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Things Which Should Not Mix
Feb. 6th, 2015 12:20 pmCreators and fandom should rarely mix.
I think I've been around fandom long enough to say that whenever I see the author/producer interacting with the online fandom it makes me wary. Wank usually ensues. The same goes for writers interacting with online reviewers of their work. I just think that other than a thank you, authors should be very wary of responding.
Truthfully, I don't leave reviews often on Amazon. I have to either be annoyed or happy to bother. I was annoyed by one recently. As I said in my review, I can overlook the occasional typo. I can even ignore some grammar or formatting. But when it's something both essential and fundamental, I have issues, and I proceeded to explain two very basic issues I had with an ebook (I'll get to the problems in a second).
For whatever reason the book I reviewed still had a tab open in my iPhone browser and I noticed that said review had been voted unhelpful by 1 person. I ruefully wondered whether it was the
author unhappy that the one and only review of the book is a negative one, but I thought that might be judgemental on my part. Then I saw there was a comment to my review and said comment WAS the author....defending the points of criticism. I'm thinking that the negative vote was indeed the author. And I stand by my negative review, because I still think they are very valid criticisms.
The story in question is ye olde 'Long lost heir' plot. 3 brothers are at their dying maternal aunt's bedside when she says that they have a brother they had never heard of who had been given away at birth and who is heir to their uncle's fortune. The brothers then go in search of long lost heir. Oh and it's 1812 England.
My problems:
1) From beginning to end of the novel the long lost heir is referred to as a step brother. He is not a step brother.
The premise is ye olde late 18th century arranged marriage where after producing the heir and the spare and tired of her husband's blatant infidelity, the wife had an affair, got pregnant, and furious husband shuffled her off to seclusion until she had said child. Then he forced her to give up the baby. The story is that her three legitimate sons are searching for her illegitimate one. The late mother was only ever married to the first husband. Plus the three legitimate brothers are biologically related to the illegitimate one via their mother, and yet, beginning to end by every character in the book, the term 'step brother' is used, and it is wrong.
In the author's response to my crit, she blames this error on her editor not having caught it. Well, yes, an editor should have caught it, but just to be clear here, I'm not talking about a term 'slipping by' copy editing. The word 'step brother' is used literally hundreds of times in the book. A lot! Repetitively so. The author consistently, throughout the entire novel, misused a common word. Yes, an editor should have told her, (hell, your standard fanfic beta reader should have told her) but the author should have known! It's literally hundreds of instances in the book, and its repeated misuse was annoying! (Since it's an ebook, the author wrote that this has since been corrected. Find and replace is someone's new best friend).
2). The premise. Lord, the premise. And I do mean, 'Lord' because the plot is not that a dead uncle left his illegitimate nephew a shit ton of money. No, the dead uncle supposedly left the younger illegitimate nephew an English EARLDOM. Not only that but not one character raises an eyebrow over this. In my negative crit , I wrote that entailments have rules. For this to have happened would be highly unusual. (I was being nice. This was preposterous). The author's response was to cry that I didn't know what kind of research went into her (ebook romance) novel, and I could not say that 'never in the history of ever' had such a thing happened (she actually used never in the history of ever'.)
Oh, my knee jerk reaction (that would only prolong this into wank) would be to challenge her to produce one case where a British earldom was willed to their younger, illegitimate nephew...bypassing two older and one younger legitimate ones, because while I'm not willing to do the research, I think the odds of 'never in the history of ever' are in my favor. I know that there are a few courtesy Scottish baronies that go along with the estate. You can currently buy a few on auction if you have the hankering for a courtesy title. But an English Earldom in the early 19th century could not --could not-- simply be willed away at random. Things just didn't happen that way, and if, for the sake of fiction, someone wanted to force it to, it would still need to be treated as an extraordinarily unusual thing to happen. In fact, such a thing would almost certainly require a literal act of Parliment. Yet this novel treated it as though it was such a commonplace happening that not only does no one hang a lantern on it by asking 'how?' but no one even seems intrigued by the novelty!
Basically, this would not happen and, if it did, it would be an extraordinary scandal with legal ramifications out the wazoo. And the author wrote it as casually as if the uncle had willed the long lost illegitimate nephew (bypassing 3 legitimate ones) Aunt Polly's dinner china.
So, no, a reader does not have to prove that 'never in the history of ever' has such a thing happened (though I suspect it hasn't ). An author has to sell their premise, either by making it conform to the rules of entailment or by at least acknowledging that what's going on breaks the rules in a highly (highly!) unusual and noteworthy manner. You don't get to post a comment on Amazon asking that a reviewer do historical research to prove that such a highly unusual event has never ever happened. If said author is depending on some obscure anomaly and not showing their story of it as an anomaly, then the criticism is still valid. This is weird. Characters would think it weird. The oldest legitimate brother, no matter how kind or how generous would still be curious how he was passed over!
Oh and while I'm at it, the titled uncle is long dead, so why was all this pending on the Earl's sister dying?! Has the title been unclaimed all these years? Why did the legitimate nephew never question why he wasn't given the title all these years?
I'm sorry. I don't believe in the 'beleaguered' author's supposed dilligence in research , because if she had been into research, at the very least she'd realize how anomalous the situation she created would be and would have the characters behave accordingly.
But then this is someone who let a few hundred instances of 'step brother' slip by. Excuse me if I think that such a person might be allowing glaring errors to slip through.
And I stand by my criticisms.
And I also returned the ebook (actually I did that before leaving the review. I didn't even finish it. I read the first forty pages, got hella annoyed, flipped and read the end and returned it. I wrote the review only when bored the next evening and noting that absolutely no one had ever reviewed the book.)
