disagreeing with the initial premise. I don’t think I have a stress response to negative reviews. It could be that I’ve been writing long enough (nearly thirty years *gasp*) that I’ve become more or less inured to negative reviews. I remember a review of my first book, the essay collection WYOMING TRUCKS, TRUE LOVE, AND THE WEATHER CHANNEL, that was mostly glowing – but also said I used adverbs too much. It came from a professional reviewer at a venue I can’t recall, and that was long before I realized that many reviewers are aspiring writers who cling to the “rules” of writing with the tenacity of an apprentice seeking the magic formula to catapult them to true wizard status. Mostly I was surprised that, if my professional, experienced editor at a university press hadn’t minded my adverbs, then why did a reviewer? I understand now. I also know more about the weird anti-adverb stance some writers absorb.
Mostly. <- See what I did there? Humor is key.
Anyway. Experiencing a flight-or-fight response to a review means that you feel attacked. I suppose some reviewers intend it that way. They like to speculate about the author’s emotional life, intentions, or deadline pressure. Authors are occasionally accused of manipulating readers to extract profit. Sometimes our moral integrity is questioned. But that’s all par for the course on social media. I think what’s most important for writers to do is separate themselves from their work. YOU didn’t receive a negative review; the book did. Even if the reviewer specifically attacks the author, they’re still not actually reviewing you as a human being, because they don’t actually know you. The author is a construct in their mind that has very little to do with reality.
Keeping your poise, a sense of yourself as a person separate from the work, and keeping a sense of humor about it all is what gets you through. After all, a review isn’t a tiger. No one’s going to die over a review. It’s fangless, toothless, and ultimately dust in the wind.
//I’m explaining how to decode the message when agents & editors say a genre is dead. Also thoughts on whether writing cross-genre is actually hip these days, why Murderbot is cool, and an exciting new cover reveal!
//The business of self-publishing, especially ISBNs, and retail platforms for print. Also, raving about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and what creators can learn from it on prequels and riffing within the canon.
//On writing cross-genre and pushing the boundaries of fantasy. Does fantasy necessarily mean non-tech/medieval culture? And other thoughts on tropes, reader expectations, and making art.
//On burnout – how to identify it, prevent it, and recover from it, should you have to. Also other thoughts on sustainable creativity, monetization (and not) and making a living from your art or passion.
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This week at the SFF Seven, we’re talking about our favorite heroines that we didn’t write.
I think you all know me by now, and thus know I don’t much like picking favorite anythings. There’s a lot of room in my universe for all the stuff I love and I don’t really think in terms of ranking. All that said, I just completed a reread of Patricia McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, one of my most cherished books of all time. It’s a brilliant fantasy novel and one I wished I’d written. The heroine and protagonist is a wizard woman named Sybel.
Don’t pay attention to the stupid listings that call this book young adult (YA). First of all, in 1974 when this book was first published, there wasn’t a YA category. Secondly, the only reason this is listed as YA, I assume, is because it’s written by a woman with a female protagonist. If this deeply layered, fucking brilliant fantasy novel is YA, then so is The Lord of the Rings.
ANYWAY.
Sybel is simply a brilliantly drawn heroine. She is a product of her upbringing, isolated physically and in her immense power. Living among the magical, nigh-mythical creatures she cares for, Sybel has to learn to deal with human beings. She is unflinchingly strong throughout the story, cleaving to her own sense of self, even when others try to rip that away from her. In her learning to first love, then to hate, then to move past both, she achieves her own mythic status. Even as the reader follows her self-destructive path, dreading the inevitable outcome, we also believe totally in her reasons, never failing to cheer her on. Sybel is the awkward, bookish, shy girl in all of us, who wrestles with the tumult of the wider world.
In rereading, I found so many ways this story has infused my own work, though I despair of ever reaching this level. And Sybel is in all of my heroines. Maybe even a bit in myself.
//Superpowers, immortality, and whether we’d keep everyone alive forever if we could. Also the movie She Said, reflections on the naughty Tumblr I used to have and how the #metoo movement changed so many things for me.
//Sad news – my 17yo cat Isabel passed away over the weekend. She went peacefully at home though. Otherwise I’m talking about productivity, training to increase wordcount and asking a Tarot question.
//Some industry gossip on the author who pretended to commit suicide to sell books. Also, an online romance book club! Then thoughts on the Mary Sue character and whether we’re really still talking about this.
