All You Ever Wanted To Ask But Were Afraid To Know... GeeGee Interviews Me!

Go follow the link, peoples, and read GeeGee Curtained's review of 'Voodoo Woman' and her fun, insightful interview with yours truly! Go here for Behind GeeGee's Curtain at The Modern L.

Hurry now! Whilst it's hot and fresh!

Normal Services Shall Be Resumed...umm, in a while?

Been a little on the poorly side lately and not around much. After the disaster with the 'Vampires of Hollywood #2' manuscript which has necessitated a lengthy and stressful rewrite, things began to take a bit of a physical toll on my health. I've had to step out of the cockpit and let that plane fly itself for a wee while. I'm not sure when those normal services will be resumed ( nor indeed how normal they will be, or ever have been ), so please just have patience and bear with me!

Meantime, enjoy the above pic. It's about as close to freakin' summer as the UK is likely to get at the moment!

Ever Have One of THOSE Days...

... where it's Friday 28th February for everyone else but you apparently have awoken in some horrible time warp where it is Friday 13th? Well, I'm having one right now. And it's living up to its reputation in fucking style!

Okay, let's be honest...some of it is my fault for being a hidebound old technophobe who does not deal well with change.

I've been trying to get Book 2 in 'The Vampires of Hollywood' series finished and off to Untreed Reads before I embark upon what I am certain will be a gruelling learning curve as I finally have my computer upgraded and Microsoft Office 2010 installed. I simply can't concentrate on finishing a book - especially one which has already been a whore of a thing to get cranked out - whilst learning some newfangled software...program...oh whatever, thingies...at the same time. My head would explode. Simple as that. Worse, other peoples' heads may explode too...because that's what tends to happen when heads are brought into forceful contact with heavy objects thrown at them by writers who have started to absolutely hate their own creation.

Anyway, until now - this very day, in fact - I have continued the archaic habit of writing everything to disk ( yes, what we used to call a floppy disk - laugh now, go on ) and after getting sick of continually renewing the back-ups on the hard drive because I rewrite everything a dozen times before I'm even near happy with it, I kind of stopped backing things up quite so often. Sometimes I'd have something 3/4 finished before I'd remember to back it up.

That happened with Book 2. Hadn't got round to backing it up. Put the disk in this morning...

...and the bottom fell out of my writing world. The disk had corrupted. All data was irretrievable.

I sat there in front of the little message box displayed on my computer screen - absolutely certain, of course, that the fucker was laughing at me - a high-pitched mental scream echoing in my head "NOOOO-OOOOO!!!!" and no doubt wearing that stunned, hammered expression of someone who, happily picking flowers buy the railway tracks, has just caught the 5.15 express in the back ( I think I'm actually still in shock and so the reality of the mountainous task ahead of me hasn't quite sunk in yet ). After several minutes of this, I finally called A Guy Who Fixes Computers and he's coming round tomorrow afternoon to take a look at my elderly, ailing machine, see if he can do anything about the corrupted files. He isn't hopeful that he can retrieve them from the disk, however. So unless the files are hidden somewhere on my hard drive, I'm screwed. I shall have to rewrite Book 2 in its entirety from word one to the damn near end that I had finally gotten to just a few nights ago.

Yeah, this is more
like it...

Anyway, one way or another I suspect the release date for Book 2 ( which was intended to be June/July 2013 ) will have to be re-scheduled. I may well be without a computer for up to a week if he needs to take it off-site to upgrade and fix. Maybe longer depending upon how busy The Guy is and how fast he works. I know I shall feel bereft, set adrift in a strange and frightening Internet-less universe, forced back to the PenandInk Age without a computer keyboard to tap-tap-tap upon. Okay, that last doesn't bother me so much. I only gave up writing everything out longhand first because my wrist joints can't take it anymore. Ah, the trusty old typewriter...how I loved thee. No, wait, those things used to go to buggeration on me too...


