One of our authors had an interview in one of the Lay-deez papers and was mightily and rightily upset by the barrage of bitchy on-line comments people had posted.
Why on earth are you reading the comments, for God's sake? I asked her. Do you have rocks in your head? Who wants to know what people think..? If it's negative (and let's face it, most people who leave messages - Edwin Moore not withstanding, speaking of whom, where are you? - don't want to pass on gifts like the good fairy at a princess's christening, they want to cough up all their own toads of bile and dump them on you) what possible good does it do you to wallow in them? Would you stand on the street and let a stranger spit on you? No, you'd walk away. So do the same with the nutters who vent their spleen anonymously.
Those comments at the bottom of newspaper articles have become the new poison pen letters. It used to be that if you wanted to voice your opinion in a newspaper you had to supply your name and address, and even if you wanted to preserve your anonymity, these would still have to be supplied. Nowadays any Tom, Dick or Harridan can say whatever nasty, ill-informed, irrelevant, skin-crawling nonsense they feel like, while hiding behind an email address that can be as fake as they are - or even worse - a completely spurious and random alias which rarely bears any relationship to either their identity or their character. I mean, how many bitterbitches or sourwankers do you know leaving comments? I do think that people would be a bit more measured and responsible about being vitriolic and mean if they weren't sniping from cyberspace and had to have their physical net-curtain twitching address printed below their so-called opinions.
On a blog such as this the comments are moderated and an email address has to be provided. I think it's only fair that since everyone knows who I am and where you can find me, both in the real and virtual worlds, that if you're going to slag me off, I should know you are. If you are not willing to put your moniker where your mouth is, then why the hell should I, or anyone else, be interested in your critical analysis? Anyone up for a verbal stoning?
Sod it, not me. That's what the delete button is for. And as for newspaper articles - you write them and you forget about them,. Even if the Google search engine has a long, elephantine memory, it also has the attention span of a flea and it soon hops on to another host. So, just say no. Do not put yourself on a Google Alert. Do not scroll down for comments.
As an author, however, we're all co-dependant hostages to such things - from Amazon reviews onwards. And as the lucky recipient of Borders promotion in the States where my only task was to open a thread on their Facebook discussion forum, I greeted the email telling me that someone had replied to my post, with some trepidation. It sat in my in box for thirty minutes while I ignored it in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that I ignored the comments beneath my article in The Times On-Line.
Fear.
But the book represents eighteen months of my life and the newspaper article took one hour. And so, after it seemed as though my stomach could sink no further, I mustered sufficient courage to click on the link...
and okay... Good Fairies do occasionally come to the Christening.
She loved it.
