RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//My Patreon and Discord community are live! I’m also talking about one of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got and how, if you want to be a writer for the right reasons, there’s no fire to put out content.
//Paying the price – do we always have to suffer or sacrifice for a reward? Why this is often offered as a writing rule, especially when creating magic systems. Also a report on ROGUE FAMILIAR: coming along!
//How you know when your creativity is flowing, which story ideas have enough juice to sustain a novel or series, and how to handle those New Shiny ideas when you have other works in progress to focus on.
//Happy St. Patrick’s Day! A short podcast today, explaining why I postponed the ROGUE FAMILIAR release date and why it won’t really be as long as it the dates imply.
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Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what’s going on there with the creative professions. I have Opinions, which boil down to my conviction that nothing can replace human creativity. But a lot of very smart people have written on the topic and SFWA has been collating those. Go read those excellent articles.
For my part, I’m trying to get ROGUE FAMILIAR written. I’ve passed 60K words and I’m closing in on the Act II Climax. I’m getting there! But I’m not there yet. No way can I make a March release date. So I’ve pushed the release back. Amazon will tell you the new release date is April 24, but that’s a handy lie. That’s just the farthest date I could push to, just in case. I’m guessing it will be more like April 7 or 10. I can always release early! I know you all are patient and supportive, so I don’t need to apologize. (But I feel I do.) Anyway, I’m working away on this!
No AI involved.
//Exciting news from Tor on their new romantic imprint, Bramble. Also thoughts on my struggles with ROGUE FAMILIAR and why I should learn to take my own writing advice.
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If you preordered ROGUE FAMILIAR on the Zon, you will have gotten a notice that I’ve postponed the release to March 25. Alas! The good news is that I don’t think it will really be that long. I picked that date because it was the full 30 days out that Amazon allows me to postpone, just to give myself some breathing room. I expect I’ll be ready ahead of that date and will keep you all informed. Better to release ahead of that than push again! I know you all understand, which I greatly appreciate.
//Cover reveal for ROGUE FAMILIAR today! I’m also talking more about finances for creatives, monetizing creativity and why there’s a fundamental problem with it, and other aspects of being a professional creative that aren’t widely discussed.
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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!
