positivity

I was planning on blogging about another non-fiction writing book I read this week but I can't. It was not a good book. Out of curiosity, I checked out some reviews of the book and they ran the gamut, some people really liked it and some really didn't. So, there you go, a lot of this stuff is subjective.

Some of my friends make fun of me for trying to stay positive on the blog, but it's my plan and I'm sticking to it! Interestingly, I'm taking a course this semester called Writing About Popular Fiction and one of our assignments is to create our author persona. My author paradigm doesn't involve scathing negative reviews or anything else that does more harm than good. Actually, this is reminding me of an argument I got in with an award-winning speculative fiction writer in which I said readers want something positive to hold on to in a book and he said, no, they want drama. Of course, he's much more successful than me ...

Ringing out my balalaika has interesting positive and negative editor Tweets That Open The Writing Door which include: I see "I really wanted to like this" from the editors a lot. They go in to submissions very hopeful! #editreport. (In the interests of full disclosure, most of the tweets aren't too nice.)

And this reminds me one of my writer friends got a "nice" rejection from an editor recently. She gushed about how much she liked the book, but since it was cross-genre, it didn't really fit their line, and she looked forward to buying it in the bookstore when another editor bought it. Good grief! Sometimes it is hard to stay positive. :( So this message is also for my friend and all the rest of us facing rejection over and over.

Stay positive!

How about you? Are you a positive or negative writer? Any tips for staying positive?