The story of Blackwood Farm was absolutely wonderful. I loved it to death, and it’s doing fine!

By no means is this a complete review, and I hammered it out in pure feeling just as I finished the last page! Just a blurb if that!

Sometimes they say if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. I’m not from that generation! I was “King” of Egypt once and I never held my tounge. I’m still alive! (okay just kidding).

When a comment is given such as these or any other like it for that matter I always take them with a bucket of salt and a calm reasurence that at least they had the decency to tell me something. It can never do any harm what so ever! If anything… it does just the opposite! THAT IS VERY WELL KNOW. Marketers and planners of all kinds know this, and sometimes such a tidal shift happens seemingly by accident. It’s just fiction! It’s fun! Good or bad is simply a matter of opinion and state of mind! Perspective? Whatever. But if works of art generate that much response whatever the hell the response is, hateful, loving or somewhere in the middle it makes no difference and provides the needed fuel to continue a journey!

So smile! Your on camera and we’re looking forward to the next one.
We haven’t quite had enough of Vampires and Witches yet and it would be interesting to see another Union.

__________

Well I felt compelled to write a tiny little review of Blackwood Farm by Anne Rice.

I just finished it (Thank God)

I absolutely LOVED everything up until Memnock (fell asleep during Lestat), But everything, and I mean everything she’s written on the Chronicles I completely enjoyed, sitting glued to my seat and finishing most of them in one siting (and then I read them again, and again, and I made a play about one of them). I’d since moved on to other stuff in my life and was pleasantly surprised when I saw Blackwood Farm Available for the first time in Hardcover. Trapped by the first chapter, and then subsequently tortured to death by endless dialogue of Quinn, telling me everything in such lush vivid detail I could not stand it! I was seduced by the beauty of the language and bored to tears by its never ending, sometimes senseless rant and recounts of what happened in the past. It reminded me of sitting in my great grandmothers home in Franklin Louisiana(pop. 1000) back in were you had to sit and listen to her tell her story. Good stories they were, she was over a hundred, and I learned a lot from listening to her. I am not saying that I actually enjoyed every minute of her crying voice, crakling out the details of one family member after another. It made me restless and afraid to sit with her for more than 10 minutes after that.

I must have, during my departure from Anne for a few years, gotten use to “The page turner” all books that were great stories but seemed to keep everything moving along with varying textures and pacing. But reading Blackwood Farm was like being stuck waist deep in a morass pit of molasses while mosquitoes buzzed above my head.

I do so LOVE Anne’s writing and in this book I especially loved SOME of the dialogs and language of Quinn and all his (oh so) familiar interactions with strange things….(more later)

I felt something was missing. The book felt more like an “I have to” rather than an “I want to”.

Baaah…

Not a complete review, but I just put it down and I had to say something…this is the first link I found online…

Sincerely,

Damn Opin

It probably didn’t help that I was reading it with a newborn baby on my lap. I couldn’t make it through that … one … scene. I can’t remember what the last book was that I had to stop reading like that and never finish, without a single regret. Something in elementary school, perhaps. The only thing that kept me from flinging it across the room was that it was a borrowed book. Even so, it was a near thing. I haven’t read any of the later books, either.

That was it – one scene, and NO MORE for me. I will never re-read her books either, I think. Mostly I don’t care – there’s other books to read. No skin off my nose. *shrug*

I guess some readers are a little more attached to the characters and take it all very personally, or something!

