May 7th, 2013 
REBLOG:
The (Un)Importance of Readers | The Misbehaving Mind. (Kate Genet)
Thank you, Kira Lyn Blue, for nominating me for a Sunshine Award – “a recognition from fellow bloggers to those who positively and creatively inspire others in the blogosphere”. But the truth is, I’ve been feeling far less
than sunshiny about writing lately. In fact, I’ve been in a major grump about it. And let me tell you, when a writer gets in a grump about writing, the sky’s pretty much falling.
My book sales took a dip before Christmas. This wouldn’t usually bother me – I rarely used to check the sales numbers anyway. As long as that cheque was arriving in the mail every month, I was happy. I don’t write without expecting to be paid for it, but I don’t write for money either. Except this dip in sales was more like a crash off a cliff and my sales have lingered twisted and wounded at the bottom of the cliff ever since.
I’m not going to go into the details of why I think this happened, because I’ve no real, sure idea. The consequences however, they’ve been on my mind. I’ve had to look about for a day job again, and that’s some big deal since poor health makes it impossible to work outside my home. But finding other ways to make money isn’t necessarily a problem, except that it means less time for writing. And I like writing. I like it better than anything else.
Except once I realised I wasn’t getting as many sales, I began to question what I was writing, and why. Unfortunately for me, I write in a small niche genre within a small niche genre. I long came to the conclusion that lesbians don’t generally like reading horror. Even when it’s called supernatural suspense or some other fancy name. On the whole, they’re big romance readers. I hate writing romance. I might have romantic relationships in my books, but tell me to write a typical romance story and I’ll lock myself in a cupboard until you’ve gone home (and I have a particular fear of being locked in small cupboards ever since a rather alarming experience at the age of 9).
But I found myself considering the task. Because of the money. Because of liking to pay the mortgage and eat and other unreasonable things. I knew however, that there’s no way I could do it. It’s just not in me. I’d be bored writing it, and it would never get finished. I’m already pissed off enough that my most popular books are slippy sliding into that paranormal romance category.
Which led me to being really fucking annoyed with readers. Why, I ranted to myself (and my poor partner) does the average reader want so little from a book? Why do they like to stick to one genre? Why do they go loopy loo over incredibly formulaic writing? I got quite hot under the collar on the subject. When I calmed down a little, I looked at the work I’d been doing, writing my novellas about the dimension-travelling Reality Dawn and thought to myself that therein might lie my salvation. While not romance, they might find a decent audience. They might be my life-line back into being able to quit the day job and stick with the writing.
Immediately upon having considered this possibility however, the fun was sucked out of the whole project. The Reality Dawn books were no longer me enjoying myself and trying something new, moving slightly north of horror into fantasy. Instead I found myself trying to figure out whether readers would like this or that about them, whether they would prefer if this or that happened, if they would want more of this or that from them.
The whole thing suddenly got very boring and very painful. They weren’t even properly finished and they were no longer my stories. I wasn’t having fun anymore, and I wasn’t writing because it pleased me to. I was writing for a bunch of people I didn’t even know and wasn’t feeling at all impressed with. Worse, I was allowing this imagined crowd of readers to dictate the course of my stories.
Well, that was a situation that couldn’t last. There were only a few options that I could see. I could drown my sorrows in the bottom of a glass of bourbon – useless suggestion as I don’t drink. I could write solely for profit, turning out copy I thought readers would buy by the bunch. Which could possibly work. I can write well enough to make just about anything sound good, what would it cost me to write what sells? Only my storywriting soul. So, not an option at all. I can slant my writing with an eye to the market, but I’m buggered if I’m going to sell my soul to it. I haven’t been able to get rid of the belief that the stories I have inside me are worth the telling, even if they’re light years from pure, unadulterated romances.
So, one option left. Forget about the readers. Forget about their preferences, their desire for this sort of story over that. Stop thinking about the large group called average reader and what their average little hearts want, and just write as I damned well please.
That’s the option I chose. I stuck a great big ‘fuck you’ sign over the picture of average reader slobbering over a cheesy romance, and went back to going my own way. Writing for myself and my ideal reader. Doing it, not just because I want to get paid, but because I’m a writer and I have stories to tell.
