Thoughts on a kerfuffle

So over on I(heart)Presents feathers got ruffled. Temperatures – and tempers got raised. Posts got irritated or snippy or just plain angry. And, more to the point, they got personal – which was the biggest mistake and just not the point at all.

We were supposed to be discussing books for heaven’s sake.
Well, not even ‘books’ in general – but one aspect of one set of books – the poor old Alpha male ! Thank you all for your comments on my last post. I read them with relief and a sense of soothing – not because they agreed with me – though most did – but because they approached the subject rationally and thoughtfully. And no one took offence or slung attacks at any one personally.


Because this is the point about discussion about a line of books, or even one part of a line of books. It should not descend to defamatory remarks about particular people. ‘Naming and shaming’ of particular authors and particular books doesn’t help. All it does is say ‘I didn’t like this book’ – ‘I’ being one person – any one person who happens to mention any one book. No- actually what they’re saying is that ‘this book didn’t work for me’ – and that’s fine. It didn’t work for you – lots of books don’t work for me. Readers are totally entitled to say that but only - – and this is vitally important – only if they have read the book. The comments that set a light to the blue touch paper over on I(Heart)presents were personal, specific – and they were made by someone who had not read the book and so was only reciting ‘what someone’ (in this case some reviews on Amazon) said.

Now I have ambiguous feelings about reviews on Amazon. I have had some lovely reviews for my books that have been posted up there. And I’ve had some screamers of bad ones. Nothing as wonderful as the personal attack of Reader X a couple of weeks ago – but some bad ones. And you see Reader X is entitled to her opinion - though I might have valued it more if she’s actually made any constrictive comments or related them to any books of mine I could recognise.
But her comments were not made on a public forum.

And this is the problem. Since the internet, Since message boards and discussion groups and – well, yes, and blogs – there seems to have been a trend to turn ‘reviewing’ or commenting on romance writers into a sort of free for all with the current trend to ‘review’ not the books that are worth it but to slice and dice instead. As I said, fine – the book didn’t work for that reader – they’re entitled to say so - but they are not entitled to hang draw and quarter the authors and serve them up to the crows to be pecked at viciously.

Let me tell your something – the author herself is more than capable of letting those crows in and feeling their cruel beaks. The Crows of Doubt are an almost constant companion to many writers – the attack me at least once in every book I write – often more than once. And currently romance readers seem to feel that if an author doesn’t serve up a book – or books - that please them personally then they have the right to flay that author as publicly as they can.

Let me take this kerfuffle away from the debate on I(Heart)Presents. There is also a discussion thread on eHarlequin. Sometime last year there was a discussion there on a particular Harlequin Presents novel that had a premise that some readers found unsympathetic. It also opened with a scene that some found distasteful and unacceptable. The discussion was hot and passionate (much like a Presents novel itself) with some seeing the book as totally in the wrong, others seeing plenty opf good in it and the way it worked out. See – very like the poor Alpha hero – some people condemned this book from the very first scene and felt it should never have seen the light of day – others waited to see WHY this had happened in the story and to see if the book justified itself and worked in the end. And yes, for some it still didn’t work – fair enough. At least they read it, thought about it and came to a rational decision – not one based on hearsay or other’s comments.

But for one particular reader the comments didn’t stop there. They became more personal – I have to say more irrational and totally illogical. This was when the Uncut mini series was prominent in the Modern/Presents line. Again – it’s fine if some readers felt that was a form of romance that went too far. That had topics/scenes they didn’t want to read in their romance. OK – don’t buy the Uncut books. But for this reader – we’ll call her S – took things even further authors, she said, who put in sex scenes using handcuffs (even toy handcuffs) or spanking or whatever were corrupt, degenerate, bad parents, bad citizens . . .. Because they wrote about these things S said, they must be practising them – and worse – and treating their children badly into the bargain.

What?

So that means that every author who writes about serial killers is actually out there murdering because they must practise that too? In that case the police had better start investigating Ian Rankin and Val McDermid right now – and Anne Rice is clearly practising vampirism in preparation for writing her next book. And I, depraved soul that I am, will be out leaping into bed with sheikhs, Greeks, and my current Spaniard in order to be able to write about it.

Let’s get a sense of perspective here. Writers write works of FICTION – that is works of the imagination. They create characters who do not exist – and characters who are not the authors themselves and so do things that the authors would think more than twice about doing. For the story.

If there is a blog about the line of books I write for, I don’t expect it to be, as one commentator said, just a ‘lovefest’. I don’t expect every single book to work for every single reader – that would be naïve at best, actually downright stupid. I don’t even expect every single book of mine to work for every single reader – I can hope but I’ll get bad reviews and letters like that from X. It goes with the territory – I write a book, yes it’s my baby but at some point I have to send my baby out into the world and there, just like my real Offspring – some people are going to love it, some not.

I was brought up on the idea that if you can’t say anything nice about someone then don’t speak at all. There are plenty of books out there in my particular romance line and many others that just do not work for me. So I don’t talk about them. Instead, I talk about the ones I do like – and there have been plenty of those since I started this blog.

But at least I have read them. And to come back to where I began – one of the things that started the kerfuffle over on I(Heart) is a reader commenting – critically – on a book she hadn’t even had in her hand. That is not only not fair, it’s downright wrong.

Take that with the commentator I mentioned in my previous post – someone who had declared it her intention to be a deliberately dissenting voice and you get a pot that was not only well and truly stirred but ready to boil over. Which it did.And that’s a pity. Because in the middle of the furore there were some really great points made – some issues raised that authors and editors alike should take note of and remember when they’re dealing with a book. The most important of those being that the worse a character’s (male or female) behaviour, the more the author needs to set down solid, believable, justifiable reasons for that behaviour. Because that’s what make the book work for more readers more of the time.

Yes the Presents books are filled with ‘emotion, emotion, emotion’ – but as many of the commentators here have said (and many more in private emails ) what makes it work for the reader is ‘motivation, motivation, motivation’.

In other words – as Kate is always boring on about - it’s the question WHY.