Adding up

Merely to note: last year's new wordage totals 1082 pages. Which, at a rough 300wpp, gives us an approximate total of 325,000 words. Which is more than I'd expected, to be honest.

Now I must go back to hacking and slaying, destroying as many as possible unread. Babies, line up: I have to kill you now.

Review of "Dislocations"

I suppose I have to believe them, but I'll never understand those people who say they don't read their own reviews. It's always interesting, at the very least it surely has to be interesting, to read someone else's take on your work.

Even where, or perhaps especially where, the reviewer's take is significantly at variance with your own, to the point where you want to clutch your head and cry "No, no, you have misread this entirely, how can you be so perverse...?"

It's salutary, is what it is. Words do different stuff in different people's heads; everyone reads a different story.

Or, in this case, a different anthology. Here's a review of 'Dislocations', where I really don't agree with him on much at all.

My own story, he's taken with the Big Idea and apparently disappointed in the characters, finding them bleak and their lives empty. Um. Not in my head, they're not; nor is the ending unclear, as he asserts. In my head. But that's the point: he hasn't missed the point, however much I want to shriek it at him. It's another reading, not a misreading. He's entitled.

Reluctantly.

ETA: you can of course read the story and decide for yourself; it's here, on the publisher's website. If you're a member of the BSFA, you can even nominate it for the short story award... (Hint!)