How to Please Everyone

See that title? Are you all excited because I've come to you with the answer of how to make everyone happy with your work?

Okay, here it is...

You can't.

Ta-da!

The fact of the matter is, when it comes to your writing (your singing, your art, your calculations of long division) you cannot please all the people...not even most of the time. After reading a review yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine and she said, "I get dinged for too much sex and not enough sex...in the same book."

At first I thought "Well at least that has never happened to me." But it has. That review in question? Didn't like the lack of sex in a book and felt that as a romance, it should have had some. Fair enough. (I fully believe that everyone has the right to their opinion on a book. So my undies are not in a bunch. Promise. Anyway...) I started thinking about it and realized while it wasn't specific to sex, there had been people who didn't like how much romance was in the book and would have preferred I stick to the action and gadgets.

(Now granted, if it wasn't a romance at all, reader #1 probably wouldn't have read it and wouldn't have been disappointed. But...that isn't the story I wanted to tell. So, romance it is.)

After that, I started thinking about reviews for my other books. And then I started reading reviews for books I either loved or hated. (Pretty much I read the opposing reviews. If I loved it, I read the 1 stars. If I hated it, I read the 5 stars.) Crazy thing. Turns out that on a pretty regular basis, the stuff I loved was the stuff someone else hated (or vice versa).

This makes sense (it just takes being able to step away from your own work to see it sometimes) because people are individuals. We each bring our own expectations to a book.

For myself, if an urban fantasy has romantic elements and there is sex, I expect to "see" the sex. Closed door in UF doesn't work for me and will yank me right out of a story. No sex is fine. Explicit monkey sex is fine. Finding out they previously had sex is even okay. But working up to the point and then jumping to the afterglow makes Sel a cranky reader. (In fairness, it's okay if it happens upon occasion in a book with a lot of sex because, you know, too much sex is no more fun than not enough sex.)

So, as a writer, you need to be able to take a step back from your work once it's out in the world. You need to let readers have their own experience with your book. Because, in that regard (and not any that would allow for pirating--we hang pirates around here), once you release the book, it's not your story any more. It's like when your kids go off to live their own lives. You don't get to control that. Your mistakes are on full display for the rest of the world. And so are your non-mistakes that people still don't like.

And that is okay. They have a right to like and not like whatever the fuck they want.

So you want to know how to please everyone?

You let them feel what they feel and don't try to own that. It's not yours; it's theirs.

In other words, don't be a douchebag author.

New Adult...Again

There are things in the publishing industry that get talked about ad nauseum. And just when you think the conversation is over, it pops up again. Fortunately or unfortunately, the conversation about New Adult and what it is refuses to quiet... at all.

Just yesterday I was confronted by an author who defined New Adult based on sex--you know, like the media has been. The fact that it's the same media who poo-poos genre fiction (especially romance) and refers to erotica as "mommy porn" is not lost on me. It's why I shake my head at the media and move on, but when I see authors--who have been around the block for a while--falling into the same patterns, I kind of want to puke on their heads.

Saying New Adult is Young Adult with sex isn't much different than saying Young Adult is Chapter Books but with kissing. No. JUST NO!

*ahem* Forgive me, but this pisses me off.

I went to college. Was sex part of my life? Yes. But it didn't define my life at that time. It shouldn't define the genre either.

Things that do define it, kind of by definition?

• Age (or apparent age) of the main character(s)--18 to 25 is a generally accepted range, though the upper limit (in my opinion) depends greatly on where the characters are in life.
• Beginnings--Post high school is a time of new beginnings, whether it's going to college or getting the first real job, or just escaping from under the thumb of parents in whatever way possible. 

Um... yeah. There you go. Where Young Adult is about coming of age, New Adult is about self-discovery. (Granted, there are people like me who are much older that are still discovering who we are, but that's beside the point because it's different at this age than it was then.)

Yes, sex is a part of that time. So is leaving home. So is being broke (much of the time). So is legally drinking. So are... a lot of things. But they don't define that age group. There could easily be a book written about a young soldier in war that could be New Adult if written a certain way. No sex. No love interest. Just some hard truths about what it's like to be a soldier in another country, away from everything you know, where people around you are dying, and realizing you might be next. With the focus put on the life the soldier hasn't lived yet, it could most definitely speak to that whole "beginnings." It doesn't need sex for that.

To put it another way, getting older and a degree of growing up is required. Sex is optional.

/steps off soapbox and puts away megaphone

Until next time.