Goodreads Is Not Your Living Room

"Imagine that you are a reader who has shelved your own books in your own personal, idiosyncratic way, with shelf tags that amuse you and help you remember where things are, your own personal organisation of the way you think and read ...

And suddenly there is an author in your reading space complaining publicly about your filing system and where they fit in it.

Creeeeeeeeeepy."

That quote came from--where else?--Absolute Write, during a discussion of yet another tempest in the teapot that is Goodreads. Said tempest seems to be the result of a series of misunderstandings and mildly bad behavior that got blown way out of proportion, some of which revolved around a few unfortunate names some Goodreads user gave to her bookshelves, and a misinterpretation over what those names meant by an author. The usual charges of bullying were leveled, accusations were made, you know the drill.

I'm not on Goodreads, and I have no plans to be on Goodreads anytime soon. This post is not about Goodreads and its merits, it's not about authors behaving badly, or about the fact that everyone is so eager to call everything the other guy does 'bullying.' No, this is another 'What do you expect?' post.

When I read that quote in the particular AW thread mentioned, that was my immediate reaction. I was derailed for the moment from the rest of the discussion. Wait, I thought. You set up a space on the internet, invite a bunch of people to come in and look around, and then get upset when someone actually, you know, stops in and has something to say? What did you expect? And why is it creepy?

Goodreads is not your living room. It is not a private place. It is a public space where anyone with a password (and maybe not even that, I don’t know, I don’t use Goodreads) can drop by and visit. And because people are people, and the internet affords both intimacy and anonymity (or, more correctly, the illusion of both), people feel quite comfortable sharing their opinions on your space and everything in it. Creepy? Maybe a bit, but if you don’t want people coming and commenting, why have a public space? Why invite the scrutiny?

Look, I get that it would be strange to have someone come to your house and immediately start telling you that your couch is too old, your drapes don’t match the carpet, and oh, what a shame, you've got that one mismatched chair in your dining room set, what a pity. No one wants to experience that. In person, most people wouldn’t do that (though you can always feel it, can’t you? You can see people looking around in that particular way, and you just know what they’re thinking), but the internet plays by different set of rules. The Golden Rule should apply, but it doesn't (This, sadly, seems to be the standard rule for too many) it’s foolish at this point to assume that it does.

Well, hey, that was pretty downerific, wasn't it? On a more positive note, Meghan Masterson recently conferred on (upon?) me a Liebster Award! Thank you, Meghan. Somehow, the Liebster has morphed quite a bit from when I first did it; the poor thing seems to have been absorbed by the Ten Things thing that went around a couple of years ago. I appreciate the award, though I'm not in the most participatory of moods just this minute.

And that's it, we're out of time here, folks. Thanks for dropping by and have a great weekend!

Information Overload

"Too much of everything is just enough" -- I Need A Miracle, John Perry Barlow/Bob Weir

At some point in the latter stages of the last century--and trust me, though we are now a decade into the twenty-first century, I still think of 'the last century' as meaning the 1800's--we entered THE INFORMATION AGE. It is largely great. When I hit the 'publish' button at the top of this page, my thoughts and ramblings will be available to anyone with access to a computer and the internet. If I want to find out more about haberdashers in Victorian England, I can do it without having to leave the comforts of home, without getting buried by a pile of books in my local library, or without having to wait weeks for my library to get those books on inter-library loan. I can get real-time information on stocks, watch a solar eclipse as it happens--in Australia! Check my credit score. I can access nearly any newspaper, check out the traffic at Exit 45 on the Long Island Expressway, or see just what business is  on the corner of Chestnut and Main in Sheboygan.

For writers in my particular stage of development, the Information Age is awesome not just because of what it brings to our work, but because of the speed it allows us to query at, and the window it gives us into the process. But sometimes I have to wonder: Is it too much?

The web giveth, and the web giveth some more. In the case of querying agents, the web giveth uth specific information on each agent. "Send a query and five pages," says Agent X on her agency website. "Submit your query by e-mail along with a synopsis and three chapters embedded in the e-mail," says another. "Attachments are fine," says a third. Great information to have, easily found, and we tailor our queries to give each agent what she wants.

