Talk back to reviewers? Bad idea

[sarahmichigan]

For aspiring authors on my LJ friends list, here's proof that an author ranting back because of a bad book review is not a good idea. Anne Rice just makes herself look like a thin-skinned idiot. You have to scroll down a bit for her entry (with five stars for Blood Canticle, of course):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/037541200X/ref=cm_rev_next/002-1677299-2863264?%5Fencoding=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155&s=books&customer-reviews.start=151

This is old-ish news, but I was discussing it with a friend over the weekend, so I thought I'd post for your snicker-worthy pleasure.


excerpt:
"If and when I can't write a book on my own, you'll know about it. And no, I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself. I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me, and I will never relinquish that status. For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art."

Um, diva much? EVERYONE needs a good editor. Even Anne Rice.

Comments

[lefthand.livejournal.com]

Especially anne rice, who is, for the most part, unreadable. Some workshopping might have made her otherwise tedious novels interesting. Even the beauty stories slogged after you realized it was the same spanking, over and over and over.

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

The Vampire Lestat, Tale of the Body Thief, The Vampire Armand, The Vampire Marius (I think that's what it was called) and The Mummy and were good. Interview With the Vampire made a good movie. The rest is pretty bad.

[simianpower.livejournal.com]

Are you kidding? Body Thief was HORRIBLE! The Mummy was good, and I wish she'd revisited that world before her writing took its nose-dive. Vampire Lestat is fun, and Queen of the Damned just finishes that story off. If she'd stopped there, it would be a decent series, even with Interview sort of a slogging introduction to it all.

It seems that lots of successful writers suddenly discover that they only have one story to tell, and tell it over and over and over, usually worse each time.

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

Queen of the Damned got carried away making the vampies demigods. Tale of the Body Thief backed away from that, and actually had a different story to tell.

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this story?

Today's Something Positive is based on it, and is hilarious.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

very funny! thanks.

[simianpower.livejournal.com]

But I leave it to readers to discover how this complex and intricate novel establishes itself within a unique, if not unrivalled series of book.

What an egotistical thing to say! Most of her self-defense post had that kind of self-promoting crap liberally laced into denials of the opinions of anyone who didn't like her work.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the woman's ego is outta control.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

She should have taken the high road. And for the record, if you don't have an editor, you deserve scorn, editors make semi-readable crap into wonderful prose. Anyone who's read the unabridged Stranger in a Strange Land knows this.

[simianpower.livejournal.com]

Yep. As authors become famous they seem to think that they no longer need editors. Thus their books get longer and longer, and less and less focused. I've been unwilling to buy any new Robert Jordan for years, even though I loved books 1-6 of his Wheel of Time series. Books 7-10 were atrocious, each worse than the last. A friend of mine says that book 11 was good, but I'll wait until either the library gets it or I can get it really cheap. I've seen the same thing happen to quite a few authors, including precious Anne.

[madrigalblue.livejournal.com]

His wife is his editor. Interesting or not, I think his plot is very well planned and that he sticks to it pretty well. There are so many typos in his books though...arg.

[simianpower.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with his plot. I have a problem with his plot not going anywhere for book after book after book. After book 6 it slowed down to the point that nothing happened at all in book 10. He could have cut one, possibly even two entire books out of the past four and had a much better story. That would have required some vigorous editing, removing the repetitive and uninteresting things. There's only so many times that Nynaeve can "sniff dismissively" or smooth her skirt or whatever before it becomes boring. His women characters are all just catty bitches, and all act pretty much the same; it stopped being interesting a long time ago. If his wife is his editor one would think that she'd maybe curtail some of that! Maybe that's a good case for not having a family member (who're supposed to be fans out of loyalty if nothing else) also be your editor!

[livinginoctober.livejournal.com]

I'm almost a hundred percent positive I found a type error in Needful Things by Stephen King. Unless "dialed" is also spelled "dialled"....

[madrigalblue.livejournal.com]

On a related note, have you ever read Alice Borchardt (sp?), AKA Anne Rice's sister? I really can't get into their styles, yet I have been told by people reading my work that it looks like I read a lot of them :/

[simianpower.livejournal.com]

I tried to read her werewolf books, but they just weren't very interesting. Now, I'm not a huge fan of werewolf stories anyhow, so I had something of a bias going in, but had they been well-written it might have made me change my mind. The styles didn't really seem all that similar, though.