(no subject)

I'm reducing my day to a tolerable size. My finger, you see, is my augury. If it hurts and swells, I must do less. No library visit this afternoon and no meeting tonight and only the housework that has to be done (none of this trying to fill in waiting time by doing useful stuff, for that's the main reason the finger hurts today). I have my lists of things that must be done and if I have time beyond that, I may only do easy things.

When I've finished this degree, I"m taking a holiday. I have no idea what kind of holiday, since I'm not very good at holidays, but I'm taking one.

(no subject)

I have students on Sunday and course notes are done. I now get a break to run messages and then I'm back to my list. That list is down to 18 items, which is a much better state. And I have dinner! Well, I have dinner plans. I shall steam rice in home made beef stock, with spinach and then add lemon and tabasco and maybe artichoke hearts at the end. I might eat it with duck eggs, or hen eggs, for I seem to be a bit short on protein. Anyhow, it's an easy meal.

And now I must brave the bitter sunshine. Except that it's almost nice outside today. Something went wrong with winter.

Review requests (again)

My current sub-section of the to-do list is emails. The biggest subset of emails I have to deal with are "Would you please review my book" requests. To all but one of those, I'm giving a polite 'no.' For every single one of these polite rejections, there is but a single cause: I have never given any indication that I review books about these subjects, whether the subjects be uncovering the inner workings of the CIA or making one's own harnesses to leap out of planes or learning how to smile when telling someone that their watch is wrong.*

This is the opposite to the too-frequent queries I got last year about when the essay would appear. The big publishers all go through the BiblioBuffet owner and then email me especially when we have a working relationship and they have something they want to ask me***. With anywhere else I review for (except here, which is a special case) it all goes through the owner or review editor of the site/zine/whatever.

Because I look at a slightly wider range of topics than some reviewers/essayists and because it's dead easy to send BiblioBuffet an email telling me about a book, I get a lot of requests. Most of them don't cover my sort of book** and most of these are just a statement about the book. No "Dear Gillian" or "Dear Dr Polack" or even "Polack, you, over there - pay attention."

So many writers take their sales pitch for the book (sometimes the blurb from the back, sometimes material from a PR package) and paste it into an email and trust that it will be wonderfully convincing and that someone like me will instantly feel a need to see that book. It just doesn't work that way. Before I had a queue of books, I'd sometimes take a work and review it regardless of the approach, especially if it came from small press. This became tiring very quickly. I still do this from time to time, but the book has to be utterly tantalising.

I don't mind form letters, what I object to is an email that consists of nothing but dump from the book's PR - it doesn't convince me to read it if the book isn't in my area and it certainly doesn't convince me that I should put the book early in my queue. The book itself has to work much harder once it reaches my clutches if you make me work to overlook the lack of etiquette.

We take so much care in sending our manuscripts off to publishers. It would be nice if even 1/1000 of the care was taken by this minority of writers in identifying potential reviewers. Read what the reviewer writes about, have a polite cover letter and don't treat reviewers as potential recipients for bookspam. I want this engraved somewhere. Putting it in bold will have to do instead.****

I rather like it that writers like my work enough to solicit reviews. I just wish they'd be more courteous about it and maybe do a little homework. And I have a few more "I'm sorry" emails to send. I so hate sending these. I wish I could write about everything.








*These examples are invented.

**When they do, I say 'yes' except when I'm impossibly bogged down and then I decline, but with sorrow - unless the subject is one I am likely to be vile about, like a study of why the author hates Jews, in which case I will decline politely and wish I had never seen the email. That last example was not, alas, invented.

***I had to decline a book by Sean Williams! They were just asking if I was willing to take an eversion and I had to say "Yes, when necessary, but I can't review Sean." Sorry, Sean. I will read it anyway, I promise. Just not as soon and I won't get to review it.

****The footnotes are intentionally evil today. This is because I really hate writing these emails. It's so tough to tell other writers that no, I won't be reading their work instantly.