{"id":5068,"date":"2011-05-09T13:56:32","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T18:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=3404"},"modified":"2025-08-24T11:47:24","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T16:47:24","slug":"reviewing-too-close-to-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/reviewing-too-close-to-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviewing too close to home"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote on this topic two months ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I still don\u2019t know what to do, but I\u2019m losing my patience because I discovered that writers of some of the stuff that\u2019s really bad are giving writing advice<\/em><\/strong>. Oy. Stop it. You\u2019re not qualified to give writing advice. Really.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In light of this post<\/a> and this comment<\/a>,<\/p>\n

in light of a recent romancelandia kerfuffle about writers\/unpublished authors reviewing,<\/p>\n

in light of Mormons\u2019 cultural tendency to say nice or nothing at all,<\/p>\n

in light of the fact that I\u2019m a reader first and I\u2019ve spent money on these books and I have a reader\u2019s perspective and want to express it,<\/p>\n

in light of the fact that writers reviewing is generally fraught with dangers, not the least of which is shitting in your own nest,<\/p>\n

in light of the fact that my work is in no way intended for a Mormon market2<\/a><\/sup> \u2026 <\/p>\n

I\u2019m still<\/em><\/strong> conflicted.<\/p>\n

Mostly I don\u2019t relish the idea of people like OutAndAbout (and I think I know who wrote that comment) coming to bash me for MY writing. It hurts my feelings. Yes, there. I said it. It hurts my feelings. Dirty little secret: It hurts every writer\u2019s feelings.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, there\u2019s a very small minority of Mormons who\u2019d brave my stuff anyway, so the worst criticism I\u2019m bound to get—probably anonymously—is that I\u2019m too graphic and my characters swear and they DNF\u2019d it after the first two pages. Okay. And?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got several Mormon novels on my TBR list (albeit heavily weighted for stuff that\u2019s been pre-vetted by readers with whose taste I get along). One I\u2019m reading, The Road Show<\/em> by Braden Bell<\/a>, is pretty good. It\u2019s not a page-turner and it\u2019s episodic (natch, written by a playwright\/screenwriter), but that\u2019s never bothered me unless badly done. It gets a little churchy-heavy-handed in spots, but I like it.<\/p>\n

I read Angela Hallstrom\u2019s book Bound on Earth<\/em><\/a> and I loved it. I\u2019m dying to write a review of that, but I have nothing to say other than \u201cI loved it\u201d and respond to some reviews I read on Goodreads. Oh, and that it\u2019s a novel a short-story-writer-who\u2019s-not-a-novelist would\u2019ve written (which is both its weakness and its strength). I\u2019m interested to see if she can write a long work that\u2019s not a series of interconnecting\/interdependent vignettes strung together.<\/p>\n

So what to do. What to do.<\/p>\n

As a compromise, I created a new alter-ego to review, but I don\u2019t like doing that. I\u2019m not cut out to sustain such an act.<\/p>\n

The unnamed book I previously linked has been haunting me (not in a good way) for months, because this is what the market base for Mormon fiction, the one that wants clean and good (e.g., my mother), associate with Mormon fiction. They are the people who need to be brought back into the Mormon fiction fold, and they aren\u2019t going to be unless Mormon fiction improves. It can\u2019t improve unless someone just says, \u201cThis sucks. It should never have been published. Next!\u201d<\/p>\n

Yeah, it\u2019s clean.<\/p>\n

But it still sucks.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

1<\/a>.<\/span>  But am I? No. It\u2019s why I don\u2019t give writing advice. At least not publicly. It\u2019s hard to give writing advice to someone who feels free to harshly critique your stuff with great (if dubious) authority, but wants you to comment on theirs and the only thing you can say is, “It\u2019s dead boring.” But instead you give advice on how to improve it, and they insist they\u2019ve written a flawless masterpiece. And really, there\u2019s nothing technically wrong with it except it\u2019s dead boring. Boring sucks. First rule of writing: Don\u2019t suck.<\/p>\n

2<\/a>.<\/span>  Because I refuse to be held accountable for your salvation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote on this topic two months ago. I still don\u2019t know what to do, but I\u2019m losing my patience because I discovered that writers of some of the stuff that\u2019s really bad are giving writing advice. Oy. Stop it. You\u2019re not qualified to give writing advice. Really.1 In light of this post and this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[535,543,532,94,534],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-molit","category-reading","category-religion","category-reviewing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5068"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5068"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18539,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5068\/revisions\/18539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}