Oh, and I just discovered that I've ben taking out-of-date medication for, well, who the hell knows how long! Another thing that I ought to have been paying more attention to. Shouldn't make too much difference...but you know that wee sinking feeling you get when you realize something like that? Yeah. That one. And my electricity bill came in and it is gi-normous. And don't even start me on the ongoing battle with the local council ass-clowns over their precious wheelie bins...

Putting on a pair of sandals and just walking out into the desert suddenly doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

Might be an idea to keep these away from me at the moment...
 

Have Some Guilt-Free Pleasure!

Guaranteed guilt-free!

Although I get the concept of a “guilty pleasure” I don’t have any personal empathy with it and frankly, I dislike the entire loaded phrase.

Let’s look at the two words: “guilty” and “pleasure”. Since they have opposing meanings they make the phrase an oxymoron. We feel guilty when we have done something bad or harmful, usually to another party. We might feel guilty as children when we see that our actions have upset or disappointed our parents. As adults we might feel guilty for cheating on our spouse, or for stealing money out of the petty cash at work. Guilt is inherently an unpleasant feeling. It is our conscience pricking at us, making us feel bad about ourselves and ashamed of our actions. Because it’s such a bad feeling we don’t want to repeat the experience which caused it. Pleasure, on the other hand, is something which makes us feel good. It makes us happy. Therefore we want to repeat the experience, often as many times as possible. If a pleasure makes you feel guilty, then it makes you feel bad or ashamed, and it cannot possibly be a pleasure. Our pleasures - given that they don’t harm anyone else or break too many obvious laws - should never make us feel guilty.

It’s easy to dismiss the concept of “guilty pleasure” with a casual “Oh, it’s just a saying. It doesn’t mean anything.” Granted, there are lots of words and phrases in our rich old English language which we do use casually and which are not freighted with meaning, and God knows I’m rarely ever an unbearably pc word-Nazi who takes issue with every sentence uttered. Who the hell has time for that? And even if I did have that kind of time on my hands, I could better occupy my hands with a chocolate éclair, a few bottles of Stella ( okay, okay then...at least ten bottles of Stella ), and maybe a woman if I’m feeling so inclined. None of which I ever feel the least bit guilty about. And I'm not a feminist either ( wait...I just got to thinking about how ludicrous that is and now I need to quickly stitch my sides back together )! But there are just some bugbears too grizzly not to take a poke at them, and “guilty pleasure” is not an innocent phrase. Therefore I will always spare a little time between getting better acquainted with Madame Artois and deciding how many varities of full-fat cheese I want on my pizza for taking a poke at this bugbear. In the case of “guilty pleasure” words do have meaning, and not a positive meaning either. Labeling our indulgences and pleasures as “guilty” is just another verbal means of oppressing women. Plenty enough women have issues with self-esteem, often linked to other issues such as an ongoing battle with food and weight and appearance, things which are already preyed on by rapacious, unscrupulous companies flogging everything from fat-sucking diet pills to wrinkle-banishing miracle face creams, and a media obsessed with this year’s crop of vacuous skinny-ass celebrities. That it is women themselves who most often bandy inquiries like “Ooh, what's your guilty pleasure?” around in the company of other women, makes the darker implications with which this phrase is weighted even more insidious. Women help to perpetuate their own oppression, and to bolster their own feelings of inferiority by continuing to employ uselessly outdated, irritatingly loaded phrases like this, each and all of which should be banished from the English language for good.

Think about this for a moment: when was the last time you heard a conversation between two men at a bar in which guilty pleasures were mentioned?

Imagine:

Joe: “Oh man, I gotta tell you…watching porn is my guilty pleasure! Sheer wicked indulgence!”
Bob: “Oooh! I know! My guilty pleasure is having an extra pint on Friday evening. Sooo bad, but sooo good!”

