look me in the eye and tell me you don't find me attractive

"where does the good go" by tegan and sara & goodreads

I have three confessions to make.

Confession 1: I fucking love Goodreads. I know, I know, I know. It’s owned by Amazon now. The search functionality is SO bad sometimes I think it’s personally trolling me. (You’ll type part of the title and it’ll start to pull it up, then you type more of the title and it’ll lose it again?!? I can’t take it.) And, of course, it can be an incredibly toxic place to be, especially for authors.

So obviously, I visit Goodreads every single morning.

Confession 2: I never, ever check Love in the Time of Serial Killers’ Goodreads page.

Like, ever.

I told this to my son once, and he was shocked. “Why wouldn’t you read your reviews?” he asked. “That’s like not checking the comments for your own YouTube video.”

Well, first of all. I’m not sure that I would check the comments for my own YouTube video. And second of all, comparing reviews to a YouTube comment section is not a way to inspire me to want to read them.

I explained that my instinct is pretty much always you wouldn’t like me, so the idea of seeking out reviews to confirm that is like voluntarily putting my own pinkie under a stapler. “There are probably good ones, though,” he said. “Don’t you want to read those?”

Once I read a book that I HATED, like gif-of-Bradley-Cooper-in-Silver-Linings-Playbook-throwing-a-book-out-of-the-window-and-going-”What the fuck???”-level hated, like I-give-almost-every-book-five-stars-on-Goodreads-because-writing-a-book-is-hard-but-I-had-to-no-star-this-one-because-I-couldn’t-bring-myself-to-do-it-level hated, and in it there was a character who was an artist. She said she never wanted to hear anything about her work, because “if you live by the cheers, you die by the boos.” And if I can forget THAT FUCKING ENDING SERIOUSLY IT MADE MY BLOOD BOIL, maybe I’d retroactively give that book 5 stars for that quote alone. It really stayed with me.

So I told my son, no, I don’t really want to read good reviews either. They’d get in my head, too, just in a different way.

He turned back to his video game. “Well,” he said. “That sounds like anxiety.”

(The casualness with which he correctly diagnosed my anxiety! I’ll never forget it.)

The point is, I spend at least 15 minutes a day clicking around Goodreads and rely on my own white-knuckle self-discipline to just never ever click on my book. Take me anywhere, just not to my own Goodreads page lol.

Confession 3: I accidentally saw my book’s overall Goodreads rating the other day and it . . . wasn’t great.

Like, the rating wasn’t great. It also didn’t feel emotionally great. Turns out you can die by the boos either way.

To set the scene: I wake up exhausted, brave my commute downtown, assess my inbox at work, grab some coffee and pull up my cute little Goodreads burner account. I do my usual housekeeping — posting a review of the book I finished the night before, assessing how far behind I am on my 2022 reading goal (4 books, but don’t worry! holiday novellas can always fix you up and I have Missing Christmas by Kate Clayborn and Santa, Baby by Eliza McLane, and Holiday Games by Cat Wynn all waiting on my Kindle! I won’t be left short of my self-imposed and arbitrary goal!!). And then I see it down there on the bottom of my screen, under “books recommended for readers of ____.” My book. Sitting at a 3.46.

Listen.

I hate quibbling over a few tenths of a point. That starts to feel like math and I . . . well, I actually do kinda like math as long as it’s long division and not the high-level shit my school counselors never thought I was capable of and so I never learned. (To be fair, I slept through Geometry so it’s not like I gave my counselors much to work with.)

So let’s just say I hate feeling like Dennis Reynolds in one of my favorite episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where he gets super fixated on what everyone is rating him on a dating app, to the point where he just follows these women around screaming at them to give him five stars. Then he sees that Dee is purposely rating men low just to fuck with them and it sends him into one of his bursts of rage that are pretty much always at the center of all my favorite episodes (“you haven’t thought of the smell, you bitch!,” when he and Dee want to swim in the fancy clubhouse pool but get turned away, “this car is a finisher car!,” and on and on, these quotes may not be accurate because I’m trying not to go down this rabbit hole which I very easily could).

“slapdash opinions” is probably a fair assessment of my own Goodreads reviews tbh, but hey, I always five star! so they’re slapdash kind opinions!

The point is, I started my day feeling like a 3.7. A solid 3.6 at least. Maybe a 3.5, because yes, I am aware that Phoebe can be unlikeable to some people (I get tagged in lots of very lovely reviews of my book that start with something like “I know people don’t like Phoebe, but I thought she was great!”), and yes, I’m also aware that some people pick up my book thinking it’s going to be more of a murder mystery or have an actual serial killer in it or something (I feel terrible when this happens but also . . . I don’t know what I can do about it! I feel very helpless!).

