It’s been a rough few months…or years…and I’m on the verge of a major personal overhaul. A Hail Mary pass, even. I’ll write more about that soon. In the meantime, a song of the week…or the years…that really speaks to the jagged depression that has eaten so many of my days since I was a kid…
For intrepid adventure readers who straddle literary realms both past and present, traditional and technological, I am pleased to announce that I am participating in Amazon’s new MatchBook program (and will happily do the same with other vendors if and when they initiate similar programs; I’m not an Amazon partisan).
What this means is that folks who buy (or have bought) the paper version of Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom from Amazon can now also buy a digital copy for only $1.99 (that’s 72% off!).
So if you’d like a copy for your bookshelf but would also like to read on your tablet or phone or other gadget, you’re golden. Likewise, if you want to read it on your device and get a hard copy as a gift for someone, you’re all set.
The deal even applies for those of you who bought the book in hardback when it was first published by Putnam. The new version is a lot better, with my “Author’s Cut” expanded text as well as dozens of gorgeous interior illustrations by comics wizard Gary Chaloner. If you bought the original from Amazon, but would like to see the story in its full glory, you can check out the new version for only $1.99.
Also, and this is important, you don’t need a Kindle to read the digital copy (or any Kindle book, for that matter). There are free apps available for PCs, Macs, smartphones, and tablets, so if you have a device on which you can read at all, you can likely read this book. The apps can be found here.
I’m thrilled that Amazon has made this possible. As a reader myself, I jump back and forth between page and screen, and I’ve wanted to be able to do something like this since I was first published.
Back in 2010, Neil Gaiman, who doesn’t really need me to introduce him, but whose past glory includes the work-of-dark-genius Sandman for DC Comics, had a great idea. As he recounted on his blog, “I was on a flight home last night, and I thought, You know, there aren’t enough traditions that involve giving books…And then I thought, Hallowe’en’s next weekend…”
From that inspiration grew a wonderful new tradition Neil called “All Hallow’s Read.” As explained on its official website, the idea is simple: “All Hallow’s Read is a Hallowe’en tradition. It’s simply that in the week of Hallowe’en, or on the night itself, you give someone a scary book.” As a lifelong reader, and writer, of tales dark and fantastical (such as my novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, now in a marvelous new expanded edition fully illustrated by ace comic book creator Gary Chaloner), I embraced this tradition immediately. In previous years, I gifted classics from folks like the brilliant Fritz Leiber, my late, great friend Karl Edward Wagner, and George R.R. Martin (who also doesn’t need much introduction these days, but whose short story “Sandkings” is one of the scariest things I’ve ever read). Last year, I treated my girlfriend in Brazil to a video of me reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Foghorn,” the story that made me decide to be a writer.
This year, I realized I was in the position to share the tradition with even more people. Now through Halloween, I am offering my semi-spooky tale “Dead Folks” as a free download on Amazon. The story is in Kindle format, but a Kindle is not required to read it; free Kindle reading apps for gadgets ranging from smartphones and tablets to PCs and Macs can be downloaded here.
This story is near and dear to my heart, as it was my first professional fiction sale years ago. In it, a small Appalachian town is mysteriously inundated with pesky corpses from various historical eras and a young man finds he must make some hard choices. One reviewer wrote, “‘Dead Folks’ ultimately reveals itself to be a clever genre admixture that is nodding toward Mark Twain, perhaps the most American of writers. Byrd puts it all at the service of a winning narrator, a well-delineated supporting cast of characters, and a transcendent love story. If Stephen King were given to whimsy, he might have produced ‘Dead Folks.'”
I hope you’ll accept my gift of this bit of weirdness in the spirit of the holiday, and that you enjoy it. Please spread the word, the more the merrier. If you like it, please consider leaving a short review of it on Amazon, as that sort of thing raises a story’s profile in searches and is incredibly helpful to starving authors like me. I also really enjoy reading what people think. And don’t forget to give someone else a story or a book, and tell everyone you know about All Hallow’s Read. Neil is absolutely right, we need more traditions based on gifting tales. What better time than Halloween, the season of scampering nightmare and sultry mystery?
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Elmore Leonard was one of those great pulp writers who helped create modern fiction and along the way taught many writers how to write. Like the best in any “genre,” he proved that genre doesn’t matter, only quality. Whether you’re writing about cowboys or bank robbers or astronauts or superheroes or ennui-laden academics fucking around on their wives and feeling really really uncertain and depressed while they wash the dishes, the content isn’t what’s important, it’s the skill and insight and art that the writer brings to the tale.
