That is, if you’re not sick of the topic. Here are a few of my thoughts: in the Washington Post, and in two audio interviews that ran on NPR stations this morning.
on-public-grovels-long-version
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Further thoughts on Sanford…
July 2nd, 2009 by
Respond
How not to respond to a bad review
June 30th, 2009 by
Respond
If you read my Twitter updates, you probably saw this one: “Never, never argue with a bad review. Chant fifty times. Repeat ad infinitum.”
It’s so tempting to explain exactly why a reviewer who didn’t like your book has the comprehension skills of a mole.
But every writer I know who’s done this regrets it. The following is courtesy of Publishers Marketplace
Go Ask Alice: Author Hoffman Shows Authors Not to Tweet In Anger, Apologizes
With one angry electronic outburst novelist Alice Hoffman may have changed how many readers view her. After novelist and longtime critic Roberta Silman wrote a mildly critical review of Hoffman’s THE STORY SISTERS in the Boston Globe, Hoffman reacted with a series of angry tweets. Not just a grumpy post or two, but 27 in all, according to NY Magazine (they have now been deleted, along with the corresponding Twitter account.)
The series of 140-character-or-less insults also included Silman’s phone number and e-mail address (with a typo) and a rallying cry to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.” But Silman was out of town, isn’t on Twitter, and first learned about the controversy from a friend, she tells the LAT’s Jacket Copy. “There have been nine emails to me, all in support of my review and/or my right to review and all apologizing for Alice Hoffman’s perplexing behavior.” Silman adds, “I wouldn’t change anything about my review. I have written many reviews for The Globe and say what I believe, and, in this case, I praised her earlier work, which was clearly better. I’m sorry Alice could not take pride in the good things I said, and perhaps mull a little on the criticism.”
Hoffman issued an apology through Goldberg McDuffie, now saying that she was upset because she believes the review gave away the plot: “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion. Of course I was dismayed by Roberta Silman’s review which gave away the plot of the novel, and in the heat of the moment I responded strongly and I wish I hadn’t. I’m sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I’m truly sorry if I did.”
Separately, Page Six notes that Hoffman also criticized blogger and reviewer Bethanne Kelly Patrick on Twitter after a Barnes & Noble panel discussion before “making up.”
The response to Hoffman doesn’t surprise me, but today I’ve been thinking it through and realize that I’m not exactly sure why it sounds so bad when a writer takes a reviewer to task. There’s little question in my mind that writers come out looking like losers when this happens, which is why I usually try to chant the mantra above. (I also try not to read the Amazon.com reviews but always fail.) But why should that be? Why the aroma of whine when we fight back?
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-28
June 28th, 2009 by
Respond
- Getting ready to watch another global-disaster mini-series. I think the moon is going to hit the earth. I LOVE these. #
- Off the grid for family day (not to be confused with “day off”). #
- Email box is down to 115 messages! Woo hoo! #
- DS12 is making pumpkin cookies. #
- DS12 is eating pumpkin cookies. #
- Never, never argue with a bad review. Chant fifty times. Repeat ad infinitum. #
- Darn it, I can’t find my cell phone… #
- Note to self: When you call lost cell phone, remember that bottom of purse is apparently inside Cone of Silence. #
- DS12 doing math tutorial by Skype, DS15 writing, DD8 practicing piano, Mom wants to eat brownies. Lots and lots of brownies. #
- Just unloaded a whole lot of hay. #
- Time for a writing day. #
- Actually turning out to be more of a writing-slash-”tell reporters why Governor Sanford’s confession was lame” day #
- Just did interview for Fox news. 45 minutes of technical troubles, 45 second sound bite, look out for it! #
- My comments on straying politicians may have gotten bumped by Michael Jackson. After all, in the greater scheme of things… #
- Library Journal picks up Fox’s slack: http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/770000077/post/410046041.html #
- DS15 used my computer, went to practice drums, left himself signed into Facebook. Let’s see…I like the sound of “It’s complicated…” #
- Last night’s discovery: I probably don’t have a future as a background dancer in music videos. #
- Oh, Pandora.com: what about my music choices is signalling “James Taylor Covers” to you? #
- DH just took all the kids to see giant toys beat each other up. I love a (temporarily) empty house. #
- Bummer. 11;20 PM and I am AWAKE. Time to leave my kids random messages on Facebook. #
- This has been a weepy morning. On a lot of fronts. #
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An hour and a half at the TV studio, a fifteen-second soundbite, and then…
June 26th, 2009 by
Respond
Michael Jackson swallowed the entire Fourth Estate. Whole.
