One of the hardest things about being a writer is the gap of time between when one finishes a piece of writing (releasing it to the publisher as edited and complete), and when the damn book actually comes out. At best, it’s a matter of months. Sometimes it’s a year or more. Months or a year between your finishing something and when you have the slightest idea whether anyone will actually LIKE it.

Those months, if my mother will excuse the language, are FUCKING MISERABLE, full of nail-biting and muscle-knotting bouts of anxiety and self-doubt. Did I get it right? Will people like it? Will they get what I was trying to do? Will they think it’s as kickass cool as I do?

You never know, and the waiting can kill you. Not just because the sales numbers and reviews can make or break your career (though they can), but because you released a piece of art in the world, and whether you admit it or not, a lot of your self-esteem is tied into what people think of it.

So it was with RSB. I am a life-long comic fan, and I have talked shit with my friends about many a poorly-written book over the years. How would mine hold up in a debate amongst overeducated, judgmental, middle-age hipsters, like me and my friends? Further, how will it appeal to my fiction readers, who never read a comic in their life and picked this up just to be supportive or completeist? Good lord, what is my mom going to say?

But the first set of reviews are in, and my heart it returning to a normal rate. People seem to like the book. There are some really nice things said by hardcore fans on on the Dynamite Red Sonja: Blue message board.

Also Blair Marnell, clearly a long-time comic reader who is unfamiliar with my prose work, writes an amazing review on Crave Online.

Then there’s Niall Alexander, who is one of my fantasy readers and longtime followers of my blog, who has only recently returned to the comic shop after a long absence.  You can read Niall’s excellent review on his blog, The Speculative Scotsman. He has some interesting theories as to why the project has morphed a bit over the last year. He also brilliantly lowers the tone of all reviews everywhere by managing to tie in the subject of queefing, something my agent assures me he could happily have gone to his grave knowing nothing about.

Dude.

Das Flüstern der Nacht (the German translation of The Desert Spear) is in the running on the German book lovers’ site LovelyBooks for their “Der Leserpreis – die besten Buecher 2010″ award! It made it to the Shortlist in the category “Fantasie/Science Fiction”, in which I am competing with 35 other books. I’m honored to be among such fine contemporaries.

I’ve never won an award for writing. I sure would like to, though.

Vote here until Friday, December 10. On Monday December 13th, the  Gold, Silver and Bronze will be awarded. Good luck to all my competitors!

What we’re releasing today is an imperfect work, with the idea being for it to be improved upon over the coming days and weeks, in response to your feedback regarding its design and ease of use. You’ll notice, for example, that the private messaging functionality is yet to go live, and that the registration process could be somewhat less clunky. Once you’ve registered, you’ll need to check the email account which you provided during registration for a message which contains your auto-generated password.

So, without further ado, I would like to invite you to check out the forum. Please feel free to post whatever you wish. It would be especially helpful if you could leave us your feedback here, under Forum Feedback.

(Please note that during the development phase, we secretly opened up the site to registered users for the first time. This is why about a half a dozen of you who are WordPress-savvy were able to register. Now that the forum page is no longer password protected, those users should be able to view the forum and sign in with your original login details.)

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to your comments and suggestions.

David

I’ve been told by many people, including a few well-known authors, that this is a bad practice. Some call it masturbation and others call it masochism, but whatever you label it, I can’t help myself. When you spend thousands of hours toiling on something, it’s hard to pretend you don’t care what people think. I care. So I go on Amazon and B&N and Goodreads and have google scour the internets and when a new review pops up, I read it.

I am fortunate that mostly they are positive things that give me joy and encouragement to keep up at what I’m doing. Other times they are critical in a fair way, and give me ideas about how to improve my craft in the future. No one likes to have their weaknesses pointed out publicly, but I think it’s worth the price if it makes me a better author.

And sometimes, reviews kick me square in the nuts. People get angry about my choice of POV character, or who slept with who, or whatever, and say some mean and hurtful things. A lot of times these reviewers don’t even know what they’re talking about, having read more into the story that was actually there, ignored sections of the text that counter their arguments, approached it with a chip on their shoulder that I accidentally knocked off, or whatever. But even when I can see this and know that I wouldn’t change the book even if I could, it stings a bit, and sometimes throws me into a funk that can last for hours, especially since I know there’s no point in responding to defend it. It’s like knowing a bully is picking on your kid at school and not being allowed to go beat him up yourself.

You have to take the bad with the good.

I know I took some chances with The Desert Spear. I didn’t want to just repeat the formula of The Warded Man, however successful it might have been. I already wrote that book, and had no interest in writing it again. I wanted to do something different. I knew this would elate some readers and piss others off. Such is the risk an author takes when they roll the dice and send a manuscript out. It’s been interesting to see the progression of reviews from one book to the next.

I used to post every single review here on the blog, but I just don’t have that kind of time anymore, but here are some recent reviews that injected a little joy into my life:

The other night at Balticon while playing arm candy to the lovely and talented NYT Bestselling author Gail Carriger, I gave a copy of The Warded Man to Howard Tayler, the Schlock Mercenary. He has since called it the best convention swag ever.

Bookish Ardour reviews both The Painted Man and The Desert Spear.

Dave Brendon was one of my very first reviewers and conducted my first online interview. He had to wait a bit to get The Desert Spear down in South Africa, but he finished it this week and wrote this great review.

Jessica Strider is a Canadian bookseller and one of the nicest ladies you’ll ever meet. She runs a site called Sci-Fi Fan Letter where she reviewed The Warded Man last year and did an interview with me. Here she reviews The Desert Spear.

Mark the Walker of Worlds wrote a kickass Desert Spear review recently as well.

Okay, enough masochistic masturbation. I have a Daylight War to fight…