Speculation, Fact and Fiction

If you click over to SFRevu you can see what I thought of Dante's Girl by Natasha Rhodes (Solaris) and also Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris (Gollancz). And as always, there's plenty of good stuff in this month's edition including an interview with Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

And as March's Interzone hits the newstands and subscribers' doormats, you can read my review of Charlie Houston's No Dominion.

Now, here's a thing. It turns out Charlie Houston, whom I don't know, is quite pleased with the review. He says so on his blog

A moment of vanity. I’m pasting in this NO DOMINION review from INTERZONE MAGAZINE not just because it praises me, but because I think it’s a nice piece of writing. Without meaning to put anyone down, I think it’s fair to say that it’s difficult to find a well structured review of genre writing. Ms. McKenna could have been reviewing a book by a writer I held in utter contempt, and I still would have had to take this review seriously. No fat. No wasted or faint praise, no egoising from the reviewer. A nice but of work all around. And, you know, she likes the book. So that’s cool.

Y'know, it's this kind of feedback that makes reviewing worth doing. But I am not just posting this to polish up my own ego.

Because the review Charlie's so pleased with was my second pass. At least half of any bouquets on offer must go to Sandy Auden, Interzone's reviews editor. I'm used to writing reviews for websites where pixels are cheap whereas print magazines stipulate word counts and that makes for a whole new ball game. So Sandy's highly pertinent editorial comments were most certainly essential to turn my first draft into the finished article.

I think learning to be edited has been the single most important lesson I've learned in my writing career.