Review ramblings

[ksmith]

So there are review kerfuffles in various places. It all seems very Six Degrees of Separation, with the maximum separation being about 2. If you don't know the people involved, you know friends of theirs.

As a writer, I am told repeatedly that I am supposed to Take The High Road and not respond to reviews. I understand this. I don't believe I've ever responded directly to a review, though I have discussed them/muttered darkly to friends. For the most part I didn't know the reviewers, and never encountered them online. That allowed for a distance that made the whole thing easier to take.

It becomes more difficult when friends and writers and reviewers and the magazines carrying the reviews are all a mouse click away, with the discussions starting almost immediately the things are posted, if not before, with folks weighing in from every corner. We spend so much of our time--too much, probably--sitting together in this great virtual con bar buying one another drinks and shouting jokes across the room that when something profession-oriented like a review crops up in the midst of it all, it can bring you up short. Hey I thought we were all having fun--well, yes, but some of us have jobs to do, too.

And someone like me is advised to Take The High Road.

I'm all for the High Road in theory, although I confess that there have been times when I wanted to hide in the ditch along the side of the High Road and sneak up behind the reviewer as they walked past and bury an axe in their head. No point in that. I know that--not an idiot, thanks, at least not about that. If I want a lecture, I'll pay tuition and choose the class myself, so don't bother.

The return of some distance. I think that would be a good thing.

Comments

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

The kerfluffle isn't over the review per se, in the sense that no one is saying the reviewer hasn't a right to her opinion.

The kerfluffle (as I see it) is that she said something which some people took as hyperbole-for-the-sake-of-drama and some people took literally. Taken literally, the statement was quite rude, and the literalists are calling for everything from better editorial standards in SH's reviews to the reviewer's head on a platter.

But yes, this being teh intarweb, and specifically a bunch of SF/F writing geeks, everyone has to wave their pedantry.

The author of the work in question has been quite reasonable about it. Because again, the kerfluffle isn't over whether or not the reviewer liked the book, but statements she made in the process of reviewing it. The people who got in a kerfluffle are other reviewers.

[(Anonymous)]

The kerfluffle isn't over the review per se, in the sense that no one is saying the reviewer hasn't a right to her opinion.

In the midst of it all, the comment that writers are silly to respond to reviews did keep cropping up. I chose to respond to that because it bugged me. As I said, it's one thing when there's some distance involved, when the writer can close a magazine or go to a different site and get away from it. But when the reviewer provides a link to said review in their blog and there's a great deal of overlap between f-lists, where the flip does a writer go? Because given the proximity of the review and the chidings that one should sit back and take it, occasionally one's reaction might be to let fly and give the reviewer somthing to take. I could be completely misinterpreting, but it strikes me that there's a neener neener undercurrent to it all, and that irks me.

I agree that the writer in question showed admirable restraint.

As for the other matter...lock 'em all in a room and last one standing. And I'm going to stop there.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

This is me, too. A stranger in my own blog.