AG dress up, new holiday edition

So yesterday I went out into the world and tried to buy some Halloween spirit. I failed. We're too close to Halloween for there to be a lot of awesome stuff left (boo) and honestly, this year it looked like no one really got a lot of NEW stuff. Hell, most of it looked like they recycled last year's stuff and threw in a case of new stuff (that naturally sold out or was crap) and called it a year before moving on to pumping out Christmas stuff.

Anyway, by the time we made it home, I had a raging headache which means that by the time I got irishgypsie's suggestions for AG dress-up, I wasn't exactly in the best place to do much more than point, click, and pray. :P She suggested Saige for the blue dress and Nellie for Samantha's new holiday dress.

( Shinies! )

Writers write, they shouldn't stalk

Well. I just got sucked down the rabbit hole that is the whole Kathleen Hale debacle.
   [TL;DR: Author admits, in painfully long detail, to stalking someone who gave her a bad review. A review I then spent forever searching for, btw. And when we say stalking, we mean showed up at her house and called her at work levels of stalking. Author also misues 'catfishing' and winds up catfishing her reviewer. Instead of dying from Grade A levels of Irony poisoning, author thinks herself right awesome.]

That got long, too. Whoops.

I don't feel any of this is complete without mentioning her whole admitting to stalking (and dousing them in peroxide) someone when she was younger, too, though that is a bit more complicated, but it was written in a way that is so problematic that my first thought was legitimately, "This woman needs psychiatric help."


Naturally, this is over a book that I think I would have given a shot otherwise but it's now on my virtual pile of No by virtue of the author being batshit crazy.

Look. I get it. Someone says something bad about you and you fixate. But you don't fucking stalk them and you sure as fuck don't brag about it in public. You accept that not everyone is going to love you (or your work) and you move the hell on.

And I say this as someone who would probably have a hard time doing just that. But I wouldn't stalk someone for not liking my work. That path leads right through Crazy Town and everyone knows it.

I review some stuff on GoodReads when I'm in the mood. I really wish they'd find a way to make half-star reviews possible because, as it is, I tend to hand out three stars for a lot of things and it's just a flawed thing on my end... and I'm on a tangent. Shush, self.

Anyway. Like I said, I review stuff there. I've left some glowing reviews (maybe?) and I've left some, "Would not read this author again" reviews. For the most part, I try not to drag the author into the review, though. If I say I won't read the author again, it's usually something like I don't care for the writing style and since I'm pretty sure very few people are reading my reviews, they're written mostly for me. (One time the lovely MaryJanice Davidson did comment and I did die of happiness!) I use my GR stuff to remind myself what's happened in any given series I'm reading or why I have a mental block against an author.

But I find it very difficult to drag someone through the muck for a book most of the time because books are work.
When everyone and their sister was destroying the MG& Cecile books in AG fandom, I felt so bad for the authors and the illustrator. Yes, the art was awful but some of her other stuff (not in those books) was amazing, so I honestly don't know what the hell happened, and I felt so bad adding to that.

Thing is, even if I said, "Your work is shit and you're shit at your job and should be fired!" it doesn't give the author the right to come after me and appear on my doorstep.
It just... doesn't.

I'm wondering how, exactly, I missed all of this until now, too.