I’ve written here before (here and here) about the terrors of newly-published-authordom — particularly, when the bad reviews land in your mailbox.
But sometimes, even a bad review contains a nugget you cling to when the whole damned thing threatens to come unraveled, when your spirit sags and you wonder why you’re even bothering to continue.
In my case, that nugget for Crossed Wires appeared in a review which on the whole was not particularly flattering. (This was the review referring to “occasional patches of arty prose.” Which was true — which was why it rankled so much!) Specifically — I’m going on memory here but think it’s pretty close to the real wording — it said: “The action scenes are winners, some of them quite funny.”
The reason this comment stuck with me wasn’t the “quite funny” part. That’s something people had been telling me for years about (much of) my writing; while it was nice to know that a stranger concurred, I more or less just nodded to myself at that point — because I was still savoring the first half of the sentence.