Rest easy, Dutch.
The new edition of Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom has its first review at a professional site, and it’s from an old friend of the Wildes.
Author Barry Hunter originally reviewed the book at The Baryon Review when it was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons back in 2009, and the review was so positive that a quote from it now features prominently on the cover of the Outlaw Moon edition:
A true delight…Tim Byrd has taken Doc Savage, added in a pinch of Robert E. Howard, a liberal dose of H. P. Lovecraft, and mixed it all together in a well done, enchanting pastiche of the pulps that will appeal to the adult audience as well as young adult readers.
He likes the new version even more:
[I] have even more enthusiasm for this new volume featuring the writer’s preferred version as well as magnificent illustrations by Gary Chaloner. Tim was able to obtain his rights back from Putnam, put together a Kickstarter project, and fulfill his dream of putting out his vision of his creation.
He has succeeded extremely well and together with Chaloner has created a volume that cries for a place on the shelf between Doc Savage and Tarzan…
There are a lot of folk doing the self-publishing routine, but Tim Byrd has found the right formula to do it in a magnificent way.
The full review can be found here.
There are several things for me to talk about today, including some very big news that affects the future of the Doc Wilde books…
First, we’re still in the process of fulfilling Kickstarter promises for Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom. Everyone has their ebooks who should have gotten them, and folks are starting to receive their printed copies. For those due autographs, we’re making bookplates that will print in Tasmania so that artist Gary Chaloner can sign them, then he’s sending them to me so that I can sign them and ship them out to the people who need them. The same goes for the posters of the book’s cover art and the handful of character sketches high level supporters are getting. This will take a bit more time, but rest assured we are on task.
The response to the book has been very gratifying. I’ve heard directly from quite a few people who love it, and there has been a great review posted at Goodreads and one at Amazon since the launch, and hopefully more to come. As a freelance writer and independent publisher, I don’t think I can overstate how important such word-of-mouth is: without it, the books will fail and I won’t be able to keep doing them. Or eat. So if you like the books please consider helping them gain visibility through such reviews.
As noted previously, the Kindle and EPUB versions of the book are on sale for $4.99 (reg. $6.99) at Amazon and Barnes & Noble through July 1st. The book is also available in trade paperback and is gradually making its way into distribution channels; it will ultimately be available for order by bookstores, it just takes a while.
Through Monday, the “Frogs of Doom Typo Challenge” is running. The full details are at that link, but the gist of it is that everyone who submits a valid typo or misspelling in the book before the deadline has a chance to win autographed copies of both the hardback first edition of Frogs originally published by Putnam and the new expanded and fully illustrated Outlaw Moon edition. So far, I’ve had a few entries that pointed out what the submitters thought were misspellings but weren’t (thinking that “gloam” was supposed to be “gloom” for instance), but there is only one entry from someone who has actually found an error. So not only is there at least one error to be found, if you find it and enter there’s a very good chance you might win.
And now, the big news…
Gary Chaloner has stepped down as artist for the Wildes.
In true pulp fashion, I’m going to leave that cliffhanger with you for the moment. More news soon, but rest assured that work continues on the books and the news isn’t as catastrophic as it might seem (though it did take me a bit of time to get my feet back under me after I found out).
Better than the movie.
Saw Man of Steel yesterday.
Didn’t love it. Sorta liked it.
If I let myself, though, I think I could hate it.
There are some movies that are deeply flawed but I come out of them loving them anyway because what I remember about them is the good stuff. The Dark Knight Rises was like that. It fails in some major ways, but it is audacious in what it attempts and gets so much right and is just so thrilling that I loved it (though not with the same passion as I love its immediate predecessor) .
Man of Steel flips that dynamic on its head. It gets quite a few things right, but what lingers in memory are its failures.
The casting is excellent (though Amy Adams, who I generally adore, isn’t as good a Lois Lane as I’d imagined she would be). Henry Cavil is a fantastic Superman. The villains are pretty great (especially Antje Traue as Faora-Ul, who seriously upstages central baddy Zod).
The action is all very good to excellent, if at times too frenetic and unclear. The story is smart and restructures the story we all know all too well by now in interesting ways. Largely, the creator’s approach to making a Superman for our time is admirable and successful.
