Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Looking into the Dark

Today was my day to post to The Indelibles website. I decided to tackle dark themes in YA literature. Here's a preview:

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Thinking of a blog post is never easy. In fact, until last week I had absolutely no idea what I would write about. You all may not know this about me but I'm intensely shy. I suffer from severe stage fright. It's ridiculous, I know. Still, it's a part of who I am and I worried that whatever I had to say would fail to meet the expectations of this wonderful group that I'm lucky to be a part of.

Fortunately something happened last week (and not the my-laptop-broke something) that provided inspiration.

I've been blogging on my own blog A New Kind of Ordinary for almost a year now. At some point during this time, my blog became a book blog. It was a natural transition given my profound and undying love for the written word. I've posted reviews on my blog regularly along with other content and never really thought my opinion was affecting anyone. I wrote mostly for me because I love to talk books.

Various PositionsHowever, last week I received not 1 but 4 pieces of hate mail. Now, I've deduced that these emails are related since, well, they all showed up in my inbox on the same day and they all made reference to a positive review of Various Positions that I had posted to Amazon that morning.

I'm a writer. I can take constructive criticism. I've conditioned myself to handle negative reviews. As a reader, I've realized that not everyone will hold the same opinion that I do about any particular book. Yet, these emails were hard to stomach. Mostly because they weren't constructive and they had little to do with my actual review. These ladies had no problem with how my review was written. They made it quite clear that the problem they had was with my promoting and praising a book that they deemed inappropriate for a young adult audience.




To continue reading, head over to my post on

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