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

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

I've been pondering this quite a bit lately, because I've been thinking about doing some meta about professional fic by written by slashers. While I no longer share a fandom with naominovik, a good number of people on my flist do have her fannish persona friended and are fans of her slash/fanfic. I have some things I want to say about reading the Temeraire books while consciously aware that the author writes slash/fanfic, but some of what I want to say is rather critical and that could get kind of wanky. Not so much with her, but with her fans.

Even more complicated is the person on my flist who has recently filed the serial numbers off some of her fic and sold it as original gay romance. One of the fics she sold was a favorite of mine and I found that, when I did my best to read it as original fiction, it suffered some. While I don't consider her a close friend, I do like her a fair amount--she's one of those people I wish I lived closer to, because we've got a fair amount in common outside fandom--and I really don't want to hurt her feelings. Plus, she's justifiably considered one of the better writers in the fandom, and, I'd rather not piss off her fans because they're my readers too.

Part of me wants to just go with what I say about crit anywhere: if you post it in public/sell it to the public, people have the right to talk about it in public. And with naominovik I probably will say some things, because I can segue into what we expect from slash/fanfic and how that might differ from what we expect from professional fic. I probably won't say anything about the other person's work, which makes me a bit of a hypocrite, but I can live with that.

Um...so yeah, this is something that's been on my mind.