Continuing my posts about junk directed at writers and at me personally, I’ve made a list of words that show a disrespectful attitude. One of the rudest, most disrespectful things you can do to a person is not give them your full, real attention while still wanting to express an opinion. If one of my books is worth your commenting on, it’s worth your full time.

What sort of person tries to make or break a book; destroy all an author’s hard work; slices up something they barely even understood; makes sweeping, negative judgments on something they didn’t even finish? Or read so hastily, basically planning what they were going to say before even reading. A person who is stating disrespect. “I don’t like this person/movie/book. I don’t want other people to find and like them either. But I didn’t pay them the compliment of giving them a full chance before I decided, so I’ll just throw out some random insults."

This makes the person doing it look stupid and contributes nothing to the social conversation. Why people do this, I don’t know, but if people ever approach you with some kind of attitude that’s just involved enough to say something rude and not involved enough to actually give you real time, put them on mute and show them the door.

• “Confusing.” This is one of the oldest bad-guy tricks. If people say this, they are trying as hard as ever they can not to understand the point of your book. That’s why it “confuses” them. They still want to say something critical so other people don’t find your book and like it. But they don’t know what to say because they’re tuning the book out. So they say the setting, plot structure, or dialogue is “confusing.”
• “Bad Writing.” This is similar to the “bad acting” and “bad directing” labels in the film industry. This is just plain old snotty nonsense. “Bad directors” are simply directors that you don’t like, like George Lucas. Same for writers, a stale cliché of being bad at what they do for a living if you don’t like the person. But being told you’re bad at something you’ve put much effort into is downright mean and should be ignored.
• “Building.” I know this doesn’t sound like a word to be outlawed, but talking about something other than the story is shady. People trying to cover up what they’re thinking about you will often reference a set-piece like buildings, and if they’re so vague they shouldn’t be talking at all. My ears are ringing still because of one older man who pounded, pounded, pounded that a palace on an old book cover of mine was a GERMAN building. GERMAN, German, German, German, German, German building. Eventually I felt like, “Knock it Off. That has nothing to do with the story.”
• “Editing.” Oh, the big, bad editing slap. This is the go-to trick for people who want to undermine something. It’s not even pretending to talk about content. After all the effort of building a world, people come and give you a fresh little, “but it has some editing errors.” Occasionally I’ve seen books with serious errors, but mostly they are tiny and are, by the way, found in almost all professionally published books. They are easily fixed and if you were reading the story you probably wouldn’t see them so awfully much. And if you’re not fully reading the story, drumroll, drumroll—“Why are you talking again?”
• “Descriptions.” This is like saying you don’t like someone’s hair color. You just . . . just like black hair better than blonde. You just honestly DO like brunettes better. What’s the point of saying that to a blonde woman? It will hurt her feelings and the sad thing is she shouldn’t even care what you think. Same when discussing whether someone has a lush, spare, wordy, or terse writing style. It’s just the author’s appearance, basically. And no, they don’t all look the same. If I had received a compliment on my writing to replace each little comment like this, I’d be too vain for my own good, most likely. 

And there will be more updates

 
This book has taken a long time to make it into my collection, but I'm finally going to be publishing it in a couple of months. it’s a really fun read that adds a lot, I believe. So I’m glad I moved it on into a more permanent position. I started writing it over 10 years ago, and about 8 years ago added the subplot of Betty Hilligan and her family to the initial idea of the Harrisons, 3 girls who had been educated at home and were now moving into the world. Betty added a lot of comedy to keep the story from getting too dull (social issues about homeschoolers is a topic that easily becomes tedious.) Her mother’s plot with Mr. Shotgun, which was created literally on the spur of the moment as I was writing rapidly, made me able to tie me in some of Letty’s adventures so all the storylines came full circle and interlocked together.
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There’s a ton of local flavor and hints of daily life based on where I lived these earlier years of my own life in Texas. Small towns, country fields of corn and wheat, churches—even the college buildings are based on real places I went to constantly. I think the authentic hum of daily life is what really stands out about this book. While the characters are invented and not based—for the most part—on anyone I’ve ever known, the setting is real. It’s a place you can really sink into and live because it’s based on the places I knew.

What I hope would be a lasting impression from the book is the theme of being genuine and honest. It’s a story with real, ordinary situations, even if some of them are exaggerated for fictional effect, and I would like to think I talked honestly about those situations. What it’s actually like to go through them. Even if it’s topics that don’t come up in most people’s lives, like church politics, TV families, and getting framed for a blind date because you accidentally ran into someone popular, there’s a thread of emotional genuineness about how it really feels to deal with things. Honesty is fundamentally the only thing that gives relationships integrity and I think that shows in The Harrisons.

And there will be more updates.