Well, there’s another less-than-stellar review of TEC in The Austin Chronicle. Which is fine; I don’t mind bad reviews. Everyone gets them, and I do sincerely think it’s better to have discussion about your book than to be damned with faint praise. Besides, reviews are generally really positive. If it was nothing BUT bad reviews I might be in the news right now as WRITER MISSING BELIEVED ON BENDER but with so many glowing reviews to comfort me, I can’t complain.
There’s always the temptation to spin a bad review, to either pretend it doesn’t exist or to do a movie-blurbation of it and somehow ellipse the damn thing into something positive. For example, with the review linked above I could pull this:
“Somers, clearly a gifted craftsman, writes in a clean, sharp style rooted firmly within the Chandler school. . .”
And have done nothing wrong. Nothing! But that wouldn’t be strictly honest, of course, and I’d likely be haunted by the plump ghost of Ray Chandler at night, rattling his chains and calling me 1930s insults.
So, I plod onward, head down. I find it interesting that people assume I was attempting something cyberpunk; I can see why, but while writing this the word cyberpunk never entered my tiny little pinhead, and I continue to be surprised. I don’t think TEC hits that mark at all, which is fine, since I wasn’t going for it. Maybe it’s the cover that makes people expect cyberpunk. Who can explain such things? Not me.
Anyway, interviews are bubbling under. People have been emailing me questions which I attempt to address with the sobriety and class that everyone has come to expect from me. Which is to say, not much of either. Watch the skies!
*Stolen shamelessly from www.defectiveyeti.com
I speak from experience when I say that you should let that review slide, and not just because I say that the Electric Church is a hoot. I’ve known the author of that review for years, and he’s managed to infect every last halfassed bookstore, magazine, book line, and online science fiction venue in Texas, mostly because nobody else wanted the job. Oh, it’d be easy to say that he spoke ill of your book because he has his tongue so far up Bruce Sterling’s ass that Sterling now has calluses on the backs of his eyeballs, or that he’s pissed that the people he’s been sucking up to for the last fifteen years are still crowing over their Writers of the Future awards as if they actually mean anything. However, it’s easier to point out that his career as such is pretty much based upon attending science fiction conventions throughout the state in the hopes that someone might give him a job in publishing other than working at the local Half Price Books.
Hey Paul,
Thanks for the note. I don’t worry much about bad reviews, actually, unless they come in bunches of, oh, a dozen at a time. That might have me sucking my tailpipe. Otherwise, I figure everyone gets a bad review at some point–someone, somewhere thinks you write like a jackass.
L
J