Category Archives: Editing/writing life

About doing this stuff for a living.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Should authors respond to negative reviews?

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In my opinion, the answer is a universal and thundrous ‘never!’ Don’t apologize because they say they wasted their money, don’t gripe that they weren’t fair, don’t bitch that they were mean. Don’t do anything. Say nothing. Shut up. I think it’s fine to respond to an exceptionally positive review, or respond to a question, but when they are critical, say not one word. You cannot win. You can only look worse.

You will look hypersensitive, thus showing other detractors that your goat is available for the getting. You will look like your work hasn’t been very successful, because you feel a negative review is impacting you. You will look petty, because you are bickering. And if you’re not careful, you may look stupid, because you fail to get the point everyone else got.

While new authors are usually the most sensitive about reviews, some damned famous ones can get very worked up about an adverse review. One may remember Laurell K. Hamilton finally breaking down and venting Dear Negative Reader, which came to define a trope. She’s never heard the end of that piece, because it conveyed to the public where she was sensitive.

The reasons not to crab back at critical reviews divide into two groups:

Professional:

  • Maybe they were actually being merciful, and you’ll convince them to stop that and say what they really thought.
  • You look petty and small-time, with so little real work to do that you have time to argue with reviewers.
  • Your book must not be selling very well if you’re afraid of a bad review.

Personal:

  • It shows the weak spot in your armor of public presence.
  • It then gives more people a good reason to want to find that weak spot and use it to torment you.
  • It opens you up to a debate you cannot win even if you’re right, stepping onto a level playing field where people won’t hesitate to gang up on you.

As you might guess, this came up due to an author’s mistake. A little over seven years ago, I wrote the following review of Joann Kuzma Deveny’s 99 Ways to Make a Flight Attendant Fly–Off the Handle: A Guide for the Novice or Oblivious Air Traveler.

Before I paid $13 for this I should have looked at the length. My mistake. There isn’t a whole heck of a lot of content here compared to other recent flight attendant books out there, and that content can be boiled down to a few salient points of guidance for travelers:

1) Have no emotions except gratitude to your sainted flight attendants for choosing to serve you. Strive for your own form of sainthood, which amounts to never having needs or feelings except the foregoing.

2) You are not here to get from point A to point B. You are here to monitor your every action to improve the flight attendants’ convenience. Now you know.

3) Flight attendants basically do not like you, so watch it, lest you receive the Dreaded Eye Roll and the Stony Ignore.

There. I saved you $13. Too bad the author doesn’t give us any real reason to want to make her life easier, as she doesn’t seem to like us much to begin with. Well, I didn’t like her co-workers much either to begin with, based on experience, but I’ve always tried to keep an open mind. I still will, but no thanks to Deveny.

That’s where the book fails those it purports to help: it fails to create any sense of community between flight attendant and passenger. Both are victims: the victims of airline deregulation, cramped planes, crappy food and miserable overall conditions. The two most aggrieved groups involved in the airline industry are natural allies. A balanced book that promoted improved relations between the two would be a real service. Instead, into the hands of already angry and frustrated passengers is dropped a treatise on how to spread that annoyance around to the nearest targets–with no incentive offered as to why they should not. So I’ll pick up some slack here.

Fellow fliers, please try and treat your flight crew with courteous respect, for everyone’s benefit, in spite of the fact that they rate you slightly above a used diaper. In so doing, you’ll rise above the mean-spirited ranting that fills this book. Focus your anger where it is deserved: the airline industry executives and the immense bonuses they get, all because flight attendants and passengers are the ones jointly taking a hosing.

As for me, I want to fly even less now than I did before I read it. I wonder if it’s occurred to the author that this sentiment isn’t really going to promote greater job security in her field.

As cold as that seems, the truth was colder. If I’d meant to hurt her, I’d have estimated the word count, to show people how little actual content they were buying. I’d have pointed out how many copies were for sale for $0.01 on the secondary market. I’d have given her one star (Amazon’s lowest rating) instead of two. I’d have used much harsher verbiage. It needed a critical review, but I had no reason to want to make sure it stung. Had I lacked all empathy for flight attendants, I wouldn’t have pleaded with the public to treat them decently in spite of the book.