I mean, Jesus, it even sounds weird and silly, doesn’t it? I know I want to be as far from these two loony old fishwives as it would be possible to get without falling off a continent. Men don’t talk about guilty pleasures because, quite simply, men rarely feel guilty about their pleasures. Certainly they don’t see pleasures or indulgences as something bad, something to be ashamed of, something to keep a secret, nearly as often as women do. And it is high time we women joined our male counterparts in making our pleasures a guilt-free zone too!

Now, if y'all would excuse me, I'm off to indulge in some non-guilty, free-from-recriminations beers on this Sunday evening! 

Happy Halloween, Humans!

I love Halloween. Always have. As a kid, Halloween probably outdid Christmas for me in the excitement stakes ( if only pressies were included in Halloween, I might never have given Christmas a second thought ), and even then I was a little bit obsessed with all things dark and supernatural. The darker and creepier the better. The notion that on All Hallows Eve a supernatural veil between worlds was at its thinnest, that doors or portals opened up temporarily allowing the dead to rejoin the living, was fascinating and thrilling to me. It still is. My beloved homeland Scotland is a land awash in magic and mystery, and much gory history too, all perfect Halloween fodder for anyone with a little darkness to their imagination. In Orkney, Halloween has long been refererd to as 'Devilment Night' in reference to the pranks played, often on unwary 'outsiders', including showering them in eggs, flour, and treacle! Recent years, however, have seen a clamp-down on these pranks by the ubiquitous Fun Police. The origin of the pranks lie in much darker, superstitious rituals played out to keep the bad spirits and the evil Fae away at this time of year when those veils-between-the-worlds were so thin. The eggs, flour, and treacle used now have replaced the somewhat less savory ingredients of days of yore, which were then designed to expose the Fae to human sight, or to keep the spirits "stuck" within the bounds of cemeteries.

Halloween is, of course, all about dressing up ( "guising" in Scotland ) and parties. Although I've never been one for large social gatherings and tend to give all manner of parties a wide berth, including Halloween ones, my sometimes odd and generally inventive parents made certain that I never missed out on Halloween fun growing up. One year Dad took it into his head that we should dress up and drive the 20 miles to surprise Mum's sister at home. Dad, done up in Nora Batty-style drag complete with curlers and headscarf, floral pinny, and wrinkly stockings ( a long-running UK television sitcom from the 80s, Last of The Summer Wine, produced the infamous Nora Batty character ) certainly gave the guy on duty at the toll bridge a good laugh. After that it became a family tradition on Halloween and the adults competed even more keenly than me and my cousins to outdo each other with costumes. Another year, stuck in hospital over Halloween, a group of mothers also stuck there doing dialysis training, got together an impromptu party on the ward. They raided the ward kitchen for bread and jam to make sticky jammy pieces, and made novel use of IV poles and tubing to string these dripping, sticky offerings from. We each took a turn being blindfolded - using a couple of paper surgical masks - twirled around until slightly disoriented, and then we had to grab a bite from the jammy pieces. Not as easy as it sounds, especially when you have a couple of giggling nurses continually moving the IV poles further and further away from you! And I'm pretty certain that cardboard bedpans were not intended for use in apple-dooking, but hey, when in a childrens' hospital...I daresay that in today's too often cheerless world the bean-counters who have overrun the NHS and the dreary Health & Safety Executive would all have had a fit and a bad turn at our cavalier use of supplies and scanty regard for jam-slippery floors!

I still put up Halloween decorations - sometimes I like them so much I'll leave them up year-round so that most of the rooms in my house have ended up looking a bit like a leftover Haunted House attraction with screaming skeletons and red-eyed bats hanging from the ceilings, and Grim Reapers at the windows. I don't need an excuse to eat too much candy ( or chocolate cake ) or to spike the punch bowl, but if ever you wanted a good excuse for doing so, Halloween is definitely it! Neither do I need a reason to watch hours of horror movies, but there's somethign a little extra-spookily special about watching them at Halloween...just don't expect any reassuring cuddles from me if you're the scaredy-cat sort. You'd be more likely to get a cushion thrown at your head for distracting me from the movie than an arm to cling to!

