Re: "Life On Umbriel" - Spectacular, Recently Published Fantasy/Adventure Novel

Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
"Joann Zimmerman" <jzimm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:MPG.1e63d3acfc4bb873989bdd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In article <11vk12ld1um4k2c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, wswears@xxxxxxx says...

Dan Goodman wrote:

Note that this usually requires not telling people they're wrong on a
particular point. Elsewhere, I've had someone say that it was
unrealistic to have anti-capitalist socialists going into business,
which I had in a story. One of the people who said this was a
libertarian who worked for a government agency. I kept my mouth shut.


Dan,

The person you're berating said a book was good, with some enthusiasm.
You told him flatly, and with no explanation or finesse, that he was
wrong. He apologized well, you came back with a superior attitude and a
lecture. Maybe I missed something here, but it looks as though you
could take a lesson from yourself, man.

What you missed was the operation of the rasfc self-protection mechanism
(TM). Somebody we've never heard of before shows up, says "Hi, this book
is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I wrote it!" It is
difficult sometimes to tell the difference between over-enthusiastic
self-promotion, trolling, confusion about what the group does, and
blatant advertising.

Dan's original response (not quoted here) was roughly the group standard
for such manifestations.


Yes; it's the follow-ups where things get ugly.

The main differences between this guy and the usual "buy my book" clueless ad are, first, that he came back to check responses, second that he came back not once, but twice -- and the second time, acknowledged overreaction to the first response. I find myself caught in the middle; on the one hand, I do tend to agree with Bill that the original poster's apology deserved better (especially after Dan's second response); OTOH, following the link indicates that this is basically a self-promoted POD book, not a request for feedback or even an enthusiastic recommendation-for-discussion, which means the original post really doesn't belong here (and as Joann said, Dan's original response is pretty much SOP for that sort of thing...not least because it's rare for the ad-poster to ever check back to see what people's reactions were).

Patricia C. Wrede


Okay,

I think I'll withdraw my comment, but with these notes: First, I don't know that crom is the author, and was never going to find out. This thing struck me as a, don't look, don't respond, thing. Second, and this is just a personal take, crom's comment was phrased as a positive, but "No it isn't" in context is a fairly good example of a dismissive put-down. It denigrated both the work in question, and the writer of the e-mail, with good economy of language. It also virtually guaranteed a heated response if anybody did come back to look. If that was the goal, it succeeded admirably.

If the goal was to make the suspected troll go away, silence would have rung more loudly, and performed more effectively.

Dan,

If I have offended, you have my apology. I should learn to ignore both sides of these little exchanges. For what it's worth, I suspect you were right in your analysis.

Bill

--
Bill Swears

Ever Inappropriate, always contrite, and now... Ironic! How cool is that?
.

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