Today, a mere seven years later, she commented on the review to complain:

Please look further to 99 Ways… eleven 4 & 5 star reviews. The overall rating is 4 out of 5, with only 2 people, with no sense of humor, in the minority. (2 to 11)

She left a similar gripe on the other critical review today. Here’s what’s comical there: she’d left a similar gripe on that one two years ago. Evidently she didn’t even read her own comment. The best argument she could come up with was, in digested form: ‘ignore this humorless minority opinion, other people love it.’

Salient point: before she griped, she looked okay. She had a couple of negative reviews, a much greater number of positive ones, and the reader was left to judge who to believe–the majority or the minority. (As I see it, I did my part. If they still want to buy it, it’s not my money, so I am not invested and don’t care.) Now she looks bad. Now every reader knows that she will be easily stung. If some real jerk wants to, he or she can use that to make the author’s life very unhappy. Not the sort of thing I (or any person with a life) would do, but the Internet has every kind of person, including obsessive psychotic bullies.

Will I do as I told her, and go back to re-read and edit the review so as to do a more thorough job of shooting the book full of holes? Nah, I doubt it. I was mainly warning her what a dumb thing she’d done. I’m not as sensitive about such things. She doesn’t like my review, well, fine; if I had cobbled together a minimal amount of mediocre content into a $13 book, and someone called me on it, that’s not what I’d want to hear either because that speaks to the book being a bad value. If it really is a bad value, of course that’s the last thing she wants people to grasp, because they will buy one of the 33 used copies available from $0.01 (at which price point it’s an okay value). I responded mainly out of kindness, to teach her a bit of a lesson, which she really does not deserve of me.

Then that thought morphed, and I realized that the entire subject might make an interesting blog entry. There is a perspective from the author’s side, but the great majority of talking about writing is done purely from a reader’s perspective; maybe readers are interested in the author’s side. One of the first things an author needs is to learn how to behave. If Deveny now pulls up this post on search, and leaves a snide comment, that’ll be proof she didn’t get what I was trying to convey to her, but I won’t stop her from compounding the mistake. Nor will I be angry. This is writing for public consumption, and not everyone will like or value it, and some of them will say so. I’ll deal with it and move on.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Current non-read: The Land of the Painful Shame

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Okay, the real title is The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel. I am going to link you straight to the reviews, just so that I’ll never stand accused of encouraging anyone to buy this.

Like many of you, I loved Clan of the Cave Bear. For its flaws, it presented prehistoric people as…people. Good, bad and somewhere in between. It painted credible cultures based upon significant archaeological research. It took some liberties with SoD (that’s a cool kids’ acronym I learned at a Radcon panel about Suspension of Disbelief), but none so grotesque as to detract from a fun story. Over the years, it turned into Cro-Magnoporn, getting progressively worse. Lots of tasting her ‘tangy salt’ (I always wondered if Jondalar actually brought a primitive herbal salt shaker to his oral sex sessions) and homing in on her ‘nodule.’ (Anyone ever heard a woman scream for some hot nodule attention?) Nodules and prehistoric condiments aside, it was never this bad.

One might also consider what it means for me to write this. I may be only the bathroom attendant in the writers’ club (‘here’s your towel, sir…ah, very generous, sir, thank you kindly’), but my badge at least gets me in the servants’ entrance. Consider, please: what if I were to one day meet Jean Auel, whose latest book I’m impaling with one of Ayla’s atlatls? I once came close to that painful experience, sitting in a panel where one of the panelists seemed familiar. Finally remembered that, on Amazon, I’d given her book meh out of five stars. Squirm, squirm, squirm. No one, therefore, can imagine me fundamentally eager to alienate Ms. Auel without good reason; that would be insane. If I thought I could do the book justice with kindness and tact, I would.

Can’t. This is just bad. It’s so bad, I don’t think it’s Jean Auel. I could not force myself past page 73.