But if you absolutely insist on something a little more - bleeech! - romantic for Halloween, try this ancient Orcadian tradition...at midnight on October 31st, any young un-wed lass should go to the barn or other outbuilding, taking with you a sieve, a pair of scissors, and a knife. Whilst facing away from the door of the barn - which should be left open - you must 'winnow' the scissors and knife in the sieve, doing so three times whilst repeating the magical words "three wechts o' naitheen" ( no, I don't know what it means either ). Then you should turn around and the first person that you see passing the open barn door will be your future spouse! NB. If the first person you see pass happens to be your father or brother, I'm afraid you may be the victim of a Fae prank! Better luck next year, sweetie.

A wee Halloween greeting from The Dog...

Family vs Future. Decisions, choices, and finding the one-size-fits-all solution.

Today I had the unsettling experience of feeling a sense of relief and a little bit bad all at once when I realized that moving away from my current island home to go back to where my mother stays, may not be as easy as everyone anticipated. I love my mother. She is one of the most courageous, resourceful, and calm-under-fire people I have ever known. She has passed some wonderful qualities to me, including the ability to see a glimmer of light in even the most hopeless and/or frightening of situations which, at various times in my life, has come in very handy indeed.

But we also remain chalk-and-cheese in many respects as far as our personalities go. This is particularly noticeable in matters of household affairs where I have inherited my Dad’s laidback approach ( “ The dust bunnies are relatively tame and so long as they only grow to a certain size, don’t worry too much about ‘em” ) and Mum is, well, Mum is a house-proud control freak. Most of the time I forget where the iron lives day-to-day: Mum can recall the day it was purchased, where it was purchased from, and often the name of the salesgirl who sold it to her. I find this trait in her bewildering but vaguely amusing. She finds my lack of household skills/care disappointing at best and little short of scandalous at worst. We can laugh about this so long as we don't have to live with the results of one another's differing household approaches. 

Mum's physical health is failing. She has carers and home helps, and a few friends who help out, but there are some matters to which she would prefer to trust a family member - and that would be moi. There are always a host of problems associated with caring for an elderly, physically frail relative, no matter how much you love and respect them, and just one of those can be the clash of ideals. For two very different people from two very different generations - the one of whom is years used to looking after the other, to being a mother to them with everything which that role entails - to suddenly switch roles can be a traumatic experience for both. Mum is clinging to what control she has left; clinging to it with a grim and strident determination which sadly and seriously is coming to more and more lack the humorously tempering input of my Dad, who is almost 20 years dead now. Where once the rougher edges of Mum’s insistence that everything be done ‘her-way-or-take-the-highway’ could be smoothed out by some gentle teasing and cajoling from Dad, those rough edges have now hardened into sharp, cutting, deadly barbs that will snag the wary and unwary alike and tear them to shreds. What was once a minor discordant note in her nature has become a major symphony of clashing, jarring noise, and I don’t think I could stand to listen to it for a prolonged period ( okay, I went a bit OTT with the similes and whathaveyous there - I’m a writer, for fuck’s sake, sometimes I take artistic license wherever I want to find it ). Well, not without taking a longing look at the sharpest knives in the kitchen. Probably whilst secretly swigging from a bottle of Captain Morgan, or maybe Grey Goose would be better since vodka has less scent and Mum has a nose like a fucking bloodhound when it comes to sniffing out alcohol on a person. It is for good reason that Mum and I get along better when we have a considerable geographical distance between our lives and homes. If I gave my space up now, I would also - very realistically - be giving up the pleasures of my life as they are. And I like my pleasures as they are. Put it this way, I don’t see myself swapping ‘em for knitting patterns and ‘Coronation Street’.

