Control: Bad Reviews
I, Dalton Lewis, don’t know why I do it.
Why do I keep writing novels? I’ve been writing for twenty-five fucking years and I’m not a millionaire yet. I shouldn’t keep working at it. I should quit and open a bakery, bake people diet cookies. People like diet cookies.
I don’t understand.
I’ve written around twenty books without making a profit. That’s terrible. Someone should pay me. Someone should throw me cash.
No one seems to care. It’s harsh — I’m sorry to those of you who read my work— but it’s true.
I got another one-star review.
I immediately crashed. I had been feeling great — above the moon — but I immediately felt depressed.
I had felt so great.
I had 2,000 downloads of my most recent book — I was delighted with 2000 free downloads. I went out to breakfast with my dad. I had weighed myself and was under 286 pounds — I had lost twenty-four pounds. I had a five-star rating for my book. I had spent countless hours writing a spaceship battles book which was a recreation of the World War II battles at Guadalcanal. I created interesting and unique characters that had arcs and dramatic tension between each other.
And I got one star.
I work so hard and get one star. I don’t know what I do wrong — so colossally wrong that people think that my writing is awful, just awful. Not two stars or three stars or something — no, I regularly get one star ratings. I’m forty-four — I shouldn’t be a beginner at anything, as Red Letter Media likes to say.
Why do I persist? I should quit. It should be bakery time.
And yet I persist in writing about what’s wrong with America and its unpopular men.
I continue to write, to push boundaries, to try to tell the truth. It’s hard — to show that involuntary celibates have a perspective, that the unhappy men in life are hurting and are lashing out and need to be listened to and understood. I need to get at the reality beneath the veneer that is respectable society, to show what is wrong with America today, to always show people’s flaws, to show a society which doesn’t care about its people, because that is always the novel — what is wrong with America today. That is always the point. That is always the irony. Something is wrong with America today.
So I persist. I continue to fight an upwards battle towards respectability. I wrote American Starfleet Independence about a group of wonderful soldiers fighting like crazy to take a small planet far from Earth to save lives and protect Earth from alien invasion. I’m proud of it. I worked hard on it. I want people to give it a chance. To the one-star person — I worked really hard on that book. I’m sorry you didn’t like it.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
