I haz a complaint with the universe.
All I wanted was a good book I could escape into, for a while.
Amazon says: Here is a romantic suspense in your custom recommendations! You will like this romantic suspense, because you like romance, and you like thrillers! It’s KU and has been out for 3 months, with 5,200+ reviews and a 4.6 rating, so it’s good!
Me, (still) sick and tired: Okay, something to turn off my brain and enjoy for a while. I’ll try it.
…you all know where this is going, don’t you? I should have known.
Dear Author,
1.) I am clearly not your audience.
2.) Hypothermia doesn’t work that way.
3.) No, former Delta guys do not introduce themselves as former Delta to someone on first meeting. In fact, they don’t even tend to call it that…
4.) If he knows she’s being hunted, he’s not going to let her wander around the farmyard in front of G-d and all his creation for anyone to spot.
5.) In fact, back up, if she arrives at his feet hypothermic, concussed, drugged, torn up and bloody… He’s not going to treat only the visible wounds and not check for any others under her clothing. I understand that would negate Major Plot Point, but that’s not how this works in any sort of training or common sense.
6.) Waking someone high-speed low-drag up from a nightmare by shaking their shoulder does NOT produce a sleepy, slow reaction.
7.) Wait, wait, you think just because she’s terrified that the local cops are in on it… for reasons you never manage to ever articulate in the entire book… you think he’s actually going to roll with that and not immediately start lighting up the chain, looking for info? Dude, she’s a stranger. Nobody suddenly trusts a incoherent stranger that arrives at their feet, especially not the professionally paranoid. Seriously, he’s more likely to think she’s either a trap, or the bait for a trap, than trustworthy.
8.) I appreciate that you tried to write close quarters combat. You researched enough to know to call it that! Good for you! I mean, your tactics suck, but that’s a lot higher than the low bar I’d set for this genre!
9.) WAIT. WTF. You have 4 mercs attack a former Unit guy at his home, and you think when his retired military working dog gets a… unnamed part of one, in the dark, while guarding the girl… that then the Unit guy shows up in the middle of the firefight, he’s going to neutralize the puppy’s chew toy by PUNCHING HIM OUT when there’s a PERFECTLY WORKING GUN in his HANDS?!?!?!?!
That is NOT how he’s going to break contact and exfil.
10.) Wait, this wasn’t a single major error in plot. Every single time you have the bad guys find him, you have the former Unit guy knocking the enemy out and leaving them alive behind him to continue pursuit, or zip-tying them and leaving them, without contacting anyone, and other mercs still loose in the area… WTF?
I… just… what are you thinking, author? That it would look bad for heroine to see hero kill the people after her? That he wouldn’t be A Good Guy if he kills people, with all the incredible precision and efficiency that the US Military spent millions of dollars and many years training into him, and combat reinforced?
There’s got to be a genre rule I’m missing here, because that’s not how that works in real life. That’s not how any of that works.
Then again, science currently thinks we can’t do Faster Than Light Travel, or jump through wormholes or ride subspace, so, you know, genre tropes don’t have to conform to reality.
Going back to that having only been out for 3 months, and already has 5,200+ reviews and a 4.6 rating… This is book one of a 2-book series. So it doesn’t have a long-series boost, it’s hitting the charts because it was picked up with Book 2’s release. Clearly, within the standards of her genre, this author is killing it as far as making her audience happy goes.
Which means she’s really good at delivering what her readers need and want, in the confines of her genre’s tropes.
…but I’m not her target audience. You tried, little Amazon algorithm. You really tried hard, with your pattern-matching. So close!
Mad Genius Club 
29 responses to “The Search For a Good Book”
I always wonder who adores these books because it’s never me. I’m currently plowing through a set of fourteen free Romantasy novellas and short stories to see what’s out there.
Of the eight I’ve dutifully read (I’ll do quickie reviews on Instagram for our regular booklove feature), two were decent. The others were all same old, same old, with evil humans, derivative plotting, no understanding of how people actually work, and on and on and on.
Of the two I liked, one I might read. It’s a time thing.
I already know I won’t read the other author. I enjoyed the sardonic humor and skewed viewpoint. She actually managed to inject something new into a magic academy story. But it was m/m (thank God it wasn’t graphic!) which I don’t like. Worse, her website is very clear. She normally doesn’t just write m/m. She writes m/m BDSM and I am not going there, ever. But I’ll give her points. She’s upfront.
Maybe you should try my books! I try hard to avoid overt stupidity and like to think I succeed. They’re sci-fi but not space opera, not military, and not “I was the alien’s love slave”. More like Charles Dickens crossed with Jane Austen on a terraformed Mars.