So yesterday was my Writing Day, the day I usually try to go off the grid to get some actual WORK done. But by the time I got to my office, I already had four emails and five voice messages from reporters asking for comments on Governor Sanford’s lame confession. (You may remember that I wrote a book about this.)
In how many ways was it lame? Here are the top four…
1. Never said “I sinned.” Just, “I hurt people” (a good thing to admit, but makes it sound like an accident), “I apologize” (this is not the same as admitting sin; you can apologize for something you never even did), “I let people down” (again, an accidental-sounding sort of event). The closest he came to it was, “It was wrong.” Note the sudden shift into the impersonal as he approaches the heart of the matter.
2. Never said clearly whether the affair was now officially over. Or whether he had gone down there to break it off before a reporter spotted him at the airport. Or why it takes FIVE DAYS IN ARGENTINA to say, “It’s over.”
3. Did a nifty bit of blame shifting right at the beginning of his speech. Anyone else notice this? Reduced to its essence: “Obama’s stimulus plan caused me so much stress that I had to go to Argentina and see my mistress by way of recovery.”
4. Left us all wondering: Who did exactly pay for these jaunts to Argentina? And not just the plane tickets. Security? Hotel? Food? Breaking an oath to your wife is bad enough; playing around in the state treasury in order to do so is probably unforgivable.
Anyway, I went ahead and commented, as asked. Then worked at top speed for three hours. Then took a quick shower and headed off to an appointment in an old orange T-shirt with no makeup on and wet hair. As I was driving, Fox News called and asked me to do a TV interview. They’d already booked a studio near where I was heading. So I agreed.
Yes, I know you’re not supposed to powder your nose and put on mascara while driving. The orange T-shirt was past help.
Got to the TV studio only ten minutes late. Sat on stage under very very bright lights for over an hour while the studio solved technical difficulties. Earpiece didn’t work, so couldn’t hear interviewer in D.C. Had to put interviewer on Blackberry speaker-phone and hold it in my lap out of sight of cameras and then talk to picture of myself.
Out of all that, they decided to use a fifteen-second clip. And then the piece got bumped. Ah, well. (My friend Justin points out that Library Journal was kind enough to highlight the connection. Thank goodness Library Journal isn’t obsessed by celebrity passings.)
If I were Mark Sanford, I’d be offering libations/lighting candles/writing grateful requiems in Michael Jackson’s memory.
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I want this guy’s life.
June 23rd, 2009 by
Respond
Maybe it’s just an aftereffect of doing all the history, but I want to make up universes for the next ten years for $$$$.
One Million Pounds=
= Slightly Less
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-21
June 21st, 2009 by
Respond
- Monday, family day: heading off the grid now. Without my to-do list. #
- And the to-do list RETURNS! (cue spooky monster music) #
- Rediscovering a basic truth: once you become a “real writer,” it gets harder and harder to find time and space for actual writing. #
- Today is feeling really complicated… #
- DS15 determined to advance through the taekwando ranks WAY faster than Mom. Yeah, it would probably damage his psyche the other way round… #
- Heading off the grid to write. I hope. #
- Picking blueberries for breakfast. #
- Ate the blueberries. Now watching kids swim. I like summer (mostly). #
- Considering how to cook two meals for eighteen people simultaneously. Thinking chicken, sausage and swiss chard w/pasta, carrot cake, bread. #
- Have mixed feelings about my newest Safari update. #
- Man. Friday afternoons are serious dead time. As in, I can see the corpse of my ambitions to write FLOATING to the surface of the marsh. #
- DS15, on why he still can’t recognize subject vs. object pronouns: “Well, I never had grammar when I was little.” NOT how I remember it. #
- Kids/DH helping cousin move, me blitzing on last workbook in series: http://bit.ly/wpJH9 #
- There just aren’t any rousing congregational hymns about locusts and invading armies. #
- From one musical crisis to another: Why are my children wandering around the house singing, “Jesus, Take the Wheel”???? #
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Let’s see, how far behind have I gotten with my 52-books-in-52-weeks challenge?
