The Cycle Begins Anew · 6:34pm Jun 14th, 2018
This one might be a little … scattered. Why? Well, I just got back from the dentist.
I hate going to the dentist. Nothing against dentists, actually; they’re some of the kinder doctors I know. And it’s not because I’ve had a traumatic experience in my past or have horrible dental problems (I take meticulous care of my teeth because I don’t like the dentist). I just have a weird, paranoid, irrational fear of people messing with my teeth.
Weird, right? Go figure. I know it’s irrational, but that doesn’t stop my body from flooding me with enough adrenaline that my hands shake during a checkup. Those poor dentists. I put on some tunes and zone out as best I can, but even then they can tell I don’t want to be there.
Point being, I’m coming off an adrenaline rush right now. Which is fitting. Because coming off of a book launch feels a little similar in a lot of ways. Just … more spread out.
So then, how is Shadow of an Empire doing? Well … it’s doing pretty well.
Yay, Dusk Guard!
Also yay, reviews! I really liked the third review. It read almost like a back-of-the-book blurb. It kinda stung when it mentioned "occasional editing oversights", though. I guess your personal army of prereaders can't find every error in an epic.
4882739
Eh, here's the thing I've learned about that, though.
A) People are incredibly harsh on indie works. To the degree that you can find reviews by the same people where they single out an indie book for "errors" because they found two typos in the whole thing, but will blissfully ignore a trad-pub book with more than that many errors per chapter, because they're inclined to believe that the trad-pub, being trad-pub, has no errors.
B) A lot of people find things that they think are errors that actually aren't. I've seen reviews where people complain about characters using period colloquialisms and language because it's "wrong." When in fact, it's right, the reviewer just doesn't know that and is assuming that English hasn't changed since its inception.
Between those two things, any time I see an off-hand comment like that, I kind of glaze over, because it's such a broad scale term, it could literally just mean they didn't approve of Sali's use of the term "bureaucratics" (which was a common word in the 1800s, but has since fallen out of favor) or the like.
4882753
Fair enough. The book is still good.
4882796
Oh yeah. I'm confident in its quality.