Ahira's Hangar

First there was Anne Rice and her infamous post at Amazon...

Then there was Laurell K. Hamilton and her equally infamous "Dear Negative Reader" blog entry where she said that people who do not like her plotless porn are stupid prudes who cannot appreciate her great artristic vision.

Now along comes Patricia Cornwell, who says that the negative reviews of her latest book are a result of a Pentagon led government conspiracy!


Notice that none of the three is willing to admit (or even consider) to a huge slide in quality in their books, which just might have led to all of those negative reviews! No, it is not a once good series of books now filled with suckitude for the last few volumes - it is the jealous haterz!!!!!

for a discussion of the Cornwell flap (including input by other professional writers such as Nora Roberts):

LMAO!! The jealous haterz!!!

--A

The Pentagon is not busy enough with being involved in two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan). So they are also forming conspiracies against mystery writers.

I didn't visit the sites mentioned, but this is certainly a curious phenomenom, if I can call it that. I dunno...do some authors let their "bestselling" status get to their heads? It must be. Maybe they start believing in their own hype so much that they think every word they write is pure gold. How else to explain their reactions to negative reviews? I mean, really, government conspiracies? Maybe they see themselves as embattled artists fighting the establishment, but again, that could be them just buying into their own hype, their own "importance." They have the right to defend themselves, of course...but to go and belittle the readers who made them "bestselling" writers in the first place?

I have not read the works of any of the authors named, I only go by what others have said about them. (And I'm not sure I'd want to spend my time with an author who cries government conspiracy in response to criticism.)

I'm not sure about Cornwell, but with both Rice and Hamilton, once both of those writers achieved enough success they did away with both proofreaders and editing. With Hamilton in particular, the work reads like a really bad first draft. I mean a really bad first draft. But the publishers let them (and others such as Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, though Gaiman still produces great English) get away with this nonsense because their books sell.

I've not read many books by Anne Rice, so cannot say how her books changed, or how much the quality dropped over the years, though it is rumored the quality dropped significantly over time.

In Hamilton's case, she went from tightly plotted and fun little mysteries to plotless badly written porn quite abruptly in the course of one book. That book is also where the proofreading and editing stopped! But when people complained, it was because they were jealous haterz and stoopid proods, not because the books went from being good to awful in one fell swoop and because the author suddenly forgot basic spelling and rules of the English language. Blame the readers, not the author!

Cornwell is another author I stopped reading. The books started out as these great mysteries centered around a forensic scientist. They were rather gross, but well written. Gradually they changed so that they were filled with weird conspiracies centered around the main character and just got really...weird. Like having a werewolf guy in a story that was supposed to be firmly grounded in our real world. The characters changed from being flawed but likable into emo whiney people you wished would die so they would shut up. And she inexplicably changed from writing in first person to a very cold third person. And, like Hamilton, she also forgot to include things like a well integrated plot and basic rules of spelling and English usage. And like Hanilton, rather than taking any responsibility for the train wreck her series became, she looked elsewhere - in this case, the Pentagon!

Surely Michael Crichton deserves a mention here, too! Awhile ago one of his books, maybe the one on global warming or maybe the one about sexual harrassment (IIRC, he wrote one on harrrassment didn't he?) got a bad review in the Washington Post. In a later book one of his character's is a vile pedophile and the character's name is the same as the Washington Post's critic.

Revenge is sweet.... I saw a t-shirt awhile ago that said something along the lines of, "Be nice to me or I'll put you in my next novel."