I’m back! All is well, no worries. Life is muchly busy right now, but when is it not?
I recently read this post over on Lauren Dane’s blog and it made me wax philosophical in my pea brain about reader perceptions, including reviewer perception.
In an ideal world ruled by moi, Queen Goddess of All She Surveys, everyone would luuuurve my books and I’d be on the NYT bestsellers list. However, it is not an ideal world and I certainly have only limited control over it. So sometimes I get a not-so-great review. There have been times, even, (*cough*) that I have received bad reviews.
They might prick my ego a little, might make me pout for a while and eat some chocolate but I know they’re inevitable. I know that each and every person who comes to one of my books has had a different life experience than I’ve had. I know their perceptions of Life, The Universe and Everything are different than mine. I know they probably have a different favorite jam than I do (blackberry!) and they may have voted for the other guy in the last election. I also know that because of these differences, every single reader sees my books through a different lens. Not all those lenses will be rosy.
So I tend to try (note the word try) to be philosophical about bad reviews and those readers who are less than enthused about my writing. Otherwise, I’ll make myself crazy, you know? And I don’t need more crazy.
Mostly, what I aim to do in my writing is create worlds of escape for people to slip into for a while. My goal is to build places where readers will want to spend time and characters they want to spend time with. Well, and I also aim to heat up the pages. 🙂 I love to build emotion between my characters through hot sex scenes. I love writing sex.
But, basically, I just love to write, (I do it the very best way I know how), and I’m thankful to each and every reader and reviewer that supports my work and allows me to do more of it.
Tomorrow I’m going to talk about three books I’ve read/am reading now: 1. Blood Bound, by Patricia Briggs, 2. Hitting the Mark, by Jill Monroe, and 3. Ain’t She Sweet, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, because not only do I love to write, I love to read.