It is mostly tell rather than show, one of the most amateurish bugaboos that editors have to beat out of writers. We get paragraphs of “Ayla felt….” No, no, no. Don’t tell me “Ayla felt…”! Don’t! Show me how she feels and what’s on her mind through her actions, her dialogue, others’ reactions to her. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care if you establish that when Ayla is nervous, she has a bad habit of inserting a finger up each nostril. “She eased two fingers into her nostrils” beats “Ayla felt nervous” every time.

Then there’s the dullness problem. Now, I grant that if you love herbalism and scenes about making tea, this might not be so dull. If you like long rehashes of past events, maybe it’s not that dull. And I recognize that after waiting ten years between books, some backstory is needed because we’ve forgotten some of it (or perhaps never read those books, never slurped on their tangy salt). We don’t need this much. The dialogue is wordy and uninspiring, with everyone spelling out everything, leaving nothing for the reader to infer/discover. It often feels like expository or technical writing.

There, that’s the big problem. It doesn’t feel like fiction. It feels like expository writing. It sometimes feels like a software manual. I can take some guesses as to what might have happened:

Guess #1: Auel, being contractually shackled to the publisher for X number of books, was required to write another one before she could be manumitted. No one said it had to be a good book, and she realized full well that her name guaranteed a certain number of sales, thus automatic profit, and that’s why the publisher insisted on it. That’s what publishers do with big names: once it’s clear that the Name guarantees a profitable release, they get it locked in for a series of books. You owe us one more, bucko, or you can retire, but you can’t write anything else until we get it. So she phoned it in, getting it over with, and trying her best to make sure they wouldn’t want any more.

Guess #2: she somehow ran out of money and had to do something. I find that highly unlikely, as Auel has made enough money on the series to buy me and sell me into slavery, but folk have written books for stranger reasons.

Guess #3: she got real offended by all the readers who threw tomatoes at her Cro-Magnoporn, and decided to torture them. (Laurell K. Hamilton seems to be doing it. You no likey my porn? Okay, you get twice as much, that’ll learn ya.)

Guess #4: she forgot how to write good fiction. Kind of hard to imagine, because we don’t really start going backwards until our minds start to turn to muesli, and even then, usually that shows up in other ways. Very rarely does a capable writer suddenly revert to second-year college English student.

Guess #5: it got farmed out to ‘lancers. I am sure that’s what happened with Herbert and Anderson’s latest Dune monsterpiece and it wouldn’t surprise me if several other big names/franchises were also doing it. A lot of stuff gets hired out to freelancers. We work cheap, and a lot of us make real livings as tech writers, which makes our writing sound like vacuum cleaner manuals. It is not inconceivable that they just paid someone, or someones, several grand (no royalties, bucko) to write this. I suspect this because the writing is too amateurish to reconcile with what we know Auel is capable of. Well, maybe it ain’t her at all. I can just see it: “Look, you owe us another book. You don’t want to write it. Fine, so don’t write most of it. Write the parts you like, sketch a storyline, and we’ll hire some literary mercenaries for flat fees. We’ll sign them to NDAs that will allow us and you to confiscate their duodenums if they talk. Win/win/win. Oh, sure, the readers will be hosed, but they have no taste anyway.”

You don’t think the publishing industry would do that? If so, you do not know them. Some publishers would not, and those I respect. Some would, faster than you can say ‘slurp her nodule.’ Never underestimate what someone will do for a guaranteed income stream.

I can’t say with certainty what happened here. All that is mere speculation. What I can say is that 73 pages left me wanting less. Life is too short to finish this book, but it’s not too short to warn others away. The kindest, tactfulest, mercifulest thing I can say is that I don’t think Jean Auel really wrote this.

Gods, I hope not.

Adventures, Editing/writing life

Radcon 2013: Sunday and after-action

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Radcon is a science fiction convention held in Tri-Cities, WA.

Wouldn’t you know that the only day I get decent sleep is the day when I need the energy the least. There was one panel that was important to me, and I was on time, but it was about half bust. Some panelists just boggle my mind with their not-getting-it. If the panel is about how to write, the minute you say ‘Have you seen Suchandsuch movie?’ you have lost me, because the point is that you have tools available in film that you do not have in print. What is worse: then talk for five minutes about how the movie did it. That’s simply not helpful to the writer or editor, unless the panel is about screenplays and making movies.

