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… then I hereby nominate… (more…)

I just received this message from Andrew Welch, who just saw Of Gods and Men. …

I saw your latest blog post about “Of Gods and Men” and wanted to comment. … (more…)

Many bookstores around the country have been supportive of my four-book series The Auralia Thread.

But Barnes and Noble has been especially helpful… (more…)

I’m probably the last blogger on the planet to post this, but here goes… (more…)

I don’t have HBO, so I’ll be waiting for Netflix or DVDs, but I’m so excited to see a celebrated fantasy epic being given a slow, patient miniseries treatment, with an impressive cast and a focus on character development instead of razzle-dazzle.

Here’s how Matt Zoller Seitz describes it: (more…)

Today at Image, A.G. Harmon has posted some thoughts on one of 2011′s must-see movies… (more…)

I’m giving away a strange assortment of stuff from my desk:

A signed copy of The Ale Boy’s Feast, Auralia bookmarks, a map of the Expanse signed by artist Rachel Beatty, posters for True Grit and The Adjustment Bureau, and two issues of Response magazine.

Want to have your name in the drawing?

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As a reader in a community of readers, I know that all of us have unique responses to the books we read.

My opinion of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or No Country for Old Men or Never Let Me Go will be different from yours, even if we both give them a thumbs’ up or a thumbs’ down.

As a reviewer, I know that there is a huge difference between a review — a thoughtful examination of plot, style, character development, point of view, etc. — and a reaction. (A reaction is something along the lines of “I liked it” or “It sucked” or “It inspired me” or “It made me feel sick”.) After all, a review requires that we attend to much more than the immediate emotional response that we experience when we look at someone’s work.

As a storyteller, I am thus prepared to encounter many different responses from readers of my own novels. I have no doubt that what delights some will disgust others.

It’s not my job as a writer to worry about what you like or what you don’t like. It’s my job to bring my subject to life and engage it in the best way I know how.

The Ale Boy’s Feast has arrived in stores, and I’ve already seen many different opinions. Other writers have told me that it’s bad manners for a writer to respond when readers have negative reactions. I don’t intend to respond to negative reactions. I fully anticipated that I’d experience those. The Ale Boy’s Feast wasn’t written to make people happy; it was written as an invitation to a difficult, but hopefully rewarding, journey.

But I do feel that I need to address a different kind of dichotomy in some of the reviews and reactions that I’ve seen on various blogs.

I’m not talking about the difference between “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.”

Here’s what I mean: Some reviewers are taking the time to share thoughtful opinions, positive or negative, about this fantasy novel. Others are just raving (positive) or ranting (negative) without much evidence that they’ve thought about what they encountered. In fact, it seems that some of them didn’t even understand what kind of book they’d been served.

It’s like this: Imagine I’m a cook and I offer a full chicken dinner to some food critics to consider. Some of those critics discuss the chicken dinner — its strengths and its weaknesses, its ratio of meat and potatoes, the quality of its ingredients. Some will be pleased, some won’t. That’s as it should be.

But some of them… let’s call them the Pastry Chefs… jump to conclusions and judge the meal as if it’s just a kind of pastry. They don’t take time to investigate what it is that they’ve been served. To them, everything is a pastry, and thus they only apply pastry standards to what they’ve been served.

Wouldn’t it seem strange to you if I served a chicken dinner and the diners responded, “As donuts go, this is very unsatisfying,” or “This is a first-rate donut!”

I welcome all kinds of opinions on my book as long as they examine it with the standards suitable for examining Epic Fantasy. But if a reader responds by judging the book as a Sunday School Lesson, a Religious Allegory, a Children’s Book, or a Formulaic “Happy Ever After” fairy tale… well, that reader should have read the label before he responded.

So, if you’re bothering to read the reviews of The Ale Boy’s Feast or any of the other books in The Auralia Thread series, here are a seven points to help you understand what the Food Critics have been served. Then you can decide if they’re giving it the right kind of attention, or if they’re judging a chicken dinner by how it fulfills the purposes of a donut.

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