I know the subject of whether authors engage with reviews is a fraught one, and I’m definitely of the mind that authors generally shouldn’t. Readers deserve their spaces. It’s yet another reason not to check your own Goodreads page — if you know you shouldn’t respond, it’s only going to be frustrating to see stuff you desperately wish you could respond to. I also understand intellectually that not every book is everyone, that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, that hey if readers are buying the book or checking it out from the library that’s awesome even if they didn’t end up loving it, that a three-star rating is pretty decent actually, that if I’m proud of my book and feel like I did right by my characters and the story I wanted to tell that’s all that matters, no matter what it’s just an algorithmic number attached to this thing I made that is a very small percentage of who I am and in fact not even me at all just a bunch of words printed on paper that has my name on it, you yourself talked about a book you hated in this very newsletter so you can’t be upset if your book is that book for someone else, and on and on and on. Intellectually I understand this.

But emotionally, ooof. If you’re thinking I bet it stung to be a 3.46, it did! I’ll admit it!

I spent the next week in a real funk. Just down about my writing, down about myself, down about everything. (I also was listening to a playlist that had not one but two versions of “A Long December” on it, which I’ll tell you all about in a future newsletter but which probably did not help my mental health lol.) Even if something good happened, I just couldn’t receive it. You could look me in the eye and tell me the most sincere compliment, could speak slow and ask me to repeat it after you, and I wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the noise of that 3.46.

So why am I writing this newsletter? I feel dangerously close to engaging with reviews, which I’m not looking to do. I feel whiny and ungrateful, when there ARE so many good things that have happened in connection with Love in the Time of Serial Killers, including that it was published at all. The past version of myself — the one who thought LITTOSK might just be another Google Doc that I’d feel too sad to open again — would be so jealous of that fact alone!

I think I’m writing it because it helps just to get it out. To express how these things can make us feel, even if we think they shouldn’t, even if we think it’s dumb, even if we think, I’ve watched this Black Mirror episode so I already know about the pointlessness of letting a number define me.

I also feel like we have to be constantly vigilant about protecting the parts of something that bring us joy. For most writers, we didn’t do it for the acclaim, or the money, god knows we didn’t do it for the health insurance. We did it because we have stories we want to tell and it’s really special and gratifying and cool if we can share them with even one person who might need that story.

For me, part of this vigilance is also protecting my joy around reading. I love to read! I love it more than writing even! (Mostly because it’s less work.) I want to read romance without comparing other books to mine; I want to be a fan of my favorite authors without letting industry stuff get in the way; I want to go on Goodreads and keep obsessive track of every book I read and find one-star reviews in Spanish to test my reading comprehension in another language and read answers to the question of SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT ENDING.

You may have noticed I didn’t actually talk about “Where Does the Good Go?” by Tegan and Sara at all! That’s mostly because it’s just an incredible song and I don’t have much to say about it beyond it’s incredible, go listen to it. But ALSO did you notice that I worked every single song title from the track listing of So Jealous into this newsletter? That was a fun little challenge I gave to myself and I’m pretty pleased with what I came up with. I’d give myself a 3.8.

(Or at least a 3.75, rounded up.)

Currently reading . . . Since it seems fitting given the topic of this newsletter, Tegan and Sara also have a Substack and I read it RELIGIOUSLY. I have a paid subscription so I can read everything they write and comment on posts with my opinions about Christmas movies, stuff like that. One of their posts that I referenced just a few weeks ago, that I think about constantly, is the one where they went through how they craft a set list and how “Where Does the Good Go?” is one of those fan-favorite songs you always want to hear at a show even if you don’t think you want to hear it. (Not me! I never think that!). Anyway, if you’re a Tegan and Sara fan or a set list fan or a spreadsheet fan, this one’s for you:

How To Craft a Set List and Why!

watching . . . My family is only two episodes away from finishing Wednesday! I know we’ve been working through this show at a glacial pace compared to everyone else, but what can I say. This time of year is busy, man.

I saw an interview with Jenna Ortega where she demonstrated how you do the “Wednesday” face, which is just to drop your cheekbones and angle your face down while keeping your eyes steady, and I was like lolololol you mean how I look every day at work.

Me when I have to staple a bunch of documents, and then unstaple them because actually they need to be scanned in, then re-staple them again. I didn’t mean to talk about stapling so much in this newsletter.

listening to . . . Paramore has a new song!!!!!