I might try your books, but… what is your name and the names of your books?
Was this “Unit” guy named Bruce Wayne?
Batman might take on armed opponents without using guns and win, but I doubt anybody else (lacking superpowers) could do so. [Crazy Grin]
Yea, I know I’ve probably missed things in my research, and authors have written things that have been occasionally…cringy in terms of the details of things. Which is hard to excuse these days, especially when you have access to things like Amazon, the Internet, and quite a few other resources to find out information.
But when you start hitting egregious errors that make you want to throw the book against the wall with as much force as possible…that’s just <i>bad</i> writing, period.
(Or gently delete the book from Kindle and demand a refund based on the time you wasted. Either works.)
I… I find myself instead marking the book as one I want to come back to, later.
Because some of these errors fall under “You don’t know what you don’t know.” If she doesn’t have any alpha or beta readers who support high-speed low-drag types, then… who’d think to ask “Hey, if she shakes his shoulder to wake him up from a bad dream, is that okay?”
Some fall under “This is clearly a shorthand to save time.” Insta-trust, both by the professionally paranoid of the girl, and by the girl of the professionally paranoid stranger, is clearly a genre shortcut to save time, just like “fated mates” in other subgenres of romance, or the equivalent in scifi, “download this training to your brain, and now you can Do The Thing at high skill levels.”
Some fall under “My readers don’t care.” And it’s true. My readers… a number of them, starting with my alpha readers, would rake me over the coals for bad strategic decisions (letting her wander around the farmyard without overwatch) as well as bad tactical ones in CQB. Hers clearly don’t. If they don’t, then at what point do you decide you’ve researched enough for your target market and let it go?
Because we all do at some point. We’ve read the fantasy adventures where they ate stew around the campfire, despite not having been there long enough for anything to stew, and it was a good adventure anyway. Watched the action movie with volcanoes and most of the audience was having a blast… (ok, and then there were us over in our little section, howling with laughter at the wrong parts: “Oh, noes, we’re now running from a pyroclastic flow on shield volcano! Bwahahahaha!” But again, not the target market.)
The give villain one punch “the fight is now over” thing is really confusing because I’ve seen that now in several author’s books. Once is bad writing. Five times, and I start wondering…
I won’t read one because she lost all her credibility with me, after: “Girl gets violently assaulted at a party, Hero who is founding member of a hobby community and his buddies (who all work for a security company) walk in on it, pull him off her, Hero punches the guy once, tosses him out of the house, and apologizes for letting guy into their local group. Then everybody acts like this is a perfect resolution.”
Is this pulling from movie tropes? Where did this come from?
*shakes head*
But even so, it’s easy to criticize authors for what they get wrong. It’s harder to see what they’re doing right, and by the sales and reviews alone, I can tell this author has something she’s doing really really right. So I may have to study this to see if I can learn to be a better author from it.
Pyroclastic flow on a shield volcano. Oh, oh, I remember that one, because it was in the Geology Department “Bad Science movie” film series. You know, the one where you are encouraged to MST3K the h-ll out of it and throw popcorn at the screen, and cheer for the geology? Oh man, those were fun evenings.
And yes, I’d be with you laughing in all the wrong places. Not the intended audience, like me and a LOT of Paranormal Romance, and aviation-in-plot books.
I keep having the issues of hitting these air pockets of “absolute failure of narrative logic” that just break my immersion. And I admit that I’m an OCD researcher who probably has too many books on too many subjects.
But when the narrative logic fails…no amount of good research can help you. And I’d like to have characters that hit that magic level of competence-not so competent that nothing is a challenge, but not so incompetent that you know the author is saving them somehow.
*Beautiful*! That review definitely made my Sunday. 🙂 I think it hit all of *my* buttons, anyway, the major one (that is also tripped by almost every action TV show I’ve ever seen) being “Wait! You left a live enemy behind you?!? Are you a *complete* idiot?!?!?”. Sheeesh…
Now please go and write more. Especially in the Combined Operations series; I *love* those!
My dear darling Alpha readers responded to my initial grumbling about this book with a mostly-teasing “How would Crane handle it?”
Easy. Crane would immediately assume she was either a trap, or bait for a trap, and after stabilizing her, would turn her over to someone else to handle. Delegation is one of his superpowers.
As soon as I’m well enough, I have a firefight in NewCali to write that’ll set off a forest fire, and a bunch of scientists to participate in a self-assisted kidnapping a la Operation Paperclip, but first there’s the little matter of a tankerload of moonshine that needs a place to hide, and the Fed losing a city to Empire-backed guerillas…
I need more brains to pick up all the worldbuilding timeline plot-threads. I’ll be so happy when I get that WIP one out the door!
