Thursday, May 19, 2011

Unpleasant exchange with a reviewer

Book: Samurai Zombie Hunter
Words: 1,604
Time: 3:30 - 6:30 (minus 1/2hr)
Mood: Bad
Impression: Good enough

My morning writing routine was derailed this morning because I had to deal with a situation with on one of my books. About a week ago someone gave Everybody Masturbates a 1 start review. That would go along with my 8 other 5-star reviews. Normally I wouldn't react to that because it was clearly an outlier, but this one I couldn't ignore.

Without going into detail, the reviewer basically implied that I wrote the book for predatory purposes. It shocked me. And although I tried to handle the situation with humor, apparently I was a little too sarcastic for my own good. To be sardonic I started a sentence with "Since Human Beings have been masturbating for 10 or 11 years now..." I thought that it was clearly a bit of sarcasm, but the reviewer responded with "See, there's proof that you didn't do any research for the book because people have been masturbating forever."

I laughed it off thinking that she was joking. But this morning someone else posted a comment say that I never really addressed the fact that I said people have only started masturbating 10 or 11 years ago. I was shocked. I then had to go back and give a very detailed answer as to why I had been sarcastic and everything else.

On one hand it was a good lesson on posting on public forums, ie. not everyone gets sarcasm. On the other hand, I'm again pretty pissed that someone could publicly imply that someone has predatory intend based on a book that they admittedly haven't read. And now I have more responses that I have to go and respond to and I know I'm just going to get more pissed when I'm done. I must remain calm.

I expected to have very strong reactions to the Everybody books. But readying yourself in theory is much different than dealing with it when it happens. I'll just try to keep on.

Luckily my only plan today was to finish the first half of the book. I hadn't planned to go any further than that. I was able to do it in 3 hours. Unfortunately it was only 1,600 words. But hopefully that still does mean that I could finish the book by the end of next week if I push hard enough. We will see though.

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