I did pick up something for Deb and some books for Jenn, so that was productive. Sunday at Radcon is usually pretty lax, with a lot of goodbyes and such. Some years I don’t even show up for Sunday.

Overall I think that the all-volunteer organizing bunch at Radcon does a pretty good job. Some of the vendors are fairly lousy at business, and it shows, but the only ones that hurts are themselves. The panel subjects have gotten fairly stale, there was a lot of ‘they have that every year.’ But I’m firm that I’d never go back with a mobility impairment, nor encourage anyone else with one to go. Security simply makes zero effort (that I could see) to keep kids from running people over. I realize that they have a hard job, and I think what they want to say but dare not is this: “Look. The day belongs to the adults, the night belongs to the kids, so just go home at night, if you would please.” Which is convenient for them, but isn’t what I came for.

There are several panel ideas I could suggest to freshen up the lineup, but I don’t think they’d be very receptive, since I’m not part of the old line Tri-Cities Radcon in-crowd and am not a big name, so I just elect not to make a nuisance of myself with ideas and suggestions. It is probably my last one anyway, for other reasons. There are a lot of people involved that I’ll miss, as the people really are the highlight, but a lot of the actual con content is fairly much the same from year to year, and I assume that’s how the majority prefers it, so, fair enough. Overall it was a good if physically painful experience, where all my guests seem to have had a good time and enjoyed the con and each other. That really is the main overriding thing.

Adventures, Editing/writing life, Married life

Radcon 2013: Saturday

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Radcon is the annual science fiction convention of Tri-Cities, WA.

Naturally, we stayed up until four last night being raucous. Naturally, I knocked back half a quart of tequila and woke up with a headache after less than five hours’ sleep. Had some special commitments before and at Radcon that made it somewhat necessary to get moving before one was thoroughly ready, but all was handled in good order without screwing up.

Tell you this: Radcon’s vendors should love up on me. I think my friends have dropped $1000 on the dealer room–and happy to do it. Nyssa and Jeff’s leather goods and clothes are some of the best going, as are Jane and Elizabeth’s at Seams Like Magick. Rebekah went in her medieval stuff complete to the gray cape with the elegant chicken guts on the sleeves, hand-sewn. Marcel’s self-designed and created musketeer costume could buckle the swashes of the Radcon women any day if Jenn weren’t along and equally imposing in her Victorian black silk dress. As before, I was the spud without a costume, except for the white beret.

Made it to a couple of panels, which were pretty good, and caught up with Sharon for a good long catching of up. John did the filk/jam stuff again, toting his violin around all day, and Rebekah reprised her normal role as force of nature. I got to unwind a bit at Bottles & Shots (room party) with the friendly and kind Joe and Adrienne, and met some very nice folks there. This is composed during some upstairs raucosity back at my place (they don’t need my help to be raucous; it comes naturally). Deb has been a saint of taxiing, cooking, prepping, cleaning up and otherwise making everyone feel not just welcome but comfortable and cared for. I totally married the right woman–not because she does such things, but because she wants to. It’s great to see everyone getting along and forming their own relationships independent of the hosts, which is how it should go.

Didn’t get run over by any kids tonight, perhaps because someone said something, and perhaps because this time I was going to brace and take advantage of being built like a bridge abutment. Radcon staff seems to do pretty well in most ways, always remembering its all-volunteer nature. I still have to say, though, that it just is a difficult con for a mobility impairment.

There is no way I am getting soused tonight. None of my guests are–they bring the merriment as easily cold sober as drunk, and none are big drinkers anyway.

Adventures, Editing/writing life

Radcon 2013: Friday

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Not a very eventful Friday; only went to one panel and no parties. I think everyone had a good time, though. Panel on steampunk was quite good, with no monopolizers and pretty good panelists. It feels very weird to experience Radcon at 50-55º F; I am used to it being ball-lifting cold. Registration looked at first like it might be a return to the goat rodeo days, but they adjusted well. Some rooms have actually been moved from the past; art room is where the dealer room always was. The panel variety is fine, though there are a lot of repeats from every year. I guess there are subjects they simply always must cover.

