Reviews

I'm up to four reviews on Amazon now for The Last Tragedy. They're all very complimentary and very gratifying, but I will say, the moment I saw the first one from a complete stranger, I felt an entirely different sense of accomplishment.

I've had relatively disinterested parties read my books and react positively to them, so I'm aware that the evidence suggests that my writing is objectively good (to the extent that any writing can be considered objectively anything). But there has always been some thread of personal connection to inject the possibility of bias into those responses. So to see the book getting high marks from that first unknown person, that first individual who had nothing at stake except the time spent reading the book -- it couldn't help but feel like a threshold being crossed.

Every review will be its own thing for a while now. Sooner or later I'll get my first review on The Sharp Edge of Memory. I'll get my first review on Amazon.co.uk, or my first verbose review (I've written plenty of those myself, but all the ones I've received to date have been pretty succinct).

And of course, there will be my first bad review. It'll be interesting to see how that feels, although I'm certainly not in any rush to find out.

Eventually, with any luck or persistence on my part, I'll accumulate enough reviews that some of them start to blur together, or enough that I no longer find each individual review a noteworthy event.

But I hope it takes a lot of them to get to that point.