Friday, July 3, 2015

"Sleeping Duty," by Laura Montgomery


I'm doing things a bit differently with my reviews now, based on the two different places they appear. Both of these are important, to me, but also to the authors I review. What you are reading here, of course, is the review that goes into my blog. Consider this as the bonus content you get on the DVD. The other place the review appears is on Amazon.
Way back in the dawn of time, say around April of this year, the reviews were the same. In fact, I'd usually write the review on Amazon, then copy and paste it to my blog. Then I experienced a couple of minor hiccups with that. Mostly it centered around the brief delay (usually brief, sometimes not so brief) between the time I submitted the Amazon review and the time it posted. A small matter, actually. But because of the delay, I started writing the reviews on my blog FIRST, the copying THAT over to Amazon. And that brought with it two problems, one irritating, but minor, and the other PERHAPS major.
The irritating but minor problem is that Amazon doesn't allow you to post a review with non-Amazon urls. The other day, I tried to copy and paste my blog review of  'Cyberbooks' to Amazon, and it rejected my review several times; I THINK it was because I mentioned getting the book from Baen in the text, and initially provided the link. Even after I took out the link, though, it still rejected the review. So, I had to start from scratch, with a pitiful little piece of monkey-scratched writing, and they took it.
The perhaps major problem is: TL;DR. And I JUST found out about a week ago that stands for Too Long, Didn't Read. When I copy my blog post to Amazon, it's got all the bonus content included, and it goes on for paragraphs, AND THAT'S NOT WHAT AMAZON READERS WANT IN A REVIEW!!! (I don't think.)
Here's the deal: my blog and my Amazon reviews are different, because NOBODY reads my blog posts unless they mean to.  That is the exact opposite from Amazon, where my posts get read because people want to know about the author's work. My chattiness works here; it doesn't work on Amazon. I can prove that to you: this pitiful blog garners, in most cases, 50+ page views. The top three posts were way above that, and I still put some things out there that only result in 20 views, but usually, I'm trying to hit 50 views. On Amazon, it is RARE that I get even ONE vote for 'this review was helpful.' There was one exception to that; my first Peter Grant novel review got 16 positive votes, because I noted that this wasn't the Peter Grant who wrote gay porn. There is such a person, and I read his amusing work, stopping at the first zipper scene. That's when I was sure there were at least two different Peter Grants writing on Amazon.
All of the above is just background material, and that's all the non-Laura Montgomery blog-specific content you get. Here's some Laura Montgomery content:
First: This is another GREAT cover by Peter Smith. Here's where he puts his commercial work, and if you click the link you can see the four covers of her work. They are all my favorite, but my favorite favorite is the cover for 'The Sky Suspended.' She took the picture for that herself with her telephone; it's her son, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Look at the rest of Phil's work while you are on the site.
I loved Laura's LAWYERS IN S-P-A-A-C-E!!!! books, which encompass (sort of) Erawan, Manx Prize, and The Sky Suspended. I hope we get more of those. I was sure she was an engineer when I read Manx Prize; she writes that well. Plus, this is my cat's favorite book. Her name is SugarBelly, and she is a fat black Manx, who likes to walk across the keyboard from time to time; she says that SHE is the Manx Prize, and is glad Laura wrote a book about her, and she can haz cheeseburger.

The following is the content of my review on Amazon, and the end of my blog post:

You wake up, disoriented. Try to move. You feel rusty, really rusty; but it's coming back to you.
You signed up to be a colonist, with your new wife, after serving your time in the service. You made it.
But when you ask the medics for your wife, it all starts to go wrong. They won't answer your questions.
And you find out you missed your destination, and while you were sleeping, somebody destroyed your future. With a king.
Time to reject their reality, and substitute your own...
This is MOSTLY an adventure story. It's also a time travel story. And a love story. And Laura the space lawyer can't help herself, she has to throw in these goofy little lines. And situations, such as: you have to catch chickens if you run away, because if you don't eat an egg every day, you will die. And the name of the planet, which is NWWWLF, for Not What We Were Looking For.
It's a good stand-alone novel; nothing left that you HAVE to know about. However, there is PLENTY that you WANT to know about, so let's send Laura our 'write-fast' monkeys to make her life run smoothly.

1 comment:

  1. I forgot to add this: I was loaned a copy of the book through Amazon for review purposes. The book is automatically returned after 14 days.

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