AAR Reviews DEMON ANGEL!
Okay, maybe it’s dumb to put an exclamation mark after that, but … WOOT! My book just got reviewed at AAR!!
It means a ridiculous amount to me — only in the last two years have I been active in a romance reading community, lurking for a long, long time at sites like AAR, TRR, and Mrs. Giggles … but mostly AAR. And I’ve gotten lots of recommendations, but the most important thing? Having people articulate what did and didn’t work for them in a romance novel. Because I’m not very good at it.
And as a writer, I think it’s invaluable to have some way of articulating where a story is going wrong — a lot of it is instinct: you get stuck, and you realize your character did something out of character, or your plot has gone off the wall or it stalled — and NAMING those problems, really being able to SAY what they are instead of just going by instinct is something I should have picked up in the thousands of books I’ve read (I didn’t, though) and a freaking degree in literature … those books let me recognize it, not really name it.
And it’s easier to kill what’s wrong if I know exactly what it is.
Anyway, for a girl in 1997 who was pretty lonely in Anchorage, AK, who used to sneak in to work at Deloitte & Touche at midnight to use the Internet and read X-Files and X-Men fanfic, and didn’t know anyone else who read romance, but one day happened to stumble across AAR while looking up more books by Katherine Kingsley, whose NO GREATER LOVE I’d just fallen in absolute love with … it was the best thing ever.
And my goal in life is getting a DIK there, dammit. (Okay, not really, I’d like that a lot, sure, but my real goal in life is just writing books that I love, forever and ever. Oh, and one day, to stop after eating Just One Potato Chip.)
(Demon Angel got a B-, but I think it was a good review.)**
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**And I’m laughing like crazy because the part that I thought had the most problems, the reviewer liked best. Hee, I’ll never be able to predict people.
But still, the best part was going to the message boards and reading that a reader had really liked it. And I’m still giggling because she liked best the same part, too.
….and now I’ve got to stop doing that.