Celebrating Independent Authors
(Note, this post should be read with your “tongue-in-cheek” detector on its highest setting) 😉
If there is one thing readers hate, it’s exposition. If there are two things, the other is main characters who aren’t physically attractive and they don’t want to have crazy monkey sex with. But if there is only one, it is that blasted expository writing. Continue reading “Ed’s Really Bad Writing Advice: Exposition”
Yes, I totally stole this post title from a Counting Crows album. I’m an old guy, so sue me. No wait, please don’t.
All last month, my Ed’s Casual Friday column here at IU consisted of a four-part look at one-star reviews on a hundred novels regarded as the “best” literature has to offer. The astute among you may have noticed that doing those four articles allowed me to write a full month of posts all at once, and then basically not show up for the rest of July. My lack of presence was not exclusive to IU, but to all the “social media outlets” around which us writerly types tend to congregate. Facebook pages, boards, groups, sites, lists, on and on, ad nauseum. I largely stayed off line for all of July, and I didn’t really do any writing, either. After finishing the fourth book in a series and releasing it at the end of June, before launching into book five I took a couple Mental Health days that turned into a week, and then the full month. Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: August and Everything After…”
And so, it ends. Maybe with a whimper, maybe with a bang, maybe with a whoopy cushion. This week concludes our perusal of Daniel S. Burt’s list from The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time, with one-star accompaniment by 100 helpful readers, who really, really hated all of these books. Continue reading “One-Star Reviews of the Hundred Greatest Novels, #25 to #1”
Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. Actually, it ends next week, but this week merely continues the countdown of brutal one-star reviews on The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels All Time (by Daniel S. Burt). We groaned our way from 100 to 76, wept bitter years from 75 to 51, now we’re rounding the bend for the home stretch with numbers 50 to 26.
Once again, these are all real one-star reviews from real readers, culled from a popular reading site. I am not saying I agree or disagree with any or all of them, and I am not doing this solely to elicit gasps or chuckles. My only goal is to remind my fellow scribblers that for every single book ever written, there are readers who feel they are absolute drek. Take solace in that whenever you get a less than stellar review yourself, and know that you will. Unless, of course, you think you are oh so much better than every writer on this list, in which case you are delusional and there is just no helping you. Continue reading “One-Star Reviews of the Hundred Greatest Novels, #50-26”