Except…
There is no heart here. There’s a virtual geometry of a heart, pumping away in predictable throbs, but there’s no blood in that geometry, no heat. No humanity. The only truly human moment in the film is when Jenny Olsen (Jimmy’s much hotter contemporary iteration) panics while trapped in a terrible situation…and Jenny is barely even a character in this movie. And it’s the actress who brings the humanity, not the script or the direction. Suddenly, in that moment, I cared for one of the characters on a visceral, rather than an intellectual, level.
The film has absolutely no sense of humor. None. Zilch. I don’t want comedy, I don’t want camp, and I hated those elements in the old Christopher Reeve movies. But I do want wit, I do want humor, I do want irony, I do want to fucking smile every once in a while.
And please. Please please please. Please spare us the Space Jesus crap. Sure, it’s easy to find all sorts of subtext in a Superman story if you want to (he’s basically more Space Moses than Jesus anyway, and was created by a couple of Jewish kids to boot), but when you start making the subtext hamfisted text it’s just embarrassing. Bryan Singer was guilty of this in Superman Returns too. Don’t bash us over the fucking head with the allegory: having Superman spread his arms as if he’s on a cross isn’t clever, it’s just stupid and obvious, especially when paired with a line of dialogue like “You can save them all…”
Also, spare us the jingoistic military recruitment video before the film that uses heroic imagery of Superman to inspire more kids to enlist to die pointlessly in far off lands. How frigging manipulative and cynical can you get?
There have been a lot of complaints that the movie makers went too dark and gritty with the film, and for the most part I disagree. There could certainly be a bit more color on their palette visually, but it’s fine, and I don’t think the story or characters are too thematically dark. I like the uncertainty and humanity they bring to Superman, and I prefer a noble person struggling to do the right thing to a two-dimensional symbol of heroism who is unfailingly perfect. I don’t mind Superman killing occasionally if he sees the need, though the need has to be overwhelming and clear and earned by the storytellers (there’s at least one big failure on this point in the film).
Overall, I’d give Man of Steel a very shaky B-. I’m glad they’ve done well with it, because I mostly like the elements in the mix and am glad they’re getting to continue with those elements. I just hope that next time they address some of their failures and make a movie I’ll actually want to watch a second time.
ON SALE UNTIL JULY 1, 2013!!!
“Really. Totally. Awesome.” ‑‑Book Nut
“Doc Wilde swings in on a jungle vine to raise the flag high for adventure. Infused with pace, fun, and all the two-fisted action a reader could ask for…” –Zack Stentz, screenwriter, Thor, X-Men: First Class
To the world at large, Doc Wilde and his family are an amazing team of golden-skinned adventurers, born to daring escapades and globetrotting excitement. Join them as they crisscross the earth on a constant quest for new knowledge, incredible 21st-century thrills, and good old-fashioned adventure!
Now, with adventurous Grandpa Wilde missing, the Wildes confront the deepest mysteries of Dark Matter, penetrate the tangled depths of uncharted jungles, and come face to face with the likely end of the world in the clammy clutches of an ancient amphibian threat…THE FROGS OF DOOM!
“Written in fast-paced, intelligent prose laced with humor and literary allusions ranging from Dante to Dr. Seuss, the story has all of the fun of old-fashioned pulp adventures.” —Kirkus Reviews
The Astonishing Adventures of Doc Wilde are written by Tim Byrd, lavishly illustrated by Gary Chaloner, and published by Outlaw Moon Books.
Now in deluxe new editions, these novels recapture the magic of pulp cliffhangers for readers of all ages. Lost worlds, ancient ruins, cool gadgets, and evil villains and daring heroes, all brought into the 21st-century with contemporary themes, modern science fantasy, the wonders of family, and a deep appreciation of literature and of the thinking life itself.
In the tradition of classic adventure stories, and modern tales like The Incredibles and Raiders of the Lost Ark, they’re great for kids and grown-ups alike.
To celebrate the return of Doc Wilde, Outlaw Moon Books is offering the ebook edition of Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom at a special low price of $4.99 (regular $6.99) until July 1, 2013. To get the book, visit the links below at Amazon (Kindle format) or Barnes & Noble (for EPUB format):
DOC WILDE AND THE FROGS OF DOOM AT AMAZON
DOC WILDE AND THE FROGS OF DOOM AT B&N
ALSO AVAILABLE IN TRADE PAPERBACK!
For more info, visit Doc Wilde Adventure Headquarters at www.DocWilde.com!
It is Father’s Day, yet I do not honor my father.
