Morning links: The author-as-stalker edition, part two.

  • Kathleen Hale, on the pushback about her essay: "“This came with its fair share of [criticism] from people who didn’t read the piece and have little-to-no understanding of journalism,” she said. “So that was hard, but I’m getting used to feedback of all kinds.”" Silly me. I always thought 'journalism' was supposed to involve information based on actual, available evidence. Not essays that rely entirely on believing the word of a narrator who is entirely unreliable. 
  • Alex Hurst: Hale vs. Harris, and the breach of online ethics. If you are at all interested in the lead-up to Hale's essay, Hurst seems to have found everything that's still out there, and provided screencaps, along with extensive commentary.
  • Liz Burns: Yes, I Am Afraid. "Trust me: on a scale of 1 to 10, it was probably a 2 at most. No threats; nothing like that. Rather, it was about making me aware that a person could reach through my public online persona to my real life world. That I was vulnerable. Even for something that low on the scale, knowing it's that low on the scale of what happens to others, I'm afraid. I'm afraid that it will start up again, from writing this post."
  • Laura Miller: Battle of the trolls: Kathleen Hale reveals the war raging between authors and readers. "There’s a long history of aggressive author responses to negative reviews. Before the advent of social media, for example, the novelist Richard Ford was notorious for spitting on one reviewer who’d panned his book and for mailing another reviewer a copy of her own book into which he’d fired several bullets. The latter victim, Alice Hoffman, is a novelist herself. Hoffman in turn lost it when a critic reviewed one of her novels tepidly and posted the reviewer’s home telephone number to Twitter, urging her fans to call up and complain." WORST. HEADLINE. EVER.
  • BookEnds Literary Agency: The Power of Reviews and Kathleen Hale Continued... "The thing about free speech, and writing, is that no matter how much we love what we do, putting ourselves out there, through our writing, as authors, as bloggers, as reviewers, is terrifying. It is terrifying to wait and see what people say. It should never be terrifying enough that we fear for ourselves or those around us."
  • Dear Author: Poisoning the Well. "It’s clear to me that unreasonable people cannot be reasoned with, that no one who justifies the victimization of others would ever think it’s okay if it happened to them. Logic won’t prevail here, and calls for human decency and accountability continue to go unanswered."
  • Laura Ruby: "Catfishing" the Catfish: Writing, Stalking, and Wanting to be Heard. "The only time I ever responded to a negative review was on a blog some eight or nine years ago. I was polite and basically recommended a book I thought this blogger would like better, but I still regret doing it. (I might as well have posted “ME!” or “I EXIST!” when that wasn’t the point at all)."

Previously: Morning links: The author-as-stalker edition.

Related: Every Breath You Take: 4 Stalkers in YA.

Books, NewsLeila Roy4 Comments