Also, there is an equally realistic business opportunity for Housemate and I right here on the island. It may take several months, perhaps a full year even, to bring to fruition, but it could well provide us both with a nice little nest-egg for our own golden years, and in the meantime it’s something which we’d thoroughly enjoy doing. If we left the island to return to the place where my mother ( and Housemate’s remaining family ) live, we could kiss that opportunity goodbye. Unfortunately, they live in a place where socio-economic deprivation has reached such a state as would’ve shocked even Charles Dickens in his day. A snowball would stand a better chance in Hades than we would of making our business fly there. Perhaps it is selfish of me to even look at it this way, but I can’t help thinking how it has taken me nearly 42 years to reach the point in my life where I could feasibly set this business up and run it successfully, and well, fuck me, but the thought of having to let that opportunity go just kills me. Even if it were for my mother. Nonetheless, when the one option which would’ve caused this to happen was effectively removed from the table today, I felt that sense of relief. Followed by feeling bad for being relieved. All of which bothers me, even though people have assured me that feeling this way is pretty damned normal and it doesn't make me a monster.

Given that I also have inherited my mother’s ability to find ways either around or out of a problem, I daresay I shall eventually come up with a solution to this dilemma which suits the needs and wants of all. Or die trying, as they say. Well, maybe not that - but I may get very drunk on Grey Goose before it’s all done and dusted!

First Blog Tour Was Sure Fun Times!

So my first-ever blog tour came to an end yesterday, and what fun it was! My thanks to Roxanne Rhoads, Bewitching Book Tours, and all the lovely bloggers who hosted me and my book, 'Dante's Awakening ( Vampires of Hollywood #1 )'.

A little bit of thinking outside of the box brought me the idea of approaching Bewitching Book Tours to ask if they could arrange a tour for a book which is primarily lesbian fiction. Roxanne was happy to do so, having had arranged LGBT tours before with success. The experience was made not just painless but even pleasant by Roxanne who handled everything, inlcuding the giveaway. In 7 stops I got the opportunity to reach out to a whole new section of potential readers through promos, guest blogs, and some very intelligent interviews. I also got sweet reviews from The Book Maven and Butterfly-o-Meter Books. For the relatively small cost of the tour, I think it was all very worth it indeed.

I know that blog tours are just one more matter in which writers often disagree as to value, but for my money ( both literally and figuratively ) a well-organized book tour via blogs can be an invaluable resource in expanding your readership and getting your name as an author out there.

See my interviews at:

Roxanne's Realm

Books and Other Spells

The Creatively Green Write At Home Mom

And my guest posts at:

Nomi's Paranormal Palace - "Come Over To the Dark Side"

Butterfly-o-Meter Books - "The Enduring Lure of The Vampire"

Smart Mouth Texan - "My Inspiration"

My First Blog Tour Now Showing At A Blog Near You!

Yes, my pretties, my first blog tour is now underway. Brought to you courtesy of Bewitching Book Tours, it runs from 15th - 22nd October ( fittingly close to Halloween ), and is helping to promote both 'Dante's Awakening ( Vampires of Hollywood #1 )' and to extend my reach as an author to a new readership. There are guest blogs, starting on the 16th Oct with this piece at SMARTMOUTHTEXAN where I talk about finding my inspiration to write, some promos, reviews, and a few interviws where you can find out more about me, my writing process, and what I do when I'm not writing...oo-er, missus! The whole deal has been beautifully organized and orchestrated by Roxanne Rhoads at FANG-TASTIC BOOKS where you can visit to find the full tour schedule. There's even a giveaway of goodies that you can enter! Just go to the Home page at Fang-Tastic and scroll on down...See you all there!

Gonna Be Nothing 'Special' About My Diet...