My father was an abusive drunk who put me through years of hell and regularly did everything he could to crush my spirit. He did a hell of a lot of damage in that regard; I’ve struggled for years with chronic, enervating, soul-crushing depression that several shrinks have identified as deep post-traumatic shock pounded into my marrow and mind during my childhood.
So today, I honor my son.
Nathaniel is seventeen, intelligent, kind, thoughtful, socially adept and funny, loves his parents, loves being around his parents, and has never been a behavioral problem in any way. When people ask us how we discipline him, we always say we don’t. If there’s an issue, we talk it out, and it’s no longer an issue.
I attribute this mostly to his innate character, but also to the fact that from the day he was born, both his parents have treated him with respect and have never seen dealing with him as an innate conflict or power struggle. He is the way he is because we allowed him to be the way he is, not because we beat it into him or forced him to act certain ways or made him follow stringent rules. We always honored his right to be acknowledged, to be present, to be heard. We pointed out when he was in the wrong, but also stood up for him when he was in the right.
We gave him love and respect at every step along the way, and as a result, he has given us love and respect in return. He doesn’t have to rebel because we’re not holding him back from being who he is and living life on his terms, and because we trust him, which lets him know that he is worthy of our trust.
Because of who he is, and how he was raised, my son didn’t have to bother with being a surly teen. He went straight to being a man.
It was pointed out to me that I really wasn’t allowing much time for the contest (detailed in my last post), so I’m adding a week and a few hours to the starting time. It will now begin Monday, June 17, 2013 at 5:00 pm EDT. I had also originally said the first person to identify a typo would win; now everyone who enters between 6/17/2013 and 6/24/2013 will have a chance to win.
When I left a multi-book contract at Putnam and decided to publish my Doc Wilde adventure series independently, it was for various reasons including getting the lion’s share of the profits from my work and full creative control. Part of the latter was a desire to produce books that were at least as professionally wrought as those coming out of a publishing house, and of which I could be proud.
We see a lot of insult hurled at the indie publishing community. The fact that it has become so easy to publish has undeniably opened the gates to a lot of lazy, shoddy, unedited books. Some people refuse to see the other side of the equation, that a great many very talented writers who have either not been fortunate enough to break in with a traditional publisher yet, or who have opted to leave the old system as I have, now have the chance to share their work and possibly even make a living from it.
I’m not the first to set out to do things right, by any stretch. But I wanted to be one of the writers who prove that indie publishing can result in wonderful books, a group that gets larger all the time.
One of the most common complaints I see about self-publishing is that the books are terribly edited, full of typos and bad spelling. As a writer who slaves over his prose with a goal of not needing to be edited, I was determined that no one be able to sling that particular brickbat my way. Which brings me to:
From Monday, June 17, 2013 through Monday, June 24, 2013, everyone who emails me (at docwildekickstarter@gmail.com) identifying a typo or misspelling in Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom will be entered into a random drawing to win an autographed first edition hardback of the book, an autographed copy of the new deluxe second edition, and my thanks for pointing out something I can correct to make my book even better.
This applies only to the new edition from Outlaw Moon Books, and doesn’t include the excerpt from the next book in the back (that book is still being developed, so the text of the excerpt is essentially still in first draft form).
Any submissions which arrive prior to noon on Monday will be deleted. Likewise, any typos pointed out beforehand (in comments here or elsewhere) will disqualify you; I want people to have a fair shot at getting their entry in when the time is right.
If anyone wins the challenge, I will update this post with the news as well as writing a new post to announce it.
Good luck, intrepid readers!
UPDATE: It was pointed out to me that I really wasn’t allowing much time for the contest, so I’m adding a week and a few hours to the starting time. It will now begin Monday, June 17, 2013 at 5:00 pm EDT. I had also originally said the first person to identify a typo would win; now everyone who enters between 6/17/2013 and 6/24/2013 will have a chance to win.
Happy birthday, Nydia!
I’m a fan of George R.R. Martin, and I’m a fan of A Game of Thrones, both in its original literary and its more recent filmic iterations. And not only do I consider Martin’s epic work to be some of the best fiction I’ve ever read, I’ve been on board longer than most because, through unlikely fortune, I got an early copy of the first book in hardback, signed, well before it went on sale…
And yeah, I’m showing off my library…forgive me.
