A Brief Introduction to a New Experiment
A couple of weeks ago I did some short reviews of stories in Uncanny - for reasons best left to themselves. And as a part of that I ran into people arguing that reviews should be nice (and contain a summary of the story???) and went to a recommended reviewer... and found... well something between cliff notes (so you can fake having read while not wasting your time on reading) and 'love me' constructed praise. Read too many, one after the other, and the desperation to be nice and skip over any problems with a story became an actual entity beaming out at me (not unlike the infamous Paperclip of Help)
I'm not a fan of hate reviewing either, but the idea that stories should be published and loved or ignored, nothing between... Well that's not great for the writer (especially if their story is getting all the ignore and no love) and it's not great for the genre either - because there is more to a published story than the writer, there's the people publishing it. The gatekeepers. The people who decide if a story gets seen as published or self-published. That a story is selected by someone as publishable in their anthology or zine etc makes a difference to how it, and it's writer, can present themselves to the world. What stories a market chooses to publish makes a difference in its own way, great or small, to what SFF is right now - where we're at.
I got a lot of value from critiquing pre-publication standard stories (often unpublishably pre-publication but there's lessons in every effort)
I got a lot of value from working as a slush reader and then editor
And I realised, looking at those Uncanny stories, that post-publication tyre-kicking is not something I've really done before - or at least where I've done it it's more 'why has that made me uncomfortable' in a nebulous way because thoughts are never as solidly constructed as words on paper/screen.
Why put those words on my LJ and make them public? Because, now and then, it's good to dance somewhere other than in your house (even if that's just in your garden).
So... I'm maybe writing a few short story reviews - could be more than a few, or maybe I'll figure out what I'm looking to learn really quickly and stop. Or I'll discover I like fewer than a tenth of published short stories and get depressed and stop (that's happened just reading for 'pleasure'), or I'll find myself getting mean because nothing's written for someone like me... Can't know till I try.
Long ago I was given the tip that when reading published stories I should look for what worked, so I could copy that in my own work. I've never got the hang of doing that, because generally what works in a story works for that story... or is a quirk of the author and shouldn't be stolen. But what goes wrong... if you find a way not to make the same mistake, that's all yours (or at least as all yours as anything can be when you've read a gajillion other writers and any solution you come up with will probably have been influenced by what they did right that you only really understand now you've seen it go wrong).
Anyhow... these will not be the longed for 'nice' reviews.
Comments about amazing underlying stuff I've missed etc welcome - most of what I'm writing will be opinion and if you have a good point and are willing to explain it, then it's possible to change my opinion.
'Be nicer' comments will attract questions that likely require knowledge of the text... please don't start down that road without having consulted the map.
I'm not a fan of hate reviewing either, but the idea that stories should be published and loved or ignored, nothing between... Well that's not great for the writer (especially if their story is getting all the ignore and no love) and it's not great for the genre either - because there is more to a published story than the writer, there's the people publishing it. The gatekeepers. The people who decide if a story gets seen as published or self-published. That a story is selected by someone as publishable in their anthology or zine etc makes a difference to how it, and it's writer, can present themselves to the world. What stories a market chooses to publish makes a difference in its own way, great or small, to what SFF is right now - where we're at.
I got a lot of value from critiquing pre-publication standard stories (often unpublishably pre-publication but there's lessons in every effort)
I got a lot of value from working as a slush reader and then editor
And I realised, looking at those Uncanny stories, that post-publication tyre-kicking is not something I've really done before - or at least where I've done it it's more 'why has that made me uncomfortable' in a nebulous way because thoughts are never as solidly constructed as words on paper/screen.
Why put those words on my LJ and make them public? Because, now and then, it's good to dance somewhere other than in your house (even if that's just in your garden).
So... I'm maybe writing a few short story reviews - could be more than a few, or maybe I'll figure out what I'm looking to learn really quickly and stop. Or I'll discover I like fewer than a tenth of published short stories and get depressed and stop (that's happened just reading for 'pleasure'), or I'll find myself getting mean because nothing's written for someone like me... Can't know till I try.
Long ago I was given the tip that when reading published stories I should look for what worked, so I could copy that in my own work. I've never got the hang of doing that, because generally what works in a story works for that story... or is a quirk of the author and shouldn't be stolen. But what goes wrong... if you find a way not to make the same mistake, that's all yours (or at least as all yours as anything can be when you've read a gajillion other writers and any solution you come up with will probably have been influenced by what they did right that you only really understand now you've seen it go wrong).
Anyhow... these will not be the longed for 'nice' reviews.
Comments about amazing underlying stuff I've missed etc welcome - most of what I'm writing will be opinion and if you have a good point and are willing to explain it, then it's possible to change my opinion.
'Be nicer' comments will attract questions that likely require knowledge of the text... please don't start down that road without having consulted the map.