I had not realized how much mobility impairment affects the Radcon experience. Frankly, I would not advise anyone with a mobility impairment to attend, period, ever. Too many very young people simply plowing heedlessly into anyone using a cane or whatever, and security is disinterested in the situation. And I’m one of the lucky ones, substantial enough not to be easily bowled over. If you are mobility impaired and you would feel comfortable walking through a busy skate park, definitely attend Radcon, and just accept being slammed into by stupid kids.

The greatest fun, of course, is seeing all those people one just does not often see.

Now I want tequila and my recliner.

Adventures, Editing/writing life

Radcon 2013: pre-prefunction

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It’s going to be an interesting time this year. For whatever reason, people like staying with us, and we will have many, nearly all from abroad: Mattias from Sweden, Jenn and Marcel from Canada, and my bro John from Andros Island, Bahamas. The token U.S. resident is Rebekah, from Idaho.

For those of you who do not have the faintest idea what I mean by Radcon, it is the annual science fiction convention in Pasco, WA. It is small compared to some bigger-city cons, but very large for the size of our area. SF cons consist mainly of vendors (selling you stuff related to SF), entertainment (the fire dancers are always a big hit, but there are other dancers, live music, and suchlike), gaming (which I never do but a lot of people do all weekend), and panels. I’ve been a panelist at SpoCon (Spokane), but Radcon made plenty clear to me some years back that I was too small potatoes as an author for them to want any panel help from me, so I stopped asking or offering. (SpoCon keeps asking me back, and I’m considering it, because they’re so pleasant and persistent about it.) However, there are various industry guests in attendance, including guests of honor in various categories, and it is good to see familiar faces and sometimes meet famous ones. Anyway, Radcon starts at noon on Friday and closes up at 4 PM on Sunday, and in between, is host to some of the most creative and amusing costuming one can imagone.

This multi-guest situation means a lot of pre-planning and arranging, more than usual because this will probably be our last Radcon; we anticipate living in another state by the time next February rolls around, and Deb starts over there in a week and a half, so we are shuffling around all that needs to occur there while also planning for a houseload of folks. Matti is the only Radrookie in the gang. We are very excited about it all.

Matters are complicated a bit by a serious knee issue I’m experiencing, which will be made better thanks to the wondrous Sharon, who arranged for a disabled permit. I qualify on several fronts but, as with my achilles surgery, don’t plan to use it except when I definitely need it as much as the next person. Frankly, this Radcon is going to involve a whole lot of physical discomfort, but I will just bear up as best I can. No costuming for me this year; navigating around will be challenging enough as it is.

Matti should be here any time now, Jenn and Marcel sometime tomorrow (lock up your milk, Tri-Cities grocers; they come for you), John at airport in afternoon tomorrow, and Rebekah on the night shift Friday. It will be remarkable if anyone’s sober enough to answer the door Friday night when she arrives,  but someone will at least crawl to it and aim her at the refreshments.

One thing is sure: this is quite a crew. John is the homesteading type at heart, a former submariner who has no comment, and a natural genius on any stringed instrument.  Jenn is the plant whisperer, knowledgeable about all fauna. Point to a plant, she can tell you everything about it. Marcel is a Yukoner, as nice as he is big, a good soul and strong like a bull. Matti is tall and funny (sometimes in a facepalming way), speaks excellent British English and loves to play with accents. Rebekah, well, in the first place she’s strong as hell, and in the second, she’s ultimately self-reliant. I usually describe it that when most people want a bow, they go to Sportsman’s Warehouse. When Rebekah wants a bow, she starts looking for a yew tree.

Should be a fun weekend, and hopefully I will sober up enough to blog some of it.