Whatever it takes, I wish you all the best to get it done. Take care of yourself, and I’ll be watching for the newest release. 🙂
I absolutely adore your books. I reread them (especially Climbing the Rim) more than any others save the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series. I have to say, though, that your to-do list sounds like two separate stories. Or, as Rocky and Bullwinkle said, “That’s a lot of which-woulds there!”
Reminds me of something stupid I saw in a movie once. Hapless Heroine was being pursued through a warehouse (or maybe a factory) by Evil Murderous Scumbag with a gun. She found a shovel, waited behind a corner, smacked E.M.S. with the shovel, knocked him down, he dropped the gun — and she dropped the shovel and ran away. Stupid, stupid, stupid!! That’s when you beat E.M.S. to death with the shovel! Or at least grab the gun. Of course that would pretty much be the end of the movie and they had another 40 minutes of screen time left to fill…
Of course E.M.S. was stupid too, for just walking around a blind corner. When you don’t know where the enemy is, you be wary of corners. Stand well back and edge around until you can see what’s behind it.
Do none of these writers ever talk to somebody who actually knows something about what they’re writing?
He dropped the gun? And she didn’t pick it up? But… but… one of the best-beloved movie lines out there is “Now I have a machine gun! Ho Ho Ho!”
There are people who think a gun makes them invincible. A famous case where the perp walked into the gas station brandishing his gun and literally brushed by the guy standing there talking to the clerk — the guy who had served as a Marine, and was still physically able and reasonably fit, and who simply took the gun away and knocked him to the floor.
Very little signs of overconfidence would convince me.
You do have to allow for panic. Mind you, I would expect the character to be set up for it, but a terrified response of “I’ve killed him!” is plausible. Possibly not appealing.
oft times it’s a little thing that pops me out. Maybe I can just ignore it but I often find other little things that annoy me and even if I like the story, Just Can’t.
Like saying Subaru cars use a Mitsubishi motor. Other small issues were in that series.
A growing number in a series that I ended up not finishing . . . a smallish Korean girl and another slightly taller Model figure girl (let alone the stud American they both have the hots for) can push a Triumph Bonnie and 2 “Cop Bikes” (Brits favor Honda ST-1300P models for the time of the stories) nearly a mile through woods, on a dirt path (just over 500lbs wet for the Bonnie, over 700lbs for the cop bikes) easily and quietly. This is after finding a bolt action .308 rifle in a random British house, using said .308 to kill large dinosaurs, just to name a few. Same author had some sailing in another book but not much and it went full fantasy not long after, giving himself no time to show more ignorance.
Yeah, I can’t bring myself to read and take seriously any narrative that pops blatantly wrong/seriously improbable details – especially if the author is one whom I have been led to believe did their research. I won’t soon forget one otherwise very readable book – an adventure on the Oregon-California wagon train trail, which had a character driving an ox-drawn wagon.
With reins. While sitting in the wagon. (sinal salute.) No, that’s not how ox teams were controlled.
Or the one set in a midwest town in the 1870s which had a pair of rebellious teenage girls from a respectable family run off on the train by themselves to the Big City, check into a hotel … and then go out drinking with some casually-met young men.
No, that’s not how respectable society worked in the 1870s…
I’m reading a nonfiction book centered on the Earps and the Mastersons, and “Got restless, ran away from the farm and fell into bad company” appears to be the backstory for at least one of the prostitute/girlfriend/common law wives that drift in and out of the story. But you’re right, it wasn’t something a young woman did with the idea that she was just going to drift home with a hangover in a day or two.
There were two that drove me nuts when I was reading western romances to see if it was something I could write. One was the story who had the heroine sitting up on the buckboard of the wagon driving (might actually have had horses instead of oxen) and chatting almost on eye level with the friendly Indians on their “massive” horses and thought that you tried to save the family chicken in a storm because it was a pet, not because it was an egg-source.
The other was the one where the local small town had some kind of place that sold coffee and pastries (in addition to other stuff), and the farmer hero would drive his angsty new bride into town on an almost daily basis so she could console herself at Starbucks – I mean, rando store in small Coloradoan farming community that incidentally sells coffee and pastries.
I mean, these were top 100 freebies, in a competitive genre, at the time I downloaded them some years ago. Obviously they worked for a lot of people. But they convinced me that I had very different interests and priorities from their target audience.
It’s mostly your own fault for accepting an Amazon recommendation, rarely a good idea.