June 19th, 2009 by
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Just so you know, I’ve been happily reading a book per week. Just haven’t had the energy to post reviews. (Remember that whole post-medieval world burnout thing? Still…burning.) So here’s a massive mini-review:
Week 17: Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife. Really? Seriously??? A top ten book from Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly? A New York Times Notable Book? She’s a good writer (I loved Prep), but this is just plain sloppy. Completely unbelievable characterization and motivation. Writing means you’re supposed to ENTER INTO the psyches of people you loathe, not just caricature them and then pat yourself on the back.
Week 18: John Sedgwick, In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness & Desire in an American Family. Promising study of the hereditary tendency to manic-depressive disorders, bogged down by way too much irrelevant detail and far too much worshipping of one’s Mayflower-disembarking ancestors.
Week 19: Stephen Fry, Moab is my Washpot. Recommended by a blogger who posted on this site. Fascinating: I’m guessing that nothing, from home education to board-school-privilege, erases that out-of-place feeling of unbelonging. (See Prep, which, like Fry’s book and unlike American Wife, was actually insightful.) Fry reminds me that this discomfort always co-exists with creativity.
Week 20: Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book. I hate it when I get invested in a first-person narrator and then am suddenly jerked into a third-person perspective. Stuck with this book and enjoyed it, but I still wish the narrative strategy had been different.
Week 21: G. K Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown. Haven’t read this for years; popped it back onto my to-read pile for nostalgia’s sake. Here’s Father Brown, explaining how he solves murders:
I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his halfwitted concentration; looking up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer….No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees.
Curtis Sittenfeld, are you listening?
Week 22: Kathryn Harrison, The Mother Knot. Like Sedgwick’s book, a potentially fascinating study of mental pain, made less interesting by its intensely personal nature; not too many points of contact here between the narrator’s journey into her individual past, and anyone else’s. Perhaps this is the nature of writing about mental illness: that it is almost impossible to connect yourself with a pain that might be larger than yourself?
Week 23: Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Disproves the statement above. Sweeping, painful, empathetic, real.
Week 24: Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Blanket statements, unsupported suppositions, sweeping generalizations, and just plain fuzzy thinking. Skip it.
Week 25: Sophie Kinsella, Shopaholic and Baby. Oh, shut up, I was tired and it was fun. Also I kept trying to read Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End and never got past the first chapter. Might try again next week.
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-14
June 14th, 2009 by
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- Heading off the grid for family day. (DD8: “Mommy, today we can do a REALLY BIG PROJECT together!” I am afraid.) #
- Monday is my day off. Tuesday is my Monday. I’m not crazy about Tuesdays. #
- Andrew Sullivan, thanks for the book mention: http://bit.ly/BuYQJ #
- Just finished my first taekwondo lesson in the company of DD8 and DS15. This is going to be fun. #
- Looks like today won’t be an off-the-grid creative day after all; too much post-conference catch-up work. Editing, emailing, weeding… #
- Want to read something truly depressing? http://bit.ly/873St #
- Get up early this morning to write. DS12, appearing: “I think the dog did something all over my rug.” Next 2 hours: labor with carpet foam. #
- Finished scrubbing & chores, did some concentrated school w/kids. Now they’re playing fort and I’m going to try that writing thing AGAIN. #
- You can now follow Peace Hill Press on Twitter: http://twitter.com/PeaceHillPress. #
- Yesterday afternoon: gave up on to-do list and went to bed. Today: to-do list leering at me from desktop. #
- I’m going to THROW the TO-DO LIST AWAY. Without crossing stuff off it. And make a new one Tuesday morning. This feels so…transgressive. #
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That’s it. As a society, we’re probably doomed.
June 11th, 2009 by
Respond
A couple of days ago, I got the following email from a member of the Teach for America corps who knows me through my connection with William and Mary. (I’m posting this with the teacher’s permission and have removed identifying information.)