The funny thing is, having thought this epiphany would lead me to start some deep, dark, and twisty novel full of scary shit and other things that go bump in the night, I opened Word and started the third Reality Dawn book. There are dragons in it, and Reality Dawn and her sidekick Rae are having the time of their lives. Just like me.
As for the money? I might not have a large market of readers to keep me in furs and pearls, but I have plenty of books to write – for myself and the ideal reader who finds they like what I do. Time to get back to it.
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MY COMMENT:
Anyway, we have this ritual of reading every night before sleep, if not also in blocks of time during the day. As authors, that ritual would be expected, but I’ve never been with another author before, so I’m going to notice these things.
underbrush of hackneyed formulas, stilted, uninteresting dialogue and purple prose. I wince at the deplorable disregard for the basic skills a writer must nurture, confronted too often with atrocious spelling, horrible grammar, sloppy mechanics and punctuation, and the specter of writers unacquainted with concepts like story arc, characterization, and plotting. Oh why do so many these days think they can write a book just because they are titillated by the idea of it and not because writing is a part of their core identity, and they care about the craft and are willing to do the hard work? When will they understand what an insult it is to writers who have spent the last 10 or 20 years paying their dues, writing and rewriting, honing their skills and studiously applying what they continue to learn?
the like. Perhaps out of some peer pressure, perhaps as a means of at last viewing myself as a romantic creature headed for sexual exploration.
one-horse town with its blue collar sensibility could provide. I looked at the precedents set by relatives and peers and pronounced them abhorrent. I stared into the abyss, the abyss stared back at me, and I spun on my heel and sprinted in the opposite direction. I wanted education. I wanted experience. I wanted to suck the marrow out of the world instead of letting it suck the marrow out of me. I can’t say that my quest was a resounding success, but I certainly reached a point beyond that fate, having done my fair share of sucking.
In those younger, avid reader days, my idea of a perfect weekend was going to one of those quaint used bookshops with whatever allowance or income I had, and spending five hours touching books, gazing at covers, reading blurbs and, I admit, like some atypical addict, sniffing the pages. This olfactory sentimentality has been compromised somewhat by our electronic readers. It’s just not the same, using a Nook or Kindle. One would have to carry a screen cloth to rub off the nose prints, without ever enjoying the maudlin comfort of that book-smell. Just the smell of …what? technology? At least paper cuts are less common. Although I have to say I was rather proud of my paper cuts. I had something to show for turning all those pages. It made me feel purposeful. A badge of literary accomplishment, sequestered inside a Band-Aid.
information and facts into my head with all the fervor of true autodidact and student of life. I gained more practical experience by being often on the yearbook staff, and also worked as a reporter for several newspapers, as a newsletter editor, desktop publisher, in-house graphic artist/label designer; I was a Managing Editor for a small women’s press in Connecticut; I studied under a Bible scholar when I wanted to understand Christianity, religion and the Bible. I held several positions as a technical writer (to include a stint with Raytheon Corporate Jets, where I was in charge of creating sales, technical presentations and documents for $10 million corporate aircraft), and almost from the start, I was an Indie Author and publisher, since I was not impressed with what traditional publishers offered, nor was I at all interested in what the medium and small presses could provide. I could much more effectively publish myself and maintain creative and quality control that way. So I learned about formatting, typesetting, cover design, marketing.
Which brings me back to Michael Stark. Sort of. I’ve been enjoying his serialized 
novel, The Island. It’s delicious. Every last page. I go to sleep thinking about his book, and wake up thinking about it. And while I’m reading I am jealous, wishing I had written it. I’m getting a callous on my finger turning digital pages. It’s so refreshing to discover a writer who knows how to tell a compelling story, has masterful command of language and nuance, and character development and plotting, and still manages to take a rather glutted genre and breath new life into it. All this, seemingly without the misplaced hubris found in so many Indie authors these days. This guy is the real deal, and I hope he offers a stack of other books for me to read soon, because he has now sufficiently whetted my literary appetite, and I will want to follow his career with all the enthusiasm of that young girl who thrilled at Heinlein and Burroughs all those years ago.
I am reposting this here, because I was so relieved to see that someone else out there sees this issue clearly. I am hoping we can overhaul the lesbian literature environment, eventually.
