I had put this up earlier but pulled it down figuring the writer might be upset, but then I thought, well, I didn't write it...not really my issue...
There is a big difference beween you and Hugh Mcleod:
Ooh, that hurts. Hugh is a best selling WSJ writer and the reviewer knows I know him.
His book bases on cartoons: His cartoons, which are unique and entertained and not imitable. NEver. Form that point, his blog just delivers a platform to communicate that unique thing and can sell it and his cartoons.
And I am not a cartoonist.
You jump into the mass writer market, and your book bases on like or dislike, very controversal, and it makes you frustration.
I wish I had had this advice earlier. It could have saved me a successful career in the advertising business and a lot of frustration.
YOu blog is nice nice, basing on personal experience, a bit creative, nice nice, but not so unique like Hugh. Please wake up, you might be very talented but what you are doing with the blog does not make you unique. Neither content nor expression.
So the content and the expression suck. Is there anything else? Go shoot myself?
So, do you want to live with and depend on bad comments or good comments of any reader for ther est of your life and be frustrated everyday? When I see you, I dont see a confident man but a frustrated one?
Find me a person in the creative arts who doesn't experience frustration and I'll show you someone who's probably not very talented. Making any art is always driven by the feedback one gets from the consumers of that art. That's how it works. That's why it works.
Dont kill yourself that way. As a friend, I would like to tell you: Dear David, wake up. I learned on internet about jsut one guy who succeeeded with his blog so that it is integrated into a newspaper. You alone do not come fromthe journalism business, but a creative writer at adversiting companies.
These days I think having a background in journalism could be a liability. I'll take my chances.
So your book is exiting, has a mix of many things, complicated but for me not so deep in content if it shoud be the way of literature.
NO clear positioning, describing the nice story of a creative person going to the east...A travel book perhaps...But Many other personal stories are comparable: Success bases on like or dislike, but no big success.
There may be a million better stories, but they're not mine - even the reviewer has a more interesting story than mine. All I try to do is write down, as best I can, the images and feelings I have. What happens after that is out of my hands. But what I can say so far, is that my good reviews far outnumber this one.
Hugh's book is unique: simple, full of cartoons, claer messege, easy to read. It is unique, clear unique, not comparable....
Yes, we already know I'm not Hugh. This is bordering on just plain cruel.
Dont kill your self, David. Success can be a grateful day, after David finishes his job to survive and writes in confidence, and bigger things will happen, step by step, in a apeaceful way.
Comments please. And please refer to my previous post, 'Can You Spot Rejecton?'
Interesting how some critics have never done much themselves, which might make it easier for them to tell us what we're doing wrong. One thing I won't be doing for sure is killing myself over this. This week the Technorati Authority for WWED jumped to 115 from 103 earlier in the week placing us at number 52,929 - and that's out of maybe 120 million blogs worldwide - so do I feel bad for my 21 months work? I could feel worse. When I first saw the review above I felt immediately the anger from the reviewer and of couse it bothered me. It hurt me deeply, not because someone trashed my art, but because they trashed two projects I care deeply about and pour a lot of emotion into. It was an attack on my hope. And if the people closest to you don't believe in what you are doing, why bother doing it? I'll survive. Maybe that person wasn't really so close to me as I had thought.
On the funnier side was this email comment from a reader: "I love hate mail", it read, "When you get it, you know you've done something right!"
Touche!