Editing/writing life, Married life

History lessons with my wife

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So, I was mostly minding my business tonight while Deb watched Grey’s Anatomy. During a commercial, I looked up from my read of a book on the decline of the Ottoman Empire to read her a passage which I thought said a lot about Napoleon’s ability to influence peoples (though I was in fact a bit wrong about that). She said, in her outside voice as is traditional, “You don’t know history at all!”

“I don’t?”

“No. If you did, you would know that his last name was not really Bonaparte…”–I grew kind of excited–“…but Bone Together. ‘Bonaparte’ was an attempt by him to draw people away from him so he could have sex with the enemy’s women. That’s why he won the war!”

“Seriously?”

“Come at me, big daddy. Ask me anything. Bring it.”

“Okay, very well. What is the significance of Çatalhöyük?”

She fixed me with a gaze of shock and dismay. “You don’t know what Saddle Who You was? Listen and learn. When they wanted to build the Trojan Horse, they needed a saddle that could hold a lot of people. So they made one, and named it Saddle Who You, which is derived from Saddle Hookah. This enabled them to deliver rubbers.”

I looked at her and just laughed. “Rubbers?”

“Duh. Why do you think it was called the Trojan Horse?” I sat silent, like any good husband slow in the uptake. “See? You don’t know your history. Ask me anything else.”

“Fine. Who did Charles “The Hammer” Martel defeat at Poitiers?”

She looked aghast that I could be so clueless. “Charles Martel defeated Le Peu Nailé, which of course means ‘the nail.'” I cracked up again, couldn’t help it. “Keep it coming. Ask me anything.”

“Okay, dear. What was the significance of Charlotte Corday?”

A sigh. “Charlotte Corduroy, you mean. She invented pants, but they were corduroy pants. They were also called ‘whisper pants,’ and the idea was to give them to the enemy so they would whisper when they walked.”

“Really.”

“Absolutely. I’m really sad for anyone like you, with a degree in history, to be so un-knowledgeable.”

“I think you meant ‘ignorant,’ dear.”

“NO! I said ‘un-knowledgeable’ and I meant ‘un-knowledgeable!’ Now come on. Ask me another. I can see I have a lot to teach you.”

“Fine. Please name one of the Spanish explorers of North America.”

She thought for a minute, consulting her stores of learning. “Well, his name was Julio El De Massmainebostainia. There are some states named after him. He came with his wife Maria, their daughter Nina, and some pinto beans.”

At that point, there was nothing for it but to come put it on the blog.

Editing/writing life

Old posts…and self-honesty about motives

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There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens to the blog, and it may be useful to bloggers who want to grow their readership. It is ‘body of work.’

If you write about a variety of topics, and do it long enough, your old posts become part of the Accumulated Mass of ‘Knowledge.’ Sure hope you knew what you were talking about, because it has become information people will now use. If they like it and your style, they might subscribe/follow; if they have some strong reaction, they may drop a comment.

For example, some time back I wrote about Gary Thomas Rowe, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s at the behest of the FBI. Turns out it’s not so easy to learn much about Tommy Rowe without buying one of the two books that discuss him in depth, so I turn up on searches. I wrote about a really clumsy union protest here in town, and now and then someone will still find it on a search. (WordPress provides me data about page views and the search strings that got people here.) The more offbeat the topic, the less is out there about it, and the likelier your take is to appear. If you’re going to game the system, might as well play to win.

Anyway, if you think long term, you can see the strategy easily enough. I’ve got a couple hundred-odd posts now, some of them of interest to almost no one, sprayed across the topical spectrum, and the result is a passive generator of public interest that requires zero activity on my part. (Except for dumping the spam bin, which WP makes pretty easy.) Information may not be the reason one blogs, and this is fine, but I’m learning that information will get you attention. That, I think, most bloggers would like, even the ones on the “I don’t give a damn if people read it, I don’t care what anyone thinks, bray bray bray” trip. Oh, yes, you do. If you didn’t, it’d be a personal diary on your machine. Instead you post it where you can never quite call it back. On some level, you want to be read.

