And Hold The Rice
I’m not a fan of Anne Rice. I read Interview With A Vampire back in high school, and it wasn’t really my thing. Still, despite the fact she has become the scion of far too many goth/vamp wannabe kids, I’ve never had a real problem with her or her work.
I did however check out her controversial post on Amazon.com. A number of reviewers had really slammed her latest book, Blood Canticle, the final volume in The Vampire Chronicles. Her husband died during the writing of the novel so it’s understandable that the writing was not up to par with her previous work. However, rather than explaining the situation calmly or even writing a rational defense of the choices she made, she blasted back with an angry post that resulted in even MORE negative reviews, this time about her attitude more than her writing.
Most of these posts, including Rice’s, have now been removed from Amazon, but having had the chance to read her post, I have to say she didn’t do herself any favors. It wasn’t even the dangerously overflowing ego that upset a lot of other people: comments that she was above having an editor “butcher” her work and that the negative reviews were “slander”. It was the fact that her very long post was done as one huge block of text with no paragraph breaks, tons of missing punctuation, and erratic structure that jumped back and forth between subjects with absolutely no sort of organization. Not only did it invalidate her claim she doesn’t need an editor, it just helped fuel the belief that a lot of people seem to have that you don’t have put any effort into expressing yourself clearly online, because it’s “just” online. Because if a famous writer does it, it must be right.