Reading Reviews

The publicist at my publisher isn't too worried about Harper Lee hijacking my release date. There's not a huge crossover audience. I suspect that the teen readers are still in the "ew, a sequel to a book I was forced to read" category, and it'll be literary people who are most excited. I did love To Kill a Mockingbird when I read it, but I've never had any desire to re-read it, and I'm not sure about reading the follow-up book. Sometimes, a book stands alone as a perfect entity, and I would rather leave it that way than follow up on it. There have been other books I've loved where I've avoided sequels. If there's enough material there to get a story out of it (and it isn't a genre situation where villains can arise), then it generally means things are disrupting these people's lives. I'd rather imagine what happens next than actually see it play out. But I'm weird that way. I haven't read the new Bridget Jones book that takes place more than a decade after Bridget and Mark Darcy got together.

For now, I need to worry about my own books. I've been going back and forth with my agent on cover copy for the next Fairy Tale book. She doesn't think my take is quite right, then I agree with her but think her take on it is all wrong, so I rewrite, and she's not sure about that. Eventually we'll agree on something that accurately describes the book. Meanwhile, they're getting info together to send to subrights agents, and I haven't been collecting or even reading reviews, so I don't have review quotes. Strangely, I find myself really sensitive about this series. I can't even bear to read positive reviews of it. The longer I'm in this business, the less I can deal with reviews, in general. When I started out with the Enchanted, Inc. series, I had Google alerts set up. By the seventh book, I didn't want to know. And it's not like I get a lot of bad reviews, so I'm not sure where this came from. I think I mostly don't want to be influenced by outside voices, good or bad. I've seen how dangerous that can be in other people's work. You'll never make everyone happy, so there's no point in catering to the fanbase. You just need to write your own stories.

Anyway, this will tie in to my next step in the book I'm working on because I need to come up with a paragraph to describe it, and if I can't describe it in a paragraph, I need to work more on the plot.

All this on a day when I really just want to crawl back in bed. I had a weird nightmare last night in which I was in grad school (I've seldom considered grad school because it's not that applicable to my life, but being in grad school has become a recurring nightmare) and taking a writing seminar that somehow involved both pointe shoes and cake decorating. And we weren't allowed to eat the cake. I'm not sure what this had to do with writing. At any rate, it didn't make for restful sleep, and then I woke up at 5 a.m. with a bad foot cramp. I managed to ease the worst of it, but it's still twinging. Maybe that's where the stuff about pointe shoes came from.