Of course, I’m not alone in my love for this series. But such love is far from universal, and some folks downright hate it. Some hate it because it’s brutal and dark and filled with not-happy endings. Some hate it because it’s loaded with sex and nakedness, and if you’re uncomfortable with the human body and the things people choose to do with it, that can be a turnoff. (If I seem dismissive of people’s discomfort with nudity and sex, that’s only because I am; there is plenty of entertainment available for more chaste tastes, and not everything needs to be appropriate for eleven year olds.) I will say this: the series should show more naked men, both because it would be more fair and because it would head off some of the arguments of misogyny.
Some people’s hatred of this series, though, is starkly political, pardon the pun. Continue reading
On his blog, author Tobias Buckell has posted an interesting counterpoint to some of the HUZZAH! of self-publishing out there:
I love this quote from the recent marketing guide that Smashwords published:
“we cannot promise you your book will sell well, even if you follow all the tips in this guide. In fact, most books, both traditionally published and self-published, don’t sell well. Whether your book is intended to inspire, inform or entertain, millions of other books and media forms are competing against you for your prospective reader’s ever-shrinking pie of attention.”
(From Smashwords — Smashwords Book Marketing Guide – A book by Mark Coker – page 7.)
This just does not get emphasized nearly enough. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal since I published The Apocalypse Ocean. One, because so many rah rah eBook advocates have been indicating to me that if I’d only just publish digitally first I’d keep 70% of the profits and *obviously* make more than I would with ‘traditional publishing.’
Since 2001, I’d been involved in selling eBooks…I lay down my bonafides, because usually the first thing I get is a lot of ‘booksplainin,’ by which I mean people lecturing me about what to do as if it’s self evident, obvious, and usually based entirely on their own anecdotal experience.
In fact, the self assured expertise of anecdotes drives me nuts…
I recommend reading the piece. Buckell makes some solid points, and his larger point — that big success in self publishing is rare, and we tend to hear only about the outliers who win big — is true. Of course, that’s also the case with traditional publishing. Even for those who score a publishing deal with a big New York corporation, most make relatively little when compared to “real” jobs that grown ups have. And the average result for them is skewed just as much by the big successes in traditional publishing.
His figures, provided by Smashwords, are interesting, but are themselves only anecdotal evidence because the numbers all come only from Smashwords, not from the far more successful ebook venues like Amazon, B&N, iTunes, and Kobo (all of whom are stingy with such data). And every self-published author I’ve talked to, or who I’ve seen write on the matter, has said that the number of books they sell on Smashwords, as compared to the other venues, is so small as to be nearly insignificant. Some of them say it’s barely worth publishing to Smashwords (I’ve only just begun this journey, so I have no opinion on that; I want my books up everywhere they can be).
Also, when looking at publishing figures like this, and comparing results between traditional and indie publishing, the comparison is meaningless unless the figures you run for traditional include all the authors who are attempting to publish traditionally and failing to do so. There are many traditionally focused authors who are making ZERO dollars, but they will never be counted. Their counterparts in self-publishing, however, *are* getting published, because they’re doing it themselves, so they get counted, and the vast majority of people who don’t actually make anything off their self-published book, for quality or whatever reasons, skew these figures just as much as the highly successful folk at the other end of the charts. The extreme low-performers in traditional publishing don’t get counted in statistics like this, whereas the extreme low-performers in self-publishing do.
And if you have a thousand authors on the traditional path who make zilch, and a thousand authors on the indie path who publish their own book and make just a dollar, you know what? The indies are doing better. Something is better than nothing.
I learned something yesterday.
For those who subscribe to both this blog and the Doc Wilde blog, who may not want to get the same stuff in their inbox twice, I’ve been trying to keep from replicating content on the two blogs. This also helps with what’s known as “SEO,” Search Engine Optimization, which is “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s ‘natural’ or un-paid (‘organic’) search results.” Posting identical content in multiple places puts you in competition with yourself with internet search engines and can make your pages appear farther down in search results, thus diluting your signal.
My approach, of late, has been to post most of my stuff here, but to focus the Wilde stuff mainly to that blog. Then I’d post a short note here linking to the post in question, but not repeating the information.
But, and this is probably common knowledge to those who care to spend time on such matters, apparently doing things that way doesn’t work all that well. Yesterday, I posted a blog post at the Wilde site which gave a lot of specific info about what’s happening with our current attempts to publish Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom to various venues. I put a note here that said, essentially, “There’s news, go to this link for all the juicy details.” Exactly 25% of folks who read the note here clicked over to actually read the post.
75% didn’t bother.
