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

[winterknight.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is that people aren't taught to read critically, and that's what a book club is for. As participants read the review/critiques of other, more experienced members, they develop the language and concepts necessary to read critically. My father, an English prof, studied this in regard to Oprah's Book Club, that women without any university education were learning a critical literary idiom and becoming critical themselves and expanding their reading/understanding independantly as a result of being in such a community.

As for the book, it's an example, to me, of the problems with modern publishing. First, it's very obvious that the author was not given the assistance of a talented editor. I get my editing done for free by a friend who is a professional textbook editor and former fiction editor and the small feedback I get from her would have cleared up many of the issues that were clumsy in Melusine. (I should be posting this in The Mollyhouse, and I may, possibly.) Also, it's my personal belief that a trilogy is no excuse not to have three reasonably independant books. The whole should improve on the experience but there is no reason why any book should be so unimpressive on its own. The structure requirements are the same for a paragraph and a chapter and a novel, it's almost hologrammatic, and so I don't see why any failures of a book can be in any way placed at the feet of the trilogy excuse.

That the reading standards are low is possibly more a function of the product being a low standard. There's a good book out there called 'Edit Yourself Into Print' that addresses the growing problem that publishing houses no longer assign authors an editor and many books are hitting the shelves on the sole basis of the first 30 pages (at best) with benefit only of the standard spelling and grammar checker in a word processor. We can and should do better as writers, and we should demand better as readers.

Man, I am blabbalicious today.

[rm.livejournal.com]

The publishing industry distresses me far more than the acting industry. Both seem to be as superficia and cruel, but only one (acting) strikes me as marginally justified in that. One of the reasons I stopped writing fiction for a long time was I didn't want to be part of teh race to get a novel out while I could still be marketed as an over-sexed under-30 crazy chick. And now that I am over-30, I'm just as scared of the paradigm.

[winterknight.livejournal.com]

I'm a state where I fully intend to write until I drop, but I am very, very leery of getting published. The whole nature of the beast has me thinking I will need to find an alternate source of income -- ironically, spurring my interest in film making. That's possibly because in Canada, one can make a living as a non-commercial film maker. :p

[rm.livejournal.com]

also, here's the thing, I can be a profoundly credulous and forgiving reader. Anne Rice may suck, but I derived value from those books and her early novels still have the power to charm me for reasons beyond mere nostalgia. I'll forgive sloppy (and a host of other things) if a writer can make heir sloppiness three dimensional.