Read it and weep.
I am finishing up my second year of Teach for America in [an inner-city school system], and am preparing to begin my third year of teaching at my school. I was shopping at the [local] bookstore the other day and I came across “The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child.” Flipping through it, I got very excited at the way in which it is written. I’m a 6th grade ELA and Social Studies teacher in a district with next to no resources. My school has textbooks that the children cannot read, and extremely incomplete classroom “libraries” from which we’re supposed to somehow construct a curriculum, though there are no books at the children’s reading levels with which to teach, and teachers do not have access to copy machines from which to make curriculum-related worksheets. (I have spent hundreds of dollars this year just to provide any sort of suitable reading materials for them!) As I read your book, I became very excited because I realized that, finally, I found a text that covers all of the 6th grade social studies curriculum in an accessible manner. This is exceptional, because you must understand–I taught seventh and eighth graders last year who told me that they had never received social studies instruction before (probably because of the resource and curricular difficulties that I just enumerated).
I immediately bought one copy of the book itself and of the activity book for my own reference. However, I know that without some sort of waiver from the copyright holder, we cannot make any copies from these books. I believe that “The Story of the World” would be an amazing curricular resource for struggling readers eager to learn Social Studies content. Unfortunately, given the current economic crisis, my principal recently announced that the school will not be purchasing any new supplies next year (paper, chart paper, pens, notebooks, etc.), that we will not be able to pay for substitutes to come in on days when teachers are absent next year, and that, most likely, a few teaching positions will be cut in order to conserve funds.
I was wondering if you have any advice on what can be done in this situation. My first thought was that my I should somehow purchase class sets of these materials- either thirty (enough for one class), sixty (enough for the two different SS teachers to use), or 90 (enough for each student to have his or her own copy to reference). However, I realized soon after having this thought that if my principal is unable even to hire substitutes for next year, there is no way we can afford this. Can you tell me what the cost of a class set of these books would be, in case I am somehow able to fundraise and try to get money to purchase a set?
After reading this, I am more impressed than ever by the recent grads who join Teach for America, and stick it out.
I know there are no easy solutions to this educational mess. In this one situation, I can help; Peace Hill Press is organizing a charitable donation to try to get this dedicated teacher the necessary resources. (If you’d like to give us a hand, call our office.)
But what a knotted mess this teacher’s dilemma represents. How do we find the end of the string–the one we’d have to pull to unravel the knots?
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-07
June 7th, 2009 by
Respond
- Walking right at dusk: lightning bugs, moonshadow in front of me, the air smells like barley. #
- Back to work today. Writing 1st, small-press business 2nd, take DS12 to violin lesson 3rd, supervise schoolwork 4th, collapse in heap 5th. #
- Random statement of the day: DS17, walking into kitchen: “Mom and Dad, the FBI called. They don’t take personal checks.” #
- Puppies in the house: the floor’s been 409-ed and carpet-foamed more in the last week than in 19 years previous. Can’t be bad. #
- Time to hoe the sunflower patch. #
- THAT was a big ol’ storm. Century-old maple next to house split in half, huge gum tree smashed back pasture fence. #
- Problem with travelling: impossible to go off the grid the week after, too much scutwork to do. #
- Getting ready for Salt Lake City: drive to Dulles, fly to Utah. #
- So here I am in Utah. Nothing against Utah, but I want to go home now. #
- Ooh, look. The smog from last night has lifted and I can see mountains. #
- This is just a convention center, but somehow the fact that it’s called the Salt Palace improves it. #
- Jetlag: My head is filled with cotton. But my mouth is moving and people are nodding, so something coherent is coming out… #
- So where’s the best place in Salt Lake City to get a really great meal? #
- Must. Get. Out. Of. Bed. Wait, didn’t I do this last Sunday? #
- Salt Lake City airport, 8 AM Sunday: Mad chaos. Lines everywhere. Piles of suitcases. Can’t get to self check-in:200 people already waiting. #
- Might help if I told the ticket agent the correct airport, when he asked where I was going. Now he’s rolling his eyes: stupid tourists. #
- Pulling out of National Airport parking garage. Ahhhh, humidity. #
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