The Lair

Why is it that some reviewers (anonymous ones, the cowards!) spend 95% of their allotted review space on hurling potshots at your paper and then terminate with one, measly, stinking sentence at the end ?

Good paper.

Dude (adjust gender as appropriate), don’t jerk me around like that! With each progressive sentence, my litany of insults at this anonymous coward grew ever more audible. I went from muttering “oh, what does he know, that twat” under my breath to a full on roar. “Why that stupid eejit. That was the fricking point, you moron. And you found that point like Columbus fricking found India. Ha!”. I had this guy made. He didn’t get it and he never will. I’m not going to bother wasting my time on his vile comments.

And then he turns my opinion on its head and offers praise. Aargh. Consistency, Senor Reviewer, consistency. If you’re going to diss my (hopefully novel, but probably mediocre) work, do it throughout your review so I can get drunk and call you all sorts of nasty names. Don’t sweeten it with praise! That means I’ll have to listen to you. Aargh. And actually make the fixes that you suggest. Double Aargh.

Yes, so that was mostly written tongue in cheek. The reviewer chap’s comments were insightful, if not always constructive - and he did toss me a huge meaty bone at the end of it, so I can’t complain much, can I ?

Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing that’s gone right today, so it’s been a day of general disaster and higgledy piggledy (I love that phrase!) packing. Not to mention running around imitating a chicken handler who’s discovered one of his flock has the avian flu. Yep, “running around like a headless chicken” is so 90s. It’s all about the avian flu now, peeps.

Ah well. They do say that if you swallow a live toad in the morning, nothing worse is going to happen to you for the rest of the day. I’ve swallowed no toads, yet, but if anything else goes wrong, I’ll consider it - just to make sure nothing else that happens will top it.