I am seriously considering giving up all attempts at writing and publishing. I need to be known, understood, and respected by the community for my contributions in whatever medium I’m working in, and it isn’t happening. I went with literature because it felt the most “me” of anything I ever tried. It gave me more joy than any other solitary activity. It made me feel alive, briefly, in the little windows I could get between chores and clocked-in work. It was clearly more important than either.

Reviewers’ lack of imagination, unwillingness to bend lexically, and downright intuitive stupidity have left me powerless. I had vision, and my vision was true. If it came through an incomprehensible interface, I’m sorry. If you were not familiar with imagination and mistook my work for genre fiction, I’m sorry. If my story splattered all across your gray face in incomprehensible colors and drowned your heavings and hawings, I’m sorry.

This, from a review publication which I won’t name. I asked them not to publish it.

“Events and the plot continue to spiral into growing confusion without any explanation or reasoning as things just happen back to back, indicating further forces at play, that Austin does have some unique ability, and that there are other worlds out there and Uncle Phil was some sort of traveler. These ideas might prove interesting if they were better explained and plotted instead of just coming out of nowhere.”

You have to read the whole Vaulan Cycle to get it. Sorry.

“Anders seems to have some vocabulary problems or perhaps has an unusual way of describing things, as words are used for description but don’t fit the meaning they’re intended.”

Nope. Exact effect that was desired was created. Sorry you weren’t ready for the effect. Maybe it was something like this that threw you off:

Inside the bowl of trees he stood, centered and commanding, cognizant and steady: a breath of boy, a straight sharp vision like an endless blade, cutting up like blinding angle into the night–a straight sharp vision like leader, like unknowing poet under madness muse. (p. 152)

Each word bears an exact function in that passage. It is packed with meaning, both visual and psychological. Sorry you lack the intuitive ability to visualize something that doesn’t exist or to see inside the psyche of another person. Regardless, language is plastic, and I am making new plastic out of your language.

The review would have worked better as a Dada poem:

Oooh oooh ma ma ma mo mo mo vocabulary words nowhere unique 

Da da da da traveler ideas events plot

Bloo bloo bloo bloo words unusual out of nowhere vocabulary plot

Blah blah blah blah ideas nowhere vocabulary unique words

*rant off*