As an expectant parent, there are lot of things to worry about.  You lose sleep hoping that your baby will be healthy and strong. You are terrified by the horror stories you’ve heard from other parents. You are stressed out about all the things that could possibly go wrong. But there is one thing you never worry about: people hating your baby. I mean it’s a baby!  Even if your baby has an squishy alien face, people are not going to hate it (although they may say it’s ugly behind your back…it is sort of true, but you’ll never believe it about your baby). You won’t worry that people will ridicule your baby, or call it stupid, or blame you for all the mistakes you made when you delivered it.* But people will hate your book baby.   Reviewers will make fun of it, they will ridicule your failings as a writer, they will poke holes in your plot, they will say mean, nasty, vicious things about your characters.  They will not care about the years — much longer than it took to grow a real baby in most cases — that it took to get your book published. They will not look at your book as a deeply cared for, intensely personal life experience. For readers, a book is a product to be dismantled and torn a part and vilified.  And they have every right to do it. I know it sucks, and (am learning, unfortunately) how painful it is.  I can imagine that it compounds so many of my writer friends feelings of inadequacy and depression. There are so many brilliant posts about how to deal with bad book reviews (and I’m bookmarking them all in case I need them one day), like this one Writer Unboxed. And they all boil down to two things:

Like  a lot of other writers, I have a very active imagination. Random images  become pieces of puzzles I don’t even know I’m working on, until one day SNAP!!  They magically fit into a story I’ve been slaving over. It’s a beautiful, wonderful thing unless it’s HORROR-related. And see, here’s the thing, I don’t write horror, but that doesn’t mean that scary, creepy, gruesome images just flit out of my imagination.  They’re stuck until my mind finds some way to excise them, usually through nightmares with me as the main character. My husband has cleared our house of all Dean Koontz and Stephen King because, apparently, my nightmares keep him awake too.  (Poor Hubs!) But just because those books are gone, doesn’t mean my mind is horror free.  I have a whole stash of YA novels that he’d never guess are the new fuel for my thrashing dreams. So, if you’re interested in reading something that’s going to make you want to sleep with the lights on.  I have three suggestions — one you can read now, one you can read tonight at midnight, and one you’ll have to wait till February to pick up. SILO This story is messed up. It gives a very dark glimpse at what the world might look like as it’s ending.  If you want read something that will make you question humanity and the people you think you know best, then this is it. It’s also available for free now on Wattpad. CREED This is a story that is part classic slasher flick, part Children of the Corn.  It’s a dark tale of three teenagers who are stranded in a creepy town that isn’t as abandoned as they first expect.  It will be available for pre-release download tonight! Both SILO and CREED are true to their genre with gore, violence, and language. There’s my warning beyond BE AFRAID.   SHUTTER So let’s pretend that Ghostbusters was actually a scary movie instead of a comedy, and that the ghosts could kill instead of slime.  Yes. That. Then add tough, imperfect, mouthy characters and you get SHUTTER.  The first two chapters are available now (if you wanted to get a Halloween taste) on Wattpad.   If you’re not one of the nightmare prone, then these may be books for you.  And even if you are plagued with bad dreams, but want to get into the season then you may want to give one of these a shot.

Happy Halloween!