I assume that most or all the people who read the note here did so because they were interested in what was going on, but they missed the information. The note here said “Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom is DONE, the epic battle raging across the world in both digital and print form. Read the news in the latest post of the official Doc Wilde blog,” and perhaps I erred not just in requiring an extra click, but also in not being clear with the message here. Maybe people read the short version and thought it meant the book is actually out, when in fact we’re working our way through the obstacle course thrown up by the various vendors, from the persnickety formatting of the Kindle files for Amazon to the recalcitrant uploading process for Nook.
People who read the post over on the Wilde site know the particulars, but maybe folks who read the post here all thought “Great! The book’s available!” Which is annoying to me and probably to them, because if they go to buy it, they won’t be able to just yet.
Whatever the case, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed that click-through on links tends to be low. It’s even the case when a post says something like “You really should go read THIS, it’s funny and fascinating and incredible.” Few people actually bother to go have the experience or get the information or whatever.
So I should probably replicate info between these two blogs, at least when it’s the essential info, so folks who read only one or the other will actually get the information. And with posts in general, I should get as much of the info into the post itself, even if I’m pointing to an interesting article elsewhere, because most people just won’t bother jumping to the article under discussion.
Lesson learned.
Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom is DONE, the epic battle raging across the world in both digital and print form. Read the news in the latest post of the official Doc Wilde blog:
CRY “HAVOC!” AND LET SLIP THE FROGS OF DOOM!!!
UPDATE: Just to be clear, the book is not quite out yet, as we’re still jumping through the hoops to place it on sale through the various major venues. The actual details on this, and other stuff, is in the post at the link.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am STOKED.
This series is not only some of the best Batman ever, it’s some of the greatest gaming ever. My love for it is already a matter of record.
And yet again a CGI game trailer shows that they really shouldn’t need to be waiting for Hollywood to get its head out of its ass to give us good flicks of Halo, God of War, or other great games, not to mention the possibilities for animated comic book fare.
You’ve probably heard about, or seen, the batshit crazy Arizona couple who went on Gordon Ramsay’s show Kitchen Nightmares and were so relentlessly, hopelessly, stupidly terrible, both as restaurateurs and as human beings, that Ramsay, for the first time, wound up simply throwing in the towel and walking away. This was followed by an epic psychotic meltdown by the couple on Facebook.
I’ve never seen this show, as I usually ignore reality shows of any sort, but curiosity got the better of me today and I watched the segment on YouTube. And folks, this is some juicy viewing, I tell ya. Being around people like this in real life would be horrendous; I wouldn’t be surprised if you got ulcers inside of fifteen minutes. I can’t believe Ramsay put up with them as long as he did. But watching them on this show, knowing that they are completely ruining their own business once and for all and reaping what they sow, is schadenfreude of the most delicious sort.
So what does this have to do with the writing life? Two things.
First, if you want to be a writer (or artist of any sort, really), you need to be able to take criticism. It can be tough to put aside your ego and listen to someone saying nit-picky or even awful things about the wonderful work you struggled so hard to birth into the world out of your very essence…but if you can’t do that, you can’t grow, and likely you’ll start shitty and stay shitty. Even if you disagree with the person offering criticism, you should honor their opinion and take it with grace. And unless their points are completely, patently stupid, you owe it to yourself to actually consider them before disregarding them. Nobody is perfect, and armoring yourself in ego or defensiveness will stunt your growth as an artist and a human being, just as we see in the video above.
Second, this video is a perfect example of just one of the many reasons why it’s a bad idea for authors to agree to read unpublished material by folks they don’t know. I’ve written about this before, rather colorfully and more comprehensively, and these folks are just some bloody kitchen knives short of the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. People you don’t know may be good writers or bad writers (odds tilt dramatically toward the latter), but they may also be neurotic, obsessive, crazy, or even violent. You just don’t know. And, as I wrote in the blog post linked above, when a lot of folks ask for you to critique them, what they’re really doing is asking for your praise. They don’t want actual critique. And they may react badly if you give it to them.
That was exactly what happened with Gordon Ramsay and these assholes. They had already damaged their reputation and business, and they invited him not to let him help them fix their restaurant but to come in and use his show to give them praise so that they could be vindicated by an authority on TV. Then, blindly evil fucks that they are, they reacted horribly to his critique and dug themselves even deeper.
Good for them. Nobody deserves such a fate more than they do, except perhaps current GOP leadership.
For more on this, please do read “Why I Will NOT Read Your Stuff“. I’m pretty pleased with that post, but I’m open to criticism on it.
Under An Outlaw Moon 