Dear Anne Rice,

Hi. It's me again. It's been about a year since we first met on not so friendly terms and I'm irritated that I feel the need to talk to you again. Open letters are highly passive aggressive and I typically do not care for them, but I don't feel like being attacked by your fan poodles so I'll just rant here on my own personal space.

Shall we begin? Off we go!

First, how can I put this kindly? Nobody is fucking scared of you or your meager petition on Change.org. The reason that Nola was met with (mostly) civil conversation is because she didn't come waltzing into the forum with a big ego looking for an argument as you have done time and time again. Are you laughing because you think everyone who participated in the discussion were on their best behavior because of a so-called change you helped inspire?

Well, I hate to burst your overgrown bubble, but perhaps we aren't the evil, wicked, hate-filled, mean, nasty, gangster bully trolls you make us out to be. Many (most) of us are genuine, kind, and considerate people who just enjoy reading. We have families, friends, loved ones, careers, and quite a few of us are highly educated folks, including book smart and street smart. We have the capacity to enjoy life. We do not hide out in back alleys with a hit list of authors we want to attack and denigrate.

We are flawed since we are human. We get angry, snarky, fed up, and yes, perhaps mean at times. We get frustrated. We are human beings and I think a lot of us are fucking tired of being treated like complete pieces of shit. 

You know what else we are tired of happening? Being worried every time we write a review of a book or chapter sample. Being worried that some author is going to flip their shit and attack us because of a bad review or other opinion we express. A lot of people are tired of being harassed, mocked, having our conversations taken out of context, blatant lies made up about us, and feeling like we are being watched constantly for anything that could paint us in a bad light.

But I'm not scared of you and I'm not running from anyone. I'm still here. I'm still reviewing how I want to review and if you don't like it, maybe you should take your own advice:

"And frankly, if you're not willing to broadcast a review write a book for the whole world to read and share their thoughts on, well, maybe it's best not to review write period."

I no longer post reviews at Amazon because I've always used my real name, I don't belong to the sunshine-enema-five-stars-for-all school of reviewing, and have been snarled at once too often by a troll who thinks her or his opinion is RIGHT and therefore I am WRONG when I disagree with him or her.

I'm moving my reviews off of Goodreads...all 872 of them...because the same mentality has taken virulent and strangling hold there since the Amazon purchase. I cannot prove these things are causally linked. I mention them together because I suspect the hideous culture of screeching at reviewers whose opinions are not those desired to be heard by (mostly) self-published authors has found a snug haven in what was once a respectable and respected independent review venue.

Now it's Amazon Lite, and will more than likely become the next Shelfari. (Which has no credibility among sentient reading netizens.) I contributed an essay to OFF-TOPIC, a collection of pieces about the angry response to Goodreads' unannounced and inexcusable abuse of user-created data. My parti pris is clear. I use no name but my own for book reviews and I have never said anything other than: The less an author says or does, the better for her or his reputation and future career. Ms. Rice coming out in favor of compulsory "honesty" and "transparency" is very amusing to one old enough to remember when she consented to having her erotica published under the name "A.N. Roquelaire" to keep it separate from her Vampire Chronicles.

A good critic is trying to tell you what she has learned about herself from the reading of a particular piece of literature. A bad reviewer is often trying to tell you how smart he is by declaring whether or not he liked a particular book. If he liked the book, then this is the kind of book a superior person likes, and vice versa. He might try to explain why he didn’t like it, but the review is really just a tautology. “I didn’t like this book because it is bad,” is equivalent to “This book is bad because I didn’t like it.”
Kevin Guilfoyle, The Tournament of Books 2014

So this is something I found at the Tournament of Books site, and with which I agree completely. I've had a lot of private and public snark on several fora about the fact that I write reader-response reviews. "Who cares" is the general tenor of these snorts of derision, with an undercurrent of "how dare you" for additional smugness.

Here's the thing: I don't much care if you liked a book or not. That's nice, either way, ohhh mmmm ah-hah. So? I like BLTs. So you go out and get yourself a BLT because Richard said he liked them. It's a soggy mess, with undercooked bacon and watery tomatoes and limp, wilted iceberg lettuce on untoasted white bread. "Ick ptui," you say, "that Richard steered me wrong! I'll never trust his recommendations again."

And you'd be right.

I **love** crispy bacon. When you put crispy, just-on-the-edge-of-burned bacon on a toasted piece of seeded rye bread, and add fresh, home-grown Green Zebra tomatoes that have been slightly salted to accent their sweetness...well, the only thing that makes it better is an inner leaf of butter lettuce, one of the yellowy ones with a crunchy-thick rib and that snap-in-the-tooth texture. Being a fat-o-holic, I need mayo on my bread, but honestly who would be a stickler and whine about the lack with these ingredients?

And please, oh please, give me a good bock beer, a Dos XX or a Shiner, cold cold cold, so I can sluice my mouth clean with carbonated richness! Could any sandwich anywhere ever say "summer" more loudly than this?

Now you hate the sound of that because you're some sort of stupid veggie nutball, or you're a religious nut who won't eat pigmeat, or maybe beer makes you cringe. Maybe you don't like tomatoes. But what you are not is in any doubt about what I'm saying I like. Based on your take on the elements presented, you have a clear picture of whether I'm speakin' your language or I might as well be speaking in tongues.

That's what I'm trying to get across, both positively and negatively, in my reviews. If you disagree with me, fine. But I don't care. It's not important to me that you "validate" me with praise each and every time I utter a pronunciamento, as more than one of the arrogant assholes who've publicly or privately told me to belt up have said.

If you don't like what I've written, go on about your day. I don't care to know why, or that, you are Offended or Bored or Contemptuous. Go feel your feelings the way you feel your bits: Privately.

Kevin Guilfoyle, The Tournament of Books 2014