When my mood is such that I need a “good book I could escape into” I reread something I know will meet the bill; there are plenty of books in the “Favourites” collection on my Kindle that need another visit, and I know I’m not going to be disappointed.
That’s a great tactic! Unfortunately, as I’m crossing into my 14th consecutive week of being sick, my usual tactics for coping have long since worn thin, and I’m left with “just stagger forward like I’m healthy, because life won’t wait for me to be able to deal with it.”
So I’m reading new things, listening to new music, working on new recipes, and trying to dial in my protein intake for weightlifting while working my way through progressively medically more interesting rounds of antibiotics and other stuff. Sooner or later, we’ll get the right combo, and I want to refill the well now so I’m ready to write new words when I’m healthy.
This has been a bad health year for several writers I know, and I’m just feeling recovered.
And reading . . . I’m trying to pull myself away from teen superheros stories . . . some are just so bad . . . and some are fascinatingly so bad, but so close . . .
Well, there’s Jeremy Kraatz’s Cloak Society, which I highly approve of. It’s middle-grade superheroes. (I’ve got some adult recs, too, but recovery may not be the time.)
I feel for your suspension of disbelief. That’s not how any of this works, indeed….
See this is one thing that has blocked me from attempting to actually write that retro-1980’s action thriller book I have a lot of notes on. Are readers going to flip out that it bears more resemblance to a Stallone or Schwarzenegger movie than some kind of ultra-realistic depiction of tactics & combat?
Also, back in the 1980’s the public really didn’t know very much about Delta or other SpecOps groups; 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed what a lot of readers know (or think they know).
All I want is to write a book set in about 1985 where an Operator who has just retired from service goes on a private mission to Angola to rescue a woman from his past from Commie-separatists who are fighting the other Commie-factions in Angola. (Honestly? It’s a sort of a quasi-sequel to the movie Commando with the serial numbers filed off.)
I’ve gathered a bunch of books about Delta and Africa for research, but I’m still afraid to write it. How did millions of copies of stuff like Mack Bolan and Remo Williams get sold back in the day? The books were not known for much accuracy in depictions of weapons, combat, wounds, etc. but they still sold millions! Is there any hope today to find an audience for something kind of like that like?
(OK shutting of valve from brain, but it’s not like I have a lot else to do still being homebound from the vertigo for over a month now. Working on a couple books covers for old stories to re-release on Amazon, and getting a lot of useful feedback from Tiffanie Gray while in progress. Just like to add that I appreciate that a lot.)
I believe the actual answer to that is to choose one of three options:
1. You can translocate it to another time and place.
I totally went with this in one scene in a souk, that eventually became part of a book. Because I have sat down for a full dinner table where I’m the only one at it who hasn’t done an arms deal in a souk, so how could I ever get it right enough for the guys?
2. Put at the top of the page, “No one ever has to see this”, and then just go ahead and write it anyway. Then work on getting beta readers that will check it well enough for you to be satisfied with your level of accuracy, for the readers you intend. Note the book I’m complaining mildly about has far outsold me; it’s accurate enough for its target market.
Yes, I have to do this for my combat scenes. Yes, they get thoroughly critiqued.
3. Embrace the cheese. How retro pulpy action 80’s can you get? Nobody expects Michael Bay movies to be accurate to known physics, and nobody’s complaining about the incorrect ecology of Princess Bride or accurate mythology of Big Trouble In Little China. Throw every trope and reference and in-joke in. All the cheese you can, every bit of it.
Do not be dissing “The Destroyer”. Those were marvelously silly books with little connection to reality (except for who the current President was). I inherited the first 50 books from a friend who passed away.
Ten reasons I hate writing fights . . .
That’s one good (?) thing about having been the receiving end of ambushes and low-level attacks – you get a better sense of how people respond, and what sort of things happen (physically, mentally). Fencing (sword, not post-hole) and being a military-history buff also helped.
And yeah, shaking the shoulder of a high-speed-low-drag individual who is having a bad dream … You do that. I’ll watch from the next county, thanks. I know my reaction, and dial that up to 9? Yeahno.
Had to leave a like for this post, just because.
I wrote a trilogy of MilSF books, and had a bunch of military guys wonder if I had served? The answer is no, but family and friends with good research skills etc did the job.
Now, have I sold a shit ton of books? Hell no. I make a cheap meal a month in income. I clearly don’t deliver what the larger MilSF audience wants.
Would I change any of it for a bigger audience.
No. More readers and money would be great, but I wouldn’t want to write stories that weren’t grounded in plausible near future tech. It’s what I wanted to write.