Authors Acting Badly

A review of a book came across the Twitter-sphere today. That in itself isn’t remarkable. What is remarkable is the response of the author of the book.

The short version is that the reviewer said he liked the story, but that it had grammatical errors. The author took this the wrong way, and ended up giving the reviewer a piece of her mind. She claimed that he had the wrong version (it appears he didn’t) and more. When it came down to it, though, she insulted the reviewer and the other commenters. She demanded that the review be taken down, as well as told commenters to… well… “Go Away” in not so nice terms.

I feel sorry for this lady. In one day, she has managed to destroy her reputation. This whole fiasco went viral on Twitter. She won’t have much luck in the future. And in truth, the real troll in the whole thread of comments was her. There were some others (as you will get when something like this happens), but the majority were people telling her to be quiet for her own good. She should have listened to the criticisms. They are given for a reason. As the reviewer said, the story was good. It was the grammar that made it hard to read.

So, to my family and friends, please destroy my pens, paper, computers and whatever else if I ever do that. It is not professional, nor useful in the long run.

Scrivener for Windows

I’m done reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but I need to do my writeup. I am planning 2 blog posts for that. Maybe more if I feel like expounding more. Today, I want to talk about Scrivener, though.

I heard of Scrivener when I did NaNoWriMo in 2009. It looked interesting, but as it was only for Mac, I couldn’t do anything with it. I may be in IT, but I haven’t been able to justify getting a Mac yet.

Then, as NaNo 2010 was gearing up, I heard that there was a Windows Beta starting. Great! Except that I do most of my writing on a Dell Mini 9 netbook with Ubuntu Linux. As NaNo progressed, I noticed that they had a Linux version! Great! But I didn’t want to take the time to figure out how to get it to work during NaNo, so I waited till afterwords. As I look back on it, I wish I had noticed that Linux port from the start. Its features make it a lot easier to work in for writing, as compared to Word or OpenOffice.

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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – Chapters 1-5

Chapter 1

This chapter could probably be titled as a Prologue. Only in the sense that all other chapters in the book are from Harry’s perspective, and if I was writing it, I might do it that way.

I do like that there are 2 POVs though. JKR did very well giving us the impression of how the Dursley’s view the world: normal and abnormal. And we only see small glimpses of the abnormal. That is better, because then there is plenty of room to grow through the rest of the book. Even though the magical does get introduced fairly quickly.

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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Readthrough

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the first in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. It was published in 1997 by Scholastic here in the US.

I wanted to read through Harry because, in some form, it’s similar to what I want to be writing: young man who ends up in a large adventure. Although, mine doesn’t have a separate magical world.

I’m not sure what else to say. I enjoy the story, and think that (as a first book) it’s well written. The story itself is engaging, and keeps moving. These days, that is important to a story. Modern novels keep the suspense going, the action is moving at a fairly consistent pace.

Beware, there will probably be spoilers. So if you haven’t read it, you might not want to read my Readthrough.

I will be abbreviating the title in the future. Look for the tag HPatSS. Or look under the Harry Potter category.