Anyway, the reason I stopped reading lesbian books was because I was so frequently and so profoundly disappointed in them. (and in fact, it was the reason I started writing novels–I was so dissatisfied with lesbian fiction, and I wanted to write a book *I* would want to read). Now, granted, I probably haven’t read enough of them to have an unbiased view–definitely not a scientific sampling….but after trying repeatedly, and finding that 9 out of 10 of them were awful, I just went back to writers I knew and respected. And yes, most of them are mainstream authors, not lesbians. I cut my literary teeth on Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allen Poe, Darian North, Raymond Obstfeld/Laramie Dunaway, Robert A. Heinlein, Dean Koontz, (and yes, some Stephen King); and most recently am enjoying Nelson DeMille and Michael Robotham. The only lesbian writer I read nowadays is 
bad books, when you can just stop reading and look for something else you can really enjoy? I will never live long enough to read all the GOOD books I want to read, so if the first two pages make me roll my eyes, I put it away and look elsewhere. With the advent of self-publishing, anyone who thinks they can write, can publish, without ever paying their dues, honing their craft. I know. I have been writing for something like 25 years, and I rewrote every book I have until I could be proud of it, applying all I’d learned to make it the best book it could be. I can go back and read through my first manuscripts and literally CRINGE at the mistakes I made; how truly amateurish it was. So I kept writing, kept studying the craft of writing, paying attention to the writing of those I admired–studying them, and kept applying that learning to those stories of mine. And that process will never end. There will always be something else to learn, to make me a better writer.
Okay, I have probably pissed off some people by now, so maybe I should hush. It’s really awful to have to mince words simply because it might alienate someone who could be a potential reader. But then again, do I want those types as my readers? If those readers who are now huffing and puffing and busting a vein on their foreheads would give it a bit of thought, they’d see that they should be glad that I care that much about the quality of my own work. I hold myself and others to the same standard, and it’s because I want every reader to get to the end of my books and feel satisfied, knowing their time and money was not wasted.
Welcome to the Irony-Fest, please sign in and wear your name tags.
Review by: 
This is a wide subject area, but I want to focus on just a few things.
{you need to give up, right now, before anyone else gets hurt. The Grammar Nazis are watching….}
side to criticizing someone else’s writing, when you’re WRITING your criticism. It pays to invest in a good helmet, quality running shoes, and to develop a taste for crow).
and powerful word processing program–more on that in another article).
Pick-A-Project-Polka; a dance we writers do when we’re trying to decide what we feel like working on next; we listen to our muse, we dance with our muse, we kick our muse out and get practical, and we sometimes curse our muse and send it to bed without dinner. All of these I’ve done this time around, as well.
the island was a living entity somehow, and perhaps it was a sort of purgatory, and my characters were already dead, but in some alternate reality after death (See? Very similar to Lost). It hardly mattered what my story was about, though, because the whole shebang was a cheese-fest. Dialogue smarmy and uber-romanticized, like something out of a bad Harlequin (not to suggest there was ever a GOOD Harlequin). But I noticed all the stereotyping I was doing, with gender-roles. I, of course, had to have the man save the woman, and she was, of course, weak and frightened and only able to feel safe while in his arms. Repugnant, all around.
scene and getting tired of using “she” and “her” so having to fix that with sentence structure, and stylistic tricks. Another was beginning paragraphs and sentences with the same word repeatedly, over and over, again and again, until it became a repetitious, recapitulation, reiteration, replay, reproduction, rerun, reshowing and also a duplication. Amazing, the little lessons we learn about our craft that we hardly notice until being faced with them in the form of our own literary apparitions, ghost stories from the past. My muse was quite wispy and frail back then. Largely attributable to my early years of reading too many of the aforementioned romance novels, and also watching too many soap operas. I learned how to write poorly from both (these sorts of things also have a way of retarding your intellect, as well). My writing only improved when I began to read more accomplished, masterful authors. Like Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein and later, Dean Koontz (in whom I have lost interest in recent years, perhaps because his writing has become a little tedious–though I did learn a great deal by studying his writing, to find out what he was doing to get me to turn that page every time).
Adult genre. I found those books hugely entertaining and delightful and quick-reading, which was what I wanted at the time. And more recently, I enjoyed Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, but was disappointed in the cop-out ending–a particularly potent peeve of mine. And I have only a few days ago, discovered Nelson DeMille, and he’s shaping up to be a favorite, if this book, Plum Island, continues to be as good as it has been from page-one. I’m excited about this possibility, since I see the stacks and stacks of books he has just waiting for my hungry eyes to explore.
waiting for me to continue that series. And I will continue to do that, while developing other series in the subgenres of lesbian fiction, and making most of them novellas since the trend seems to be shorter books, now. I guess people don’t have or make much time to read these days. Until then, I must keep my focus, and not stray into territory that I can’t occupy in a formidable way, and hope to gain an appreciable piece of the literary pie in that fashion.