I think I've been around fandom long enough to say that whenever I see the author/producer interacting with the online fandom it makes me wary. Wank usually ensues. The same goes for writers interacting with online reviewers of their work. I just think that other than a thank you, authors should be very wary of responding.
Truthfully, I don't leave reviews often on Amazon. I have to either be annoyed or happy to bother. I was annoyed by one recently. As I said in my review, I can overlook the occasional typo. I can even ignore some grammar or formatting. But when it's something both essential and fundamental, I have issues, and I proceeded to explain two very basic issues I had with an ebook (I'll get to the problems in a second).
For whatever reason the book I reviewed still had a tab open in my iPhone browser and I noticed that said review had been voted unhelpful by 1 person. I ruefully wondered whether it was the
author unhappy that the one and only review of the book is a negative one, but I thought that might be judgemental on my part. Then I saw there was a comment to my review and said comment WAS the author....defending the points of criticism. I'm thinking that the negative vote was indeed the author. And I stand by my negative review, because I still think they are very valid criticisms.
The story in question is ye olde 'Long lost heir' plot. 3 brothers are at their dying maternal aunt's bedside when she says that they have a brother they had never heard of who had been given away at birth and who is heir to their uncle's fortune. The brothers then go in search of long lost heir. Oh and it's 1812 England.
My problems:
1) From beginning to end of the novel the long lost heir is referred to as a step brother. He is not a step brother.
The premise is ye olde late 18th century arranged marriage where after producing the heir and the spare and tired of her husband's blatant infidelity, the wife had an affair, got pregnant, and furious husband shuffled her off to seclusion until she had said child. Then he forced her to give up the baby. The story is that her three legitimate sons are searching for her illegitimate one. The late mother was only ever married to the first husband. Plus the three legitimate brothers are biologically related to the illegitimate one via their mother, and yet, beginning to end by every character in the book, the term 'step brother' is used, and it is wrong.
In the author's response to my crit, she blames this error on her editor not having caught it. Well, yes, an editor should have caught it, but just to be clear here, I'm not talking about a term 'slipping by' copy editing. The word 'step brother' is used literally hundreds of times in the book. A lot! Repetitively so. The author consistently, throughout the entire novel, misused a common word. Yes, an editor should have told her, (hell, your standard fanfic beta reader should have told her) but the author should have known! It's literally hundreds of instances in the book, and its repeated misuse was annoying! (Since it's an ebook, the author wrote that this has since been corrected. Find and replace is someone's new best friend).
2). The premise. Lord, the premise. And I do mean, 'Lord' because the plot is not that a dead uncle left his illegitimate nephew a shit ton of money. No, the dead uncle supposedly left the younger illegitimate nephew an English EARLDOM. Not only that but not one character raises an eyebrow over this. In my negative crit , I wrote that entailments have rules. For this to have happened would be highly unusual. (I was being nice. This was preposterous). The author's response was to cry that I didn't know what kind of research went into her (ebook romance) novel, and I could not say that 'never in the history of ever' had such a thing happened (she actually used never in the history of ever'.)
Oh, my knee jerk reaction (that would only prolong this into wank) would be to challenge her to produce one case where a British earldom was willed to their younger, illegitimate nephew...bypassing two older and one younger legitimate ones, because while I'm not willing to do the research, I think the odds of 'never in the history of ever' are in my favor. I know that there are a few courtesy Scottish baronies that go along with the estate. You can currently buy a few on auction if you have the hankering for a courtesy title. But an English Earldom in the early 19th century could not --could not-- simply be willed away at random. Things just didn't happen that way, and if, for the sake of fiction, someone wanted to force it to, it would still need to be treated as an extraordinarily unusual thing to happen. In fact, such a thing would almost certainly require a literal act of Parliment. Yet this novel treated it as though it was such a commonplace happening that not only does no one hang a lantern on it by asking 'how?' but no one even seems intrigued by the novelty!
Basically, this would not happen and, if it did, it would be an extraordinary scandal with legal ramifications out the wazoo. And the author wrote it as casually as if the uncle had willed the long lost illegitimate nephew (bypassing 3 legitimate ones) Aunt Polly's dinner china.
So, no, a reader does not have to prove that 'never in the history of ever' has such a thing happened (though I suspect it hasn't ). An author has to sell their premise, either by making it conform to the rules of entailment or by at least acknowledging that what's going on breaks the rules in a highly (highly!) unusual and noteworthy manner. You don't get to post a comment on Amazon asking that a reviewer do historical research to prove that such a highly unusual event has never ever happened. If said author is depending on some obscure anomaly and not showing their story of it as an anomaly, then the criticism is still valid. This is weird. Characters would think it weird. The oldest legitimate brother, no matter how kind or how generous would still be curious how he was passed over!
Oh and while I'm at it, the titled uncle is long dead, so why was all this pending on the Earl's sister dying?! Has the title been unclaimed all these years? Why did the legitimate nephew never question why he wasn't given the title all these years?
I'm sorry. I don't believe in the 'beleaguered' author's supposed dilligence in research , because if she had been into research, at the very least she'd realize how anomalous the situation she created would be and would have the characters behave accordingly.
But then this is someone who let a few hundred instances of 'step brother' slip by. Excuse me if I think that such a person might be allowing glaring errors to slip through.
And I stand by my criticisms.
And I also returned the ebook (actually I did that before leaving the review. I didn't even finish it. I read the first forty pages, got hella annoyed, flipped and read the end and returned it. I wrote the review only when bored the next evening and noting that absolutely no one had ever reviewed the book.)
