The DAN ZONE

After almost three years in print, my first book¸ Closet Monsters, has finally received some serious negative press from a customer’s review on Amazon! The biggest atrocity, according to the review, is the bad editing and typos. See, in my glamorous and pampered career as a retail copywriter, I’m just send off whatever garbage I put together to be proofread by a copy editor. I don’t deal with those petty details. But the one thing independent porn publishers don’t tell you when they accept your garbage is that, despite making you sign a contract in pig’s blood that you will make every correction and revision they send you by the strict deadlines, they don’t actually have ANY editors look at it. You send them your first draft, and the next thing you know, they send you a printed copy of your book! I learned later that they expect you to hire your own editor to proof your manuscript. So get out your red pens readers, because you can expect to find plenty more typos in my second book Horny Devils. There was no way I was handing my 5% royalty check over to some freelance editor!

Next, the reviewer despised all the name dropping. Wasn’t quite sure what that meant at first, but then I surmised that it was referring to my use of pop culture references like Good Charlotte, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil. What can I say? I grew up on popular media filled with name dropping, like Stephen King’s books, the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie Scream, and songs by Eminem…

And finally, my writing has too many phrases that sound like they are lifted from someone’s idea of bad writing. Nope. No plagiarized ideas or phrases. Those phrases are 100% my own bad ideas.

My only regret is that the reviewer failed to explain just how bad the content, plot and narrative of my stories are. I would have assumed the reader just didn’t have the patience enough to get past the spelling error on the very first page of the book (so graciously referenced in the review), however, there was also an error referenced from the very last story in the book. Gosh. I wish I had the time to highlight every spelling error and typo I find in every book I read from cover to cover. Heck, if I did, I might make corrections in a copy of my own book.

So there it is. I felt like a failure as an author…until now. My first bad customer review. Finally! Luckily, my years of experience in a retail environment have taught me the most important lesson of all: customers only think they’re always right. Now excuse me while I go print out the review, frame it, and hang it on my wall.

Wow. I’ve always been a huge fan of author Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, etc). He writes some of the most poetic verse you’ll ever read. Many times, I love individual paragraphs or sentences of his books more than I do the novels as a whole. Plus, he has written some of the most fantastic short stories ever.

Bradbury has a way of writing about a subject without actually naming the subject. Years ago, I was reading a story of his that was simply a conversation between a man and his son, and as I continued reading on, I soon realized that the cryptic conversation the two were having was actually a discussion about the son being gay! But the word was never used, because it was about the emotions humans were experiencing rather than a focus on the concept of ‘gay’. Amazing.

Well, I just began reading one of his more recent short story collections, entitled We’ll Always Have Paris. In his foreword to the collection, Bradbury says that many of his stories are based on true experiences he has had. Imagine my surprise when I read the story that gives the book its name: We’ll Always Have Paris. Why was I surprised? Because the story, written in first person, which makes it hard not to take it as some sort of autobiographical piece, is about a protagonist who leaves his wife in their room while in France and nearly gets some action by a guy who cruises him on the streets of Paris!!! WTF??? Not something I’d ever expect from Bradbury, especially at this point in his writing career. It’s beautifully told with a combination of honesty, compassion and innocent naivety, whether or not it’s based on a true flirtation with man-on-man action or fully fictional.

Thanks for the wonderful story, Mr. Bradbury—and for proving that you can teach an old dog…um…new tricks…