It’s so satisfying to sit at my desk and write to the sound of the ocean. Only this time, it’s not in my earbuds, but outside my window. Our move to Dunedin placed us within walking distance of the beach, and the rhythmic breath of the waves at shore soothes me. The cool, robust breeze from the water sometimes spits through our windows like a fire hose, but it helps regulate the temperature in this upstairs master suite, high above almost all other houses on this hillside. It’s Summer here, though luckily for me, the fall and winter-loving, heat-intolerant moi, there really hasn’t been much heat yet. Weather is weird everywhere, as I understand it.
finally create some normal routines.
Thus, over the years, I have managed to produce work in myriad categories. Fourteen, at last count. But it has become clear to me in recent months that my approach has not been wise. This diversification has only managed to erode the ground under my literary feet, and prevent me from getting a proper foothold in the market–especially when so many other writers have established theirs. And they are the ones who enjoy better sales. There’s a reason for that.
It seems that most of THOSE-WHO-READ (myself included, though I made the error of thinking other readers behaved differently) tend to pick the type of book or author they like, or both, and then they continue to read that book/author. When they run out of an author’s work, they seek other authors who write in a similar genre and/or with a similar style. Thus, the readers who buy my books have read whichever genre of mine they are drawn to, and then discover there isn’t another book in that genre from me, and they move on to find those other authors they might also like who have books available which they have not read. This does not encourage a strong, growing readership.
probably would have existed by now, after 29 books. Had those 29 books been in one genre, I would not have taken such a hit when digital publishing swelled to its current oceanic level. According to factzone.com, in America, a new book is published every 13 minutes. This groundswell of publishing is attributable to the ease with which we can now publish our work. Yes, that means more bad books from bad writers mucking up the booklist for the rest of us, but it also means more freedom, and demands that we employ smart-marketing techniques. Hence, the issue at hand with my diversification.
s for my own writing endeavors, though I’ve been getting some whining about where the 3rd in the AKA Investigations series is, currently, I have been sucked in by my story, Resurrection Sticks. It was supposed to be only a short story, based on a weird dream I had. But then as I worked on it, I could see there was more there. Likely, it will be a novella. Kate has been cracking the whip for me to continue it, since she likes it so much. It is a bit of a departure for me. Call it speculative scifi.
You know I feel your pain, my love, as I am in the same boat. After over 20 years of honing my craft and evolving as a writer, I have found that many lesbian readers don’t want anything that makes them think too hard. Hell, some of them even get angry at plots that are unpredictable or complex. I want to write what I want to write, but get bogged down in the marketing aspect, and how little lesbians expand their literary horizons. I still read mostly mainstream fiction, and am not ashamed to say so, nor do I feel it’s some sort of betrayal to lesbians-what it is, is a testimony to the fact that there is more quality fiction in the mainstream than in lesbian literature. Maybe this cliquish lesfic genre needs to evolve–not maybe–in my opinion, it DOES. Writing, and the books that result, should ALWAYS be about the quality of the story, the skill of the author, and not about one genre or another. But alas, there is a hardcore popularity in cheesy romance that reminds me of all the Harlequins I read as a teen. I outgrew those as I matured, and needed deeper material. I don’t understand it either–why lesbian readers don’t thrive on good stories, instead of vapid, puerile drivel.
The other day on Facebook, a lesbian “writer” posted a short snippet of erotic dialogue/interaction, and I almost hurled. Especially when a slew of her fans posted fawning one-liner reviews below it, as if it were actually titillating, and not insipid, adolescent rubbish. Harsh? You betcha. It’s not that there aren’t any good romance writers out there. But most of it, frankly, is not good, it’s swill. I just wish lesbian readers would have a bit more integrity and pride in their literary pursuits; I wish they’d evolve, demand quality writing. What they are doing, is supporting something that speaks ill of us as a community–like we have nothing substantial to offer, and don’t take pride in things like solid storytelling, grammar, punctuation, depth and significance.