Today on Skiffy and Fanty, I interview The Little Red Reviewer herself, Andrea Johnson, about her forthcoming kickstarter
- Please introduce yourself to our reading audience.
Hi! My name is Andrea Johnson, I run the science fiction and fantasy book review blog The Little Red Reviewer. In the eight years since I started the site, I’ve written over 400 reviews. I was a contributor at SFSignal, and I am currently the author interviewer at Apex magazine. My house looks like a library exploded, and I am literally incapable of not bringing books home.
This January, I’m kickstarting The Best of Little Red Reviewer, which will be a print book of my best reviews. Backer rewards include customized books, getting your favorite review into the book, and more. I’ve never run a kickstarter before, so I am equally excited and terrified!
In real life, I’m an introvert who enjoys cooking and singing.
2. A Kickstarter for your non fiction reviews is exciting. Who and what inspired you to take the plunge?
I’m excited too!! (and terrified!) Over the years I’ve collected a handful of very nice compliments about my reviews. I’m proud of the work I’ve done. If WordPress shuts down tomorrow, all my work will be gone. When the blogosphere is no longer a thing that is in fashion, when the internet as we know it evolves into something else, my work will be if not gone at least very hard to access.
My work is currently 100% dependent on the internet and the blogosphere being fairly static environments. The speed at which the internet changes, the speed at which people change how and why they use the internet has been fairly slow. But when change speeds up, when the internet evolves into whatever its next shape will be, I’ll have to think fast. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if my work could exist outside the inevitable evolution of how we use the internet today?
You know what survives most societal changes? Physical books. A print book of my best work is proof that my work is worthwhile enough to exist beyond the computer screen. In a way, this kickstarter is a viability test of the value of reviews, and the true value of independent hobbyist reviewers. What us bloggers do, what we’ve accomplished, what is this worth? And If the kickstarter doesn’t fund, that will tell me something valuable too.
On top of that, I know I have some excellently written reviews. If you visit the review index of my blog, how in the world is anyone supposed to know which of those reviews are worth your time to read? My best stuff is nearly impossible to find. There is such a thing as being too shy.
3. You’ve had an impressive oeuvre of reviews. How have you refined and honed your craft over the years?
It was more fun and less cringy than I thought, to look through so many of the reviews I wrote when I first started. They were so short! I had no idea how to express myself! I remember that I knew that the only way to get better at writing reviews was to write a lot of them. And then write more.
There is supposed to be a step in there, where you find reviews you like, and figure out why they are good, and then make your reviews include those good elements.
I sort of did that step, but instead of finding reviews I liked, I found music I liked. Mostly movie scores and cinematic video game music. My husband and I used to have this tiny apartment, we lived there for years and years. His computer desk backed up to the living room sofa. He’d be playing computer games that had dramatic and cinematic music, and I’d lie on the sofa reading. I’d inevitably fall asleep while listening to his video game music, and I’d dream of the book and the music and the story and the sounds, and I suddenly really miss that teeny apartment. When I woke up, I had all this inspiration to write about books I was reading. Yeah, I’m weird, I know.
My reviews have evolved into more “emotional response” to a book, rather than talking about the plot or the characters. What did the book make me think about? What did it make me feel? What personal armor did I put on to get through the book? What personal armor did the book let me drop? Sometimes I’ll title a review as a “not-a-review”, which is a hint that I’m not going to be talking about the book so much as how it disarmed me.
Something I have not gotten any better at over the years is catching grammatical errors. I seem to catch the errors anywhere between five minutes and a week after a review publishes.
4. How does the prospect of reviewing a book change how you read it or look at it afterwards?
I read more intentionally when I’m planning to review the book. I’ll take notes as I’m reading, jot down phrases that catch my attention or scenes I like or questions or predictions. Recently, I’ve found myself so engrossed in what I’m reading that I don’t take any notes, so I end up reading the entire book again to catch things I missed the first time. Or even if I do take notes, I’ve become self aware enough to realize that on a first read through I’m missing the important stuff, so on a second read through I can focus on the subtleties and small things, since I already know the larger elements.
It’s funny, often the review I end up publishing has very little in common with all the notes I spent so much time writing down. I often start typing up a review with very little idea of what I’m going to end up with. I’m such a pantser!
Books that I have reviewed, I tend to remember them better weeks or months later. I don’t know that I look at books differently afterwards, if I’ve reviewed them or not. Sometimes I’ll read a book with the intent of reviewing it and then never get around to reviewing it, and other times I’ll pick up a book that I’m not planning to review and then end up reviewing it.
5. How are you going about editorial choice in selecting reviews for this project?
I spent hours and hours one weekend, reading through nearly every single review I’d ever written. The first four hours were . . . fun? The next six hours not so much.
I identified about 40 reviews that are “must haves” for the book. I identified about 40 more that could also be included, if space and funding allows. I am planning on a backer reward at a certain pledge level will be “Have a favorite review on LRR? This pledge level guarantees your favorite review will be in the book”. I haven’t finalized the verbiage yet, but backers at that level will get some control over what is in the book.
The Venn diagram of “Andrea’s favorite books” and “Andrea’s best reviews” has a lot of overlap, but The Best of Little Red Reviewer is not a list of my favorite books. The reviews of many of my favorite books didn’t make the cut because although I loved the book, the review I wrote wasn’t up to par. Some of the reviews that made the cut are of books I’ll never read again for one reason or another. The reviews that made the cut is the work I am most proud of, the work that shows who I am as a reviewer.
6 What reviews from your oeuvre, as you re-read and chose reviews in preparation for this project, are you particularly proud of?
The reviews that I’m most proud of are the ones I feel best succeeded in transferring my emotional journey and response to the book (be it awe, or surprise, or joy, or recognition, or something else entirely) into words on a page. To name a few, these are the reviews that I feel were especially successful:
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
Clockwork Phoenix 5 edited by Mike Allen
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
The Incrementalists by Steven Brust and Skyler White
The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne Valente (I loved this book so much I wrote about it again)
7. What reviewers do you yourself read and inspire your own work?
I use the “reader” function on WordPress to find a variety of bloggers who are blogging about science fiction and fantasy, and I lurk on twitter a lot to find reviews. I used to subscribe to blogs, but for some reason that just didn’t work very well for me.
Recently I’ve been enjoying reviews at Bookforager Reader Voracious , and I’ve been following Lisa of Dear Geek Place and Lynn of Lynn’s Book Blog for just about forever.
I’m probably a jerk for saying this, but I don’t get all that much inspiration from reading other review blogs. I enjoy their reviews, and we have plenty of great discussions in the comments section and on twitter, but I get more inspiration from listening to music, looking at artwork, looking at clouds or a sunrise or sunset, and reading beautiful fiction.
8. Where can readers find out more about the Kickstarter project? Where can they find you online or in the real world?
The Kickstarter will run from January 2nd to January 31st. Until then, I’ll be posting all sorts of info on my blog, on twitter, and doing guest posts and interviews around the blogosphere. And once January 2nd hits? I’ll be doing more guest posts, and more interviews, and tweeting 24 hours a day.
In real life, I plan to be at ConFusion science fiction convention in Detroit at the end of January.
Thank you, Andrea!
