01:37 am - Want some irony?
Poking around online, I discover that Barnes & Noble's website actually lists the Kirkus review for MNC, which I didn't realize had come out already.
I'm ending my day with one hell of a contrast:
A hardworking, sanitized Elizabethan backdrop frames a tortuously passive yarn populated by lifeless characters: Mediocre stuff at best.
It really just makes me boggle. Two people read a novel; one falls over praising it, while the other finds it a remedy for insomnia. Did they read the same book?
It's hard to understand how radically subjective our reactions to things can be. You'd like to believe there's some such thing as objective quality, that everybody can agree on the technical merits or flaws of something whether it's to their taste or not . . . but the truth of the matter is that our reactions are often more informed by subtle factors of preference and mood and what we had for breakfast that morning than they are by any supposedly objective criteria.
And then you're just tempted to throw your hands up in the air and say, screw it. There's no such thing as quality, just taste, and you might as well throw darts at a board blindfolded; reactions will be just that scattershot, no matter what you do.
Then you have to sigh, shrug, and go back to working on your stories, in the belief that there
is such a thing as quality, and you'll achieve it (or at least get closer) if you just work hard enough. All the while knowing that some reviewers will fall over praising the result, and others will find it a remedy for insomnia, no matter what you do.
(Those, btw, are the closing lines of the review; I'm not quoting the full thing because the rest is just a summary of the plot, though without any terrible spoilers.)
10:29 am - Baby Writer Moment
I've had three pro author friends more established than me come into the comments thread on the last post to pat me on the head and reassure me that Kirkus Hates Everything. This does indeed help, as does the quoting from their reviews of Gene Wolfe's work.
It was an odd little Baby Writer Moment, as I got educated in something new to me (namely, the general snarky disdain of Kirkus, which I had not been aware of before).
Our brains are weird things. Psychologists have apparently established that it takes on average fifteen or so pieces of praise to outweigh one negative response. (As I headed for bed, I started tallying up how many positive reactions I've gotten, to see where my personal balance sheet stands. <g> We're up to roughly eleven, as I count it.) Certainly writer-brain seems to lend itself to mood swings that would get any normal person put on medication: the PW review had my subconscious convinced that my book would storm the world, sweeping all before it, for NONE CAN DENY ITS MAJESTY!!!! Then I read the Kirkus review and dropped straight into the Doldrums of I Suck, do not pass Go, do not collect your royalty check because there won't be one.
(An exaggeration. The actual emotional reactions have been magnified slightly for the sake of imagery. But only slightly.)
If we were rational beings, this math would make more sense. But we aren't, and it doesn't.
03:35 pm - icon shoutout!
I need an icon. (Actually, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
moonandserpent needs an icon. But he's sort of agreed that if I get him this icon, he'll work on the book I want him to be writing. So, I need an icon.)
Can somebody hook me up with a Val-Kilmer-as-Doc-Holliday image with the text "I'll be your huckleBRAAAIIINS . . . ."?
In other words, a Zombie Doc Holliday icon.
Surely someone on my friends list can produce such a thing.