But the web giveth more. The web giveth uth (right, I'll stop that now) pages upon pages on how to write a good query. And the web giveth us sites like Query Shark and The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment (where yours truly is likely to end up some time soon) and Absolute Write's Query Letter Hell, where your query can be deconstructed like it's Dickens in a literature class, ripped apart for you to rebuild into the Six Million Dollar Query, able to stop any agent or editor in their tracks. The web gives us contests to post our queries and first two-fifty, all in the name of helping us get better, helping us get published. And you have myriad sites where you can discuss the craft ad infinitum, where you can ask if prologues are bad and how long your chapters should be, and whether you should use 'that' or 'which'. And while I've wondered before if all this information makes us lazy, the fact is, it's a great thing. But again, is it too much?

Earlier in the week I found myself poking around on Query Tracker, looking at the comments posted about Agents I've Queried and Agents I Plan on Querying. Generally, querying is a 'Fire and Forget' exercise. There are some who are insanely fast (two minutes! My personal record for a rejection was five hours), but by and large, the best thing you can do is send the query, move on to the next one, and when you're done with this batch, get back to writing something new. I've gotten mostly good at doing this, but I've also found myself checking agent blogs and Twitter feeds, trying to see where they are ('status: read all queries through 4/15; if you sent before that and haven't heard anything, resend'), trying to figure out where my little old query is in the process. No doubt, you've seen these kinds of things on boards that deal with this sort of thing: "Oh, no! This person submitted after me and got a request for partial! What does that mean?" Or "SuperAgent's response time to fulls is X weeks and I'm at X weeks + 1 day--should I nudge?"

By and large, the thing to do is chill out. Write the letter, send the letter, log it in your little spreadsheet or notebook or whatever. Fire and forget.

Yeah, right.

Have a great weekend, all!

Something in the Water?

I am liable to be all over the place today. We spent a couple days visiting the triplets (oh, my, three six-month old babies at once!) this week and spend five hours on the road yesterday coming home. Then I stayed up until 1 AM watching assorted hockey playoff games go into overtime. Ah, this is the great season, multiple games on every night, tension, drama...but I digress.

Bloggers piggyback off each other all the time. You know how it goes, you're planning a post but you read something on another blog and you just have to write about that same topic. It happens all the time. Or maybe there's a rather newsworthy event that occurs so you, me, and just about everyone else does a post on the same topic. It's bound to happen from time-to-time. I can't quite figure out why it works on forums, though.

I am a regular reader and frequent poster over on Absolute Write (not as frequent as I used to be, though. I read it all the time, but I'm in a down-cycle when it comes to responding for some reason). This morning, after being away from the boards while I was away from home, I found a thread titled: "Which title should I choose?" This thread was started yesterday (4/12) .I knew I had seen something very similar recently, and poked back. Sure enough, on the fourth of the month, we had "Help me think of a good title", and just six days earlier, we had "Critique my title." Not all that long ago there were at least three threads that popped up at weekly intervals about 'meaning' and 'theme'. These three threads asked pretty much the same question, and pretty much the same people wandered in to answer in pretty much the same way.

I don't know if you see threads popping up on the same theme or asking the same question so frequently is the result of some sort of 'group think' that happens, or if people see one thread but don't want to post in it because it hasn't had a new post in it for several days (and who wants to get flamed for 'necroing'? That doesn't usually happen on AW, but I've seen it elsewhere). Actually, for the title threads I can understand it. I wouldn't want to hijack your discussion on a good name for your romantic comedy with questions about what I should call my political thriller. It's not polite (and AW is usually pretty polite).

I do have to wonder, though, when I see some of these threads. The internet should make us smart. We have almost-instant access to incredible amounts of information on almost any topic. And yet, when I see some of the questions pop up, I wonder if we're also making ourselves stupid. Are we losing our ability to think for ourselves? People ask so many questions on these boards that they really need to answer for themselves: what should my title be? Should I give my main character a limp? These sites, these blogs, they're great, don't get me wrong, but I think they become too easy to fall back on. Instead of sitting back and thinking, too many people are just immediately going to the Answer Man.


Yeah, I'm chucking rocks perilously close to my own house of glass. Yes, the only stupid question is the one you don't ask. Still, I'd like to think the times I ran back to my critters for advice came only after serious thought on my part. Some of those threads I've seen, I think they ask first, think later (if at all).

Yikes, I'm not sure how I got here. Happy Friday the 13th! Have a great weekend, all.