Special diets are something I know a thing or two about. I spent my life between the ages of 9-17 yrs following a weird ‘n’ wacky variety of special diets thanks to kidney failure and dialysis. Low sodium, low calcium, low potassium, low protein, high protein, high calcium, restricted fluid…and often a combination of one or more of the aforementioned. My mother’s kitchen was filled with measuring jugs, low-sodium products ( which cost a fucking fortune and were hard to find in the 1980s UK ), potatoes steeping in water overnight to remove their potassium content, and special weighing scales which went down to the nano-level to measure even the smallest iota of protein. If there was one thing I took away from the experience it was that following a special diet is a pain in the ass. Especially if you happen to be a lazy, undisciplined, occasionally hedonism-prone individual like me. Try as my doctors did, they couldn’t stop me from eating nuts - salted, unsalted, peanuts, walnuts, brazils, whatever - even though these were cited as frequent culprits in messing with my biochemistry. Yeah, well, I loved 'em. Still do. Never met a nut I didn't like.

One day, whilst I was on a low-protein diet sometime in the mid-80s, my mother and I were in the kitchen, weighing a Wee Willie Winkie sausage for my dinner. For anyone who doesn’t know what these were, they were tiny little pork sausages, about the size of an index finger ( No off-color jokes, bitches, please! ), and very, very tasty. Go here to view today's Wee Willie Winkie sausages. We ended up with a piece of sausage about 2 ½ cm in length which sat there forlornly on the scale whilst both of us stared in abject disbelief at it. My mother deadpanned “ Well, there’s your dinner, dear. Don’t eat it too fast now, in case it gives you heartburn” and we both dissolved into giggling hysterics at the absurdity of it all. I swore then that soon as I was able to eat and drink freely, I’d never get sucked into any manner of ‘fads’ or brainwashing as far as diet went, and I never have.

Oh, and my mother threw in the whole sausage that day, figuring - correctly - that it wasn't going to fucking kill me!

Today I firmly believe that telling people not to eat or drink something at all or ever again is pointless - not unless doing so is actually going to kill them, and even then it had better be sooner rather than later. It’s far better to practice moderation, to experiment with what suits you as an individual and to make that work for you. Attempting to follow diets set for some elusive ‘average person’ is also frustrating and pointless - who the hell is the 'average person' anyway? I’ve never met them. Have you? I suspect if I had, I’d have been so fucking bored by them that I wouldn’t remember anyway.

Lately, my docs made the discovery that I have gout - apparently something of an inevitability after childhood kidney failure, years of dialysis, and then years of taking corticosteroids and immunosuppressive drugs. Fair enough. They offered me the chance to control it through diet but I said, “ Gimme the meds” instead because those will allow me to eat and drink normally. Like hell I'm going back to futzing with my diet at this stage in my life! Besides, just about everything I love to eat and drink ( except for shellfish and organ meats which I loathe ) is moderately high to high in the purines which cause gout attacks, and if you read the contradictory literature on the disease, no one seems to know what exactly is best to cut out, cut down, or eat/drink more of. Some say taking more fruit and citrus drinks is a good for preventing attacks. Others say that citrus is a cause of them. Some say drink wine and spirits instead of beer. Others say that it’s better to drink beer in moderation than to drink wine or spirits. Yet others preach that you shouldn’t drink any alcohol at all ( yeah, any bloody excuse to flaunt your teetotal halo, huh? ). Some think peanuts are a cause. Some say lentils/ oily fish / peas / spinach are all causes.

I say fuck that noise. I love beer. I love cider. I love nuts. I love oily fish. I drink a glass of orange juice every day. I eat an apple every day. Okay, I could live without ever eating spinach again, but I really like peas with my oily fish.

The pain of an acute gout attack is something that I would not wish upon anyone. I’ve endured a variety of pain before - from peritonitis to pancreatitis, from migraine to damaged nerves - but nothing has ever driven me to the extreme of distraction that the acute gout pain did. My docs even broke their cardinal rule of never giving me stronger codeine ( that’s a blog in its own right! ) to try to kill the pain. In the end, the only thing worked was increasing my corticosteroid dosage…ironically, one of the very drugs which probably caused the gout in the first place! Drugs, and the human body’s reactions to them, are a fascinatingly contradictory thing at times.

