You Can't Make a Writer Happy

Just got a fine review from The Indiscriminate Critic, a pretty influential blogger, although clearly favoring books of the literary persuasion. No complaints, I've always fallen somewhere in between literary and genre - one of my "favorite" reviews was a standalone short in the NY Times saying I was such a good writer it was rather sad that I chose to spend my time in the genre gutter. Uh... thanks. Anyway, it always good to get pixels. Here's an excerpt from today review:

 One of my biggest problems with thrillers of any variety is when they demand too much suspension of disbelief from the reader without giving the requisite wink and a nod. The Girl Who Cried Wolf ends up taking itself pretty seriously despite its witty, almost Chandleresque humour. There aren’t any self-referential winks to the audience to say it’s all just in good fun. In the same hand, it doesn’t try to create a hyperreality where the events would be absolutely ludicrous outside of a novel. In all, the book actually balances everything rather nicely. 

Plenty of good stuff in the whole review, but of course the rest of that paragraph was followed by:

With the exception of one scene where a cagey veteran cop is inexplicably struck with a terminal case of the dumbs, nothing in the book really stretched my credulity.

Yes, this is one of my favorite scenes in the book. Two weeks effort, at least. I've decided to take the advice of a publicist at a former publisher, who told me when I groused about a less than rave review, "We can just pull out the praise for the ad. Be grateful that you got noticed."

Thank you, Obi Wan. I am well rebuked.