It also helps if you can write, I think, but I know some fairly popular blogs put out by crappy writers, so it isn’t just your literary chops. It also has to do with knowing something–and sharing what you know. I think it’s fun.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Newly published: Lucky Man, by Shawn Inmon

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My most recent editing project was Shawn Inmon’s spanking new short story, Lucky Man. The Kindle version is available as we speak. While I categorized this with book reviews, that’s just for organizational purposes, since obviously no one can purport to present a review of a book on which he worked.

Upon my initial read, I liked Shawn’s story concept. One thing that really gripes me in fiction is predictability, and the story remained unpredictable all along. Shawn is growing rapidly in the craft of writing, because this is my second go-round with him on a project, and I didn’t have to deal with any of the stuff I caught last time. We were on to new, subtler changes and storyline considerations. Most writers just don’t absorb things as fast. It’s like a baseball coach teaching someone the virtues of opposite-field hitting, and the hitter starts knocking doubles off the opposite field wall. Well, yes, in fact, yes, that will do nicely.

If you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon will happily let you download emulation software for your machine. Thus, if you can read this post, you can read Lucky Man. I think you will find it of value well out of proportion to the $0.99 Shawn wants for it.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Current read: Sisterhood of Dune…and a bit on how *not* to write

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Being one of the only people who liked all of Herbert’s Dune books, it was natural to try his kid’s prequel series with Kevin J. Anderson.

Of course, we didn’t expect it to be Frank Herbert. To his credit, the son did not try to pretend to be the father. There’s only one problem: the writing now is…very flawed. The story is okay, and I’ll read it to finish the story just because I’m nine books in, but seriously, these guys need help. A couple of examples, quoted for fair use review purposes:

—From p. 10, paperback version—

Looking down, breathing heavily, she said, “Back at the Swordmaster School of Ginaz, I slew hundreds of these things. The school still has a standing order for functional combat meks, so trainees can practice destroying them.”

The very thought soured Manford’s mood. “Ginaz has too many functional meks, in my opinion–it makes me uneasy. Thinking machines should not be kept as pets. There is no useful purpose for any sophisticated machine.”

Anari was hurt that he had criticized her fond recollection. Her voice was small. “It’s how we learned to fight them, sir.”

—

So what’s wrong with this picture? The red part (color added). Do not ever, please, tell me the feelings. Show them through action. This is lazy writing. It was too much work to make her sound wistful when she said the first part. It was too much work to put her second part in a hurt tone. Instead, we were simply told. This is what mediocre writing looks like. This should be shorter, more fluid and subtler. It should not insult the reader’s intelligence. It should let the reader infer and gather emotions through skillful word use in dialogue and narrative.

Here’s another ‘how to do it wrong’:

—From pp. 29-30, paperback version—

“You are going to tell me where those captives are being taken,” Vor said.

The man groaned again and gurgled something that sounded like a curse. Vor didn’t consider it an acceptable answer. He glanced up, saw the fire spreading along the roofs of the houses. “You don’t have much time to answer.”

Receiving no cooperation from the man, Vor knew what he would have to do next, and he wasn’t proud of it, but this slaver was far down on the last of people for whom he felt sympathy. He drew his long skinning knife. “You are going to tell me.”

—

Like it wasn’t already obvious that a gurgled curse wasn’t the answer Vor wanted. Why tell us that, as if we are stupid? And obviously, anything but an answer was continued non-cooperation. No one is so slow in the uptake that this needs to be spelled out so. Wasted words, the kind that push the covers of a book too far apart. I guess it’s easier than writing…

Okay, that was waspish, but I dislike this immensely. It is lazy, it radiates ‘phoning it in.’ If you are trying to improve your writing, this is one of the best and most important lessons you can absorb. Where humanly possible, show rather than tell. It will read smoother, cleaner and your reader will not be jarred, nor have her intelligence insulted. ‘Like your reader’ includes ‘respect your reader.’ This means that you write clean stuff that doesn’t waste her time or treat her like she isn’t smart enough to figure out a cue.

Anyone who considers him or herself in the intermediate phases of developing writing skill is welcome to rewrite either passage in comments, and I’ll be glad to make some observations. Show me how it should have been done.