Three months before she died Daina Harrow faced a bully at school.
Six weeks before she died Daina Harrow suffered an assault in the park.
One week before she died Daina Harrow stole a secret people had killed to hide.
Published: January 2015
Three months before she died Daina Harrow faced a bully at school.
Six weeks before she died Daina Harrow suffered an assault in the park.
One week before she died Daina Harrow stole a secret people had killed to hide.
That was ten years ago. Ten long years.
Now, her bones have been found on a building site. A coroner's inquest has been reopened. A parade of witnesses is about to start.
And Daina's here. Watching every day as her mother cries in the courtroom. Watching every day as her friends, and her enemies, and her killers lie about her on the stand.
Watching, and making sure that no matter what the coroner hears, you know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.\
So help you God.
GUEST POST
How to handle negative criticism.
Write a gruesome death scene where the killer tortures someone for hours, wringing every last drop of pleasure that he can out of the victim’s pain before sticking the final blade (or bullet, or noose, or injectable poison) into him. Do it immediately after receiving the review. You don’t want to let that emotion grow cold. If you start to calm down mid-scene read it again. Give yourself the gift of a scene crafted with pure emotive power.
Then name that character after the person who gave you the negative review. You can always change it later because it’s bound to be a stupid name that no character you’re giving birth to will ever be called.
Stick the review in a drawer, or in One-note or similar if you’re living in the digital age, and then ignore it for at least a week.
Getting a negative review is very much like taking your baby for a stroll around the park and having some random stranger stab it because it’s ugly. You need some time for that hurt and anger to heal before you look to see if they’re correct and your baby needs some drastic plastic surgery before you take it out in public again.
But you do have to take the baby out again and see if they’re correct. Even if your friends and family have managed to slip a review past the Amazon sky-net (don’t get me started I’ve already blogged it out of my system) and you think it’s all five-star glory, you can’t make the mistake of thinking that you have nothing to learn.
Some negative reviews are, thank goodness, instantly dismissible. You think my book should be a different price because someone once told you that eBooks are the wave of the future and should only ever cost 0.99c? Why is that my problem?
The answer to that question is, it’s not. No one is going to take a look at that review and think that it’s a good reason not to read your book. If they were upset at the price being more than a dollar, they wouldn’t have clicked through to read your copy and the reviews it had in the first place. You can probably even expel a little bit of effort and have the host site take it down if it’s completely irrelevant. There are online forums for rants that this would sit much more comfortably in.
Don’t worry about taking anyone’s advice on how they think you should fix it – if they knew what was meant to happen in your story it would be their story – but you do need to work it out for yourself. There’ll be one-off randoms where one person thinks there’s a problem where no one else does, but if there’s a theme cropping up you need to work it out and quickly.
Even if it’s too late for your current baby, you can always keep it in the back of your mind as you go on to conceive your next love-child. One ugly baby is unfortunate; a crèche full is just bad family planning, and that’s on you.
About the author:
Throughout my childhood there was never anything I wanted to do but become a writer – it seemed the only natural progression to my life. Then I crawled inside a bottle for fourteen years, and when I popped back out I was working in an office job in a travel agency, my mother was dead, and I was clueless as to how I was meant to get my life back on track.
About the time I started to seriously study the craft of writing, something that used to come naturally to me but had grown incredibly hard through lack of use, I also had a change in career path into insurance (not as big a change as it might seem as it was really from one office job to another with a brighter future and better career path.) I started to challenge myself in my professional life, and my personal life, so instead of focussing in on writing I instead tried out a range of different hobbies, followed up on fleeting interests, tried to learn to play the saxophone which my partner was glad was a short-lived affair, and generally did all of the things I should’ve spent my teens and twenties doing but hadn’t.
But of course I always circled back to writing. Reading and writing. My passion remains the same but instead of skimming widely across any and all genres I’ve narrowed down and done a deep-dive into crime fiction which has been my favourite for over a decade now.
I love the fact that I’ve been reading the same genre of fiction for more than ten years now, and still find new and interesting things with every book that I pick up. Now I’m trying to bring something new and unique to me to the genre. And soon I might finally get back on track to being the person that I always wanted to be.
1 comment:
Thanks very much for hosting my tour today, and thanks to any of your readers dropping by!
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