I received my second review the other day on one of the Smashwords stories I put up -- "Second-Hand Princess." The reviewer, "Caite" said:
"A very muddled story, with a Princess who never acquires a name, a Prince with an unpronounceable one, and entirely too many typographical and grammatical errors to be readable. Lovely premise, poor execution. (review of free book)."
I've spent the last few days trying to decide what I thought of this review. It's not bad. My initial thought was to ignore it, but then I wondered: was she right? I think what worried me more was not the muddled story or the poor execution part -- that's opinion -- but the part about typographical and grammatical errors.
So tonight I ran the story through Microsoft Word's grammar and spelling corrector. Yes, she was right. I wouldn't call it unreadable, but I found at least two spelling errors, one of which wouldn't have been caught by spell check. I also replaced a number of periods with commas. *sigh*.
The rest is her opinion, although I'm still trying to figure out how the name "Aarach" is entirely unpronounceable. The name doesn't seem as hard as some I've seen, such as Lois McMaster Bujold's "Miles Naismith Vorkosigan." (I discovered I was pronouncing it wrong when I listened to the audio books.)
That's fine. While I would like other people to enjoy my stories -- that's why I put them out there -- I mostly enjoy writing them. And that's all that counts. In my opinion!
"A very muddled story, with a Princess who never acquires a name, a Prince with an unpronounceable one, and entirely too many typographical and grammatical errors to be readable. Lovely premise, poor execution. (review of free book)."
I've spent the last few days trying to decide what I thought of this review. It's not bad. My initial thought was to ignore it, but then I wondered: was she right? I think what worried me more was not the muddled story or the poor execution part -- that's opinion -- but the part about typographical and grammatical errors.
So tonight I ran the story through Microsoft Word's grammar and spelling corrector. Yes, she was right. I wouldn't call it unreadable, but I found at least two spelling errors, one of which wouldn't have been caught by spell check. I also replaced a number of periods with commas. *sigh*.
The rest is her opinion, although I'm still trying to figure out how the name "Aarach" is entirely unpronounceable. The name doesn't seem as hard as some I've seen, such as Lois McMaster Bujold's "Miles Naismith Vorkosigan." (I discovered I was pronouncing it wrong when I listened to the audio books.)
That's fine. While I would like other people to enjoy my stories -- that's why I put them out there -- I mostly enjoy writing them. And that's all that counts. In my opinion!
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