Friday Five

[jimhines]

1) After spending all that time working on Red Hood’s Revenge, it’s amazing how quickly the short fiction goes.  One week from short story seed to finished first draft?  I could get used to this!  Now to go back and make the whole thing coherent and cohesive.  (Right now it’s 3700 words of themeless mess, but that’s okay.  It’ll get better.)

2) A

Comments

[jjschwabach]

Re: #3 That happened to me once, too. Three reviews of Dark Winter turned into two. (Yeah, some of us don't have reviews in the double digits.)

ETA: If this appears twice, it's LJ's fault.

[jimhines]

Curious. I wonder what triggers the removal of a review. None of mine were abusive or seemed to violate any Amazon policies.

[jjschwabach]

Mine, neither. The person whose review it was reposted when they realized it was no longer among their listed Amazon reviews.

Another AmazonFAIL, of a different stripe?

[melissajm]

I hadn't realized how tricky weight is to write about until I started a story with a major character who weighs nearly half a ton. I love her, but I still haven't finished the story because I keep thinking "Am I doing this right? Am I being respectful, yet realistic in the way certain other characters relate to this person? Is she coming across as more than just fat?"

Plus, it's hard to focus a story on a character who can't leave this one place and never gets a moment's privacy (and therefore can't have secrets), and still have it be exciting.

[margaret_y]

Would it help Cat Valente if I went to the bookstore and bought all her books? I'm not sure of the precedent if I buy books simply because the author is needy, but I've bought books for some strange reasons, or sometimes no reason at all, so why not?

[jimhines]

It certainly wouldn't hurt. Given royalty structures and schedules, one person buying the books only means a few bucks at most for the author, and that doesn't usually show up for many months. But I definitely think everyone should go out and buy all the books by all of us :-)

If you read e-books, she's got some of her books for sale directly on her site: http://www.catherynnemvalente.com/ebooks/ For most of thsoe (the PayPal books), the money would go directly into Cat's pockets, which is a much better deal for her.

There's always the direct donations route, either in the post I linked to, or else as she starts writing and sharing the new book online.

[anonymous]

And you seem to have attracted the attention of Robert Stanek. Have you noticed that the person who left negative reviews for two of your books, also has written a 1 star review for David Edelman's Infoquake? (his blog post about self promotion places highly in a google search of Stanek).

[jimhines]

Heh. I remember Edelman's blog post. That was a funny smackdown :-)

Aside from that connection, is there any proof that the reviewer is a Stanek sock-puppet? I agree it's possible, but I don't see it as certain.