Your comment was not taken as “good faith, useful feedback.” You came across as mean-spirited, and your posting appeared ignorant of the facts of the matter regarding the frequency with which we openly advertise our own work.

My only fault was responding in kind.

Unfortunately your response is ALSO in kind, so moral high ground has been lost to both of us. Your haranguing reeks of personal attack. Sure, you’ve toned it down some, but you’re using fightin’ words. “Teenager,” and “extremely unprofessional” while perhaps justified are loathsome epithets in this setting and you know it. Yet you brandish those words freely.

You’ve let me drag you down to my level. Or perhaps I’ve been dragged down to yours. Shame on both of us.

Howard – regarding your response to my criticism about the advert:
That was extremely unprofessional. I made that comment in good faith to provide you with honest, hopefully useful feedback. Your response was churlish, sarcastic, gave the impression that you can’t handle criticism, and set up a heavy incentive for anyone else who dislikes an aspect to just not bother telling you, and not come back. … why do all that, when it would have been so easy to just be polite, or even ignore the comment altogether? I mean, look at the choices:

You have a listener (a potential customer) who has made a mild complaint. You could:
A) Ignore the comment. Nothing happens.
B) Acknowledge the comment with the explanations you gave – minus the sarcasm, and the last paragraph. Listener has a positive experience from giving feedback, feels heard and appreciated, and will likely continue listening. You look professional and accepting of criticism, and your more fanatical fans take the criticizer down a peg or two for you anyway. Everybody wins.
C) Make sarcastic remarks that dismiss and belittle the listener’s complaint, alienating them (and potentially anyone else that had a sympathetic opinion), make yourself look like the childish bully who can’t handle mean words, drive listener away. Everyone loses.

I know you’re a smart guy. So I can’t for the life of me work out why the hell you chose option C. It seems my comment really got up your nose, which I find surprising – it wasn’t particularly harsh, nor even directed at your work, but rather at an action you made. I would expect you’d deal with far worse in your career as an artist. I’m sorry to harp on, I’m just flummoxed that you’d respond like that. That’s the kind of response I’d expect from a teenager in a forum, not a professional on their own webpage. This is how you’re representing your professional self. Sure, it’s a message board, so it’s a little more relaxed and casual, but that doesn’t mean you act unprofessionally. How you conduct yourself still reflects on your professional image. Maybe I just caught you on a Bad Internet Day, but that was not an appropriate – not even an adult – way to handle that.

I personally define an “info dump” as anything that interrupts the story to get across information, necessary or unnecessary. Basically, it’s anything that makes your writing sound more like a textbook and less like a novel, and I hate it. I might differ from some of the people here, but I think that there is never a time when you need an info dump, and that if your reader really does need that information, there is always some other way of getting it across. When I write my stories, my goal is to get to the end without ever info dumping, not once.

In a previous Writing Excuses episode, Patrick Ruthfuss had some very interesting advice. He said that if you withhold information from the reader in the right way, it creates a sense of mystery that generates interest in that piece of story. When you finally do reveal it, the reader is thrilled rather than bored.

I suppose it’s analogous to some of the geeky conversations we’ve all had with people who are less inclined towards sci fi / fantasy. Have you ever been really, really eager to tell people all about this great story that you read, or that you’re writing, only to find that you’ve monopolized the conversation for the past half hour and everyone else is losing interest? An info dump is like that. You’ve got to find a way to make them interested in it, and often times that means restraining yourself and withholding the information until there is a more appropriate way to get it across.

I believe Baen’s universe also has a couple of “introducing” slots for the magazine that would be worth looking into for new writers. I don’t remember whether that was part of Baen’s Bar or not.

And sick on his birthday, aye? Smells fishy to me, but I’ll accept it as truth. )

Keep up the good work and congratulations on the good sales.

Feel free to chime in and round out or correct that answer, anyone. After all, I’m still just an amateur here myself.

The ads aren’t why you tune in to the podcast? REALLY? Wow. This changes EVERYTHING.

Seriously, we already know that. We try to record our ads as humorously as possible so that we can get the word out while still entertaining our listeners. Clearly you weren’t entertained. But I let your comment through so you could see how cold and alone you are in your whining. Also, so I could poke cruel fun at you and abuse my moderatorial powers.

@David Noceti: It was Dan’s birthday, but he was also sick. He was sick ON his birthday. So sad! We’re glad he decided to not get us sick though he had been planning to show up.

@John Brown: 78% of statistics are made-up. But not this one. Probably.

I guess the secret is hard work, as you can’t quite make your own luck all the time.

Here’s why. He was talking, not about slush, but published fiction, trying to defend SF from attacks by the literary elite by saying that the all genres are filled with crap so it’s meaningless to use it as an argument against SF in particular.

More here: http://johndbrown.com/2008/12/is-90-of-everything-really-crap/ , but I think Nancy revealed the truth of the matter when she said numerous times that many of her criteria were specific to her editorial tastes.

A tiny man with a ring
Said I’ll save the world from this thing
He traveled to Mordor
But in very short order
Was trounced by the chatty bling bling

(;))

The cast was excellent, as always.

I’ll be alerting TOTI to this ASAP. Although I did place an order for my UK version of Serial Killer. Thanks for that link.

Nancy: “Some of the best advice I’ve heard is you start the story where something changes.” (thanks for the transcript Mike!)

I struggle with beginnings, and that seems the best advice I’ve heard. Start with movement, start late, start where things change.

I also liked her corollary: “If you hook too hard, your hook is so interesting that the rest of the story is a complete letdown. So you actually have to be careful about that too.”

http://mbarker.livejournal.com/108531.html

No wonder Nancy had time to do the podcast.

If TOTI really finds every untruth, we are ALL in trouble.

“When I was a little boy, they called me a lier. But now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.”
~Isaac Bashevis Singer~

So writing professionally is both trenacity and a crapshoot? Is that it?