So, all I need to do now is keep any further acute attacks at bay until the beginning of October and then I can start the anti-gout meds and start getting my regular life back.

10 more days. I can do that.

As my mother always told me, “ You can take whatever shit and nonsense life throws at you because you are stronger than you even imagine….” and added with a raise of her eyebrows… “ Besides, you’re also a bloody-minded little bastard who can't let anything get the better of you on principle! ”

Amen. Now, pass me that damned beer, bitches. Before I die of alcohol withdrawal!

"Hive Mind" Reviews - Resistance To Them Is NOT Futile

No thanks,
I won't be making any
deal with the Devil today!

When an author has a public meltdown on the internet it’s usually over a review which they feel - rightly or wrongly - has been unfairly harsh to them. As with any dispute, there will always be two sides ( at least ) to the story, and no shortage of people jumping into it with poorly-informed and ill-formed opinions. In traditional and indie mainstream publishing these meltdowns tend to blow over as soon as the next juicy scandal comes thee-ing and thou-ing along to distract everyone. The amount of long-term harm done to either the author or the reviewer is debatable - probably negligible. As writers, knowing that we will all get a less than glowing review at some point because it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time, most of us have learned to take the rough with the smooth and not to get all bent out of shape about the former. Certainly, if the poor review comes from another writer, we have learned that it is particularly bad form to rubbish that writer back out of revenge, or to allow our fans and friends to rubbish or shun them on our behalf.

However, there is one corner of the publishing world where the giving of less than glowing 5-star reviews often continues to have more long-term and sinister repercussions for the review-giver, especially if that review-giver is another writer…and that is in lesbian fiction publishing. Sadly, parts of the lesfic world run on a “hive mind” where dissent is very often not tolerated. If A says that B’s book is the best thing since individually wrapped cheese slices, then it is expected that C through Z will agree with this position. Some may deny this is so. Probably the most vociferous deniers will be those who have benefited most from the hive mind - denial is an attractive and much-inhabited land, after all. Just not one which I choose to inhabit. The expectation of consensus may be unspoken, the pressure to join the consensus may be subtle, but it’s there. I believe that.

From time to time I post on Goodreads, and on my blogs, reviews of some of the books I have read. I post honest reviews which concentrate mainly on how I found the story to be. I rarely comment on the grammar or editing unless it is so bad that I’ve been left with the urge to hurl the book ( or my Kindle ) across the room. I’m often harder on traditionally published books than indie ones because if the trads want to continue claiming that they are better and sneering at the indies for poor editing etc, then they had better raise their own bar pretty fucking high. But so long as I continue to fail to see appropriate bar-raising in traditional publishing, I will continue to point it out if and when I feel the need to. I do try always to make it clear that my reviews are simply my opinion. As are anyone's reviews.

A while back I just stopped posting reviews of lesfic because I began to feel that subtle pressure to join the consensus at work in my own life. I felt the pressure to post only good reviews, that in posting anything less I was being subjected to the collective wrath of the hive mind. And I hated myself for compromising my own integrity. I hated that I backed off in the face of this insidious pressure. The simple truth is, if I'm going to post a review, I can’t post anything other than an honest one. If I find something good about a book, I’ll mention that. But I can’t go along with the shiny-happy everyone-gets-a-gold-star-just-for-participating mindset which says “ If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all!” And I certainly won’t join with any hive mind.

If all we ever saw were glowing 5-star reviews, there’d be no balance, no honesty, and it’s my feeling that the integrity of both readers and writers would be compromised by any such thing. So I won’t compromise. Even if A through Z are all singing the praises of a book in perfect chorus, I will sound any discordant note I feel the need to. I'll be the dissenter. I’ll be the only sour cherry on that fruit stand and I’ll be damn well proud to be so.


Yeah, gives me an excuse to post this!