quick curious q

[rm]

Pro authors are all over LJ, often in very participatory fashion. Does this effect how or to what degree you critique their books?

I'm being relentless on the subject of Melusine and was just sort of taken up short by "Monette is on my friends list" in another comment on it. Of course, it doesn't really change my tonal quality, which is what it is, but it interested me.

Conversely, for those of you published or working on publishing, how do you want that sort of thing handled and how do you intend to handle it on your end.

Personally, I think I'd have to do a lot of constant reminding my myself not to engage, because I can explain my work all day long, but ultimately a book must speak for itself, no matter how engaging I seem to think I am on the subject.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

While RPG writing is admittedly a mixture of technical writing and (typically) low-end genre writing, so the issues are somewhat different, I very much want honesty. If someone loves my work, I want to hear about it, if they hate it or have serious negative criticisms, I also want to hear about this (although, preferably ones that don't come down to their being either a raving homophobe &/or right-wing wackball, as was true of most of the negative criticism of Blue Rose).

As for handling such criticism, I see arguing with critics as largely being silly and useless, and only do so to attempt to correct what seem to be significant misconceptions about a particular work, or occasionally in an effort to make raving homophobes &/or right-wing wackballs look even more foolish than they naturally do - however, this last behavior is no different from my typical on-line behavior, except that when I'm writing about my work I attempt to be considerably more polite.