The LKH message board and blog should be used as an example to all aspiring writers regarding what NOT to do to a strong fan base. Most of the people who have now been banned from that board (and I am one of them) and who are lambasted as CSM’s were the people who talked up LKH early on, wrote good reviews of her books because they honestly enjoyed them, and gave her books to friends and relative to encourage them to read her. People didn’t become CSM’s overnight, nor did they become them willingly. You would have had to be present on the board for years to truly understand the how the metamorphosis of a large segment of the fan base occurred. But if you want to follow in her footsteps, here are a few quick pointers:
1) Don’t visit your own message board and interact with your fans.
2) Have all questions and email read and answered by your personal assistant.
3) Don’t answer any questions that ask for explanations of continuity discrepancies.
4) Allow you personal assistant to be the primary moderator of your board, and to take any criticism of your work as a personal affront.
5) Under the guise of rewarding “politeness’, encourage sycophants.
6) Create vague rules that you are unable to define when asked, and consider the asking of such a definition as a violation of the rules.
7) Create a rule stating that fictional character must be treated with respect.
8) Never accept responsibility for your actions, take all literary criticism as a personal attack, and encourage people not to buy your books.

Follow those steps and soon you’ll have a tribe of crazy, screechy monkeys of your own.

(BTW John, I’ve just discovered your books and am enjoying them. You don’t seem to be the type of writer to engender CSM’s, so you should be safe from me turning into one – lol. )

I must also add that it’s useless to try and negotiate or reason with the Crazy Screechy Monkey’s too. They’re CRAZY! Any attempt to deal with them diplomatically has them flinging poo at you and claiming victory.

So… I stopped reading the books. If I thought she’d ever go back to the “real” Anita, I’d start reading the stories again.

Give up the porn, Laurell!! You are BAD at it. Really, really bad. I mean REALLY bad. I can’t express the BADNESS enough. There is still time for you to come back from the dark side.

The previous message was paid for by the Save The Darkside from Laurell Campaign.

http://www.thesif.net/SIF/index.php?

Last year I had the good fortune to make acquaintance with two — in my personal experience — extremely gracious authors.

The first visited my town for a signing [scarcely five miles from my doorstep] and the second shared a panel with me at Philcon.

Both were friendly, personable, approachable, informative, and entertaining.

Because of those meetings, I decided to forego my impulse to stop buying the former authors novels altogether, rather downgrading her to cheaper editions — thank you, SFBC — and, in the case of the latter writer, promptly began buying all his available novels. In fact, Greg Frost and I were tripping over each other at Larry Smith’s table in the Dealer’s Room immediately after sharing that Philcon panel, in haste to scoop up the fellow’s books.

Yes, I’m gravely dismayed at Ms. Hamilton’s auctorial direction. Eventually, I may only skim her books while at the library. We’ll see.

However, there’s this new guy’s exciting, thought-provoking stuff to absorb. Gladly, no one holds a gun to my head. The reading life is a buffet. Why there was even a new Dick Francis for Columbus Day!

But I posted to address this one comment:
Honestly, what author of anything other than a harlequin romance novel, would attempt to put out two 220 page large type hardcovers in one year, claim them as real novels; charging $20 each for them; and still have any self respect.

****
—I just wanted to correct this misconception. I know quite a few Harlequin romance authors and they know exactly what they’re creating–a (hopefully) well-written novel that can be enjoyed by a very specific type of reader in a generally short period of time. HQ category novels make no pretense about what they are, and they’re very reasonably priced, especially in the current book market.

They’re not to everyone’s taste, they’re not mostly to my taste, but they’re not a synonym for ‘crap novels’ either.

And neither the HQ authors nor HQ would ever think to market them as $20 hardcover novels.

A great many authors with currently excellent publishing careers got their start with HQ–Jennifer Crusie, Nora Roberts, Janet Evanovich, Barbara Samuel, Patricia Gaffney, Rachel Caine recently, under a pen name….not genre fiction, not all of them, but all excellent writers who produced very good work while at HQ. Sure, not all category books are good or even competent but neither is everything in the SF section. And SF/F can be just as formulaic.

All of those authors, plus many more I know in the romance community, can write more intense, more emotional and just plain better sex scenes than LKH even standing on their heads. If anyone here wants GOOD porn, try Emma Holly, particularly her contemporaries, though those into good werewolf/vampire sex scenes will also enjoy her historicals.

In short, I consider it a low blow for HQ authors to be compared to LKH. :)