Hey darlin',

Just commenting (belatedly) to say that the pressure for me was entirely self-imposed. No one asked me to stop reviewing and I want to make that clear--my editor and my agent have always been incredibly supportive of everything I wanted to do. I haven't talked about it much in public in part because it was such a personal decision. A huge component was that after four years of reviewing, I started to feel wrung-out by the workload. My negative reviews felt formulaic to me, and (more than a year ago), I'd grown tired of reading things to pan them. I was DNFing a lot more books, reading more selectively, so my numerical ratings were skewing up anyway. I've always had mixed feelings about star ratings--because sometimes I'd rate things highly initially and like them less in retrospect, or vice versa--and it seemed like a good time to break myself of the habit, since I was stepping away from posting long reviews anyway. I was going to stick with some ratings but these days I'm just not rating anything. In my experience, it all evolves with your career, and in surprising ways, too. I never would have imagined that I'd just get kind of tired of posting a good, one-star, skewering.

(I still post negative reviews up at Strange Horizons, for what it's worth. But that's a professional venue and so justifies the workload.)

There were other factors, too--that I'm better connected than I once was, doing more beta reading for other pro authors, and so I feel less able to speak as objectively as I once did. And during the process of requesting blurbs, I realized that if *I* was ever successful enough to be asked to blurb, it would be a conflict of interest to review a book I've received for blurbing. Ironically, I received my first blurb request like two weeks after making this decision. Heh.

In my experience, wearing both hats isn't as doom and gloom as people make it out to be. I'm glad I was a reviewer and my experiences reviewing directly led me to many great opportunities within publishing (and ironically, without my 3-star Divergent review, I would have never gotten to know Veronica Roth. She blurbed Starglass, and we critique one another's work now and it's generally great and take that, writers who say you have to be nice or face ruination). But I was REALLY over-extended last year. Blogging and reviewing became stressful work and so I wanted to give myself a chance to just be an author (and a reader again, too.)

Which is why I love bloggers so much. I know the work they put into EVERYTHING. It's amazeballs.

This was posted on my birthday, and it makes me super happy that YOU know what Alien Nation is! <3 Hope you enjoy Starglass. July can't come soon enough.

Thanks for the invite, Lenore! I really enjoyed doing it (& you rock too <3!)

Yup! See?

Will you be around Tarah's place Sunday? Jordan and I are planning on stopping there for dinering.

<3 <3

Thanks for the feedback, Experiment! I made the text several shades darker than the default. Hope that helps (though the comments boxes are styled through Javascript/Intense Debate so it might look a little different on my end than it does on yours).

The theme I use is Alyeska by Jason Bobich. I was previously using another of his, complexity, but this is a bit more customizable. Well worth the money spent!

And I've been meaning to give the blog an overhaul for awhile, but I just hadn't gotten around to it. The blog layout specifically always bugged me, and this theme should be easier to grow with. :)

I love how your comment went through the moment I put my blog back online. Like, don't you have a book birthday to celebrate, lady?! (Also: YAAAY! And congratulations!)

And yes, it's very irritating, but I think you're right: the characters inform us who they are as we write them. What a strange process.

That is so sweet, Dave Brown! And yes, Scrivener is wonderful!!

(I suspect next summer will come faster than we think!)

A Cesarean, you mean? :P

It's not about which character was strong. In fact, I think both showed strength in various ways. Vickers' "self-centeredness" could also be seen as "career-mindedness" or a "lack of a nurturing nature" or any host of things which are very rarely valued as featured of women in the movies. I think it's obvious that Shaw was also self-centered--compare their reactions about Holloway after he's infected. Of course, we're meant to see that self-centeredness as a virtue, because one arises out of love. And we're meant to see Vickers' actions as selfish because it arise out of a desire to protect her father's business. Even though it's arguably a more noble, ethical action.

I meant the other three crewmen who die on the ship, as well as those who accompany Weyland--they all take an active role in their death. Vickers is the only one at the climax shown struggling against her fate.

Agree re the Christian subtext… and yes it was a kind of an arbitrary schism being laid out there. And simplistic. But, with a more literary mentality some of the ideas could have been pretty interesting.

Agreed. Mostly the problem was \"bad writing.\"