Ya know, when I got injured and realized I'd be off work for a couple of weeks at least, I thought, well, at least I might get some reading and writing done.

Fat chance of that. It's hard to write when you're never alone. And for a while there, I couldn't be alone because I couldn't do the simplest stuff for myself. Couldn't pick something up if I dropped it. Couldn't get something from the fridge. Couldn't carry something from one place to another. About the only thing I could do for myself was go to the bathroom (and that had its challenges too).

Anyway, that isn't the point. The point is, I did finally do a little reading. I found a book by a guy named Steve Umstead called Gabriel's Redemption. It was an e-book, and it was priced at $0.99. The description sounded pretty good. I'm not usually big on military sf, but I did enjoy John Scalzi's stuff and this one sounded like it might have a few things that weren't strictly military stuff.

What I got was, for me at least, the best indie SF tale I've read yet on the Kindle. Granted, I haven't read a lot of them. But I was certainly glad I got this one. I also bought Derek J. Canyon's young adult continuation, Where Magic Reigns: Tales of Zura, the follow-up to his book The Elemental Odyssey. I paid $3.99 for this one because I liked the first enough to know I won't be disappointed. (And if I am, hey, it was only 4 bucks.)

As I was reading blogs and such about indie publishing (J.A. Konrath's and Dean Wesley Smith's blogs are two that I've found to be quite interesting), I was thinking: what do *I* look for as a reader? I mean, I read that there is a lot of criticism of "self published" authors, now being lumped with these indie authors who are maybe mid-list writers with backlists that are out of print, or are folks who have published a book or five (like Tim Pratt, maybe) and got dropped for some silly reason, regarding their editing, their copy, their covers, etc etc.

I suppose if something is really terribly edited, it pulls me out of the story. But that suggests for me that the story wasn't strong enough to pull me all the way in anyway. I don't think I even look at the covers.

If a story is strong enough, I look past a lot of typos and proof-reading errors. That's just me. Maybe some people get sucked right out of even a good story by these sorts of errors. Grammar and using the wrong words might pull me out a bit more; a really poorly turned phrase is hard to bypass, even if you're into the tale. But there are things that don't bother me too much. It's like that experiment that wrote a paragraph with all the words having the first and last letter in the right place and the letters between them jumbled...most people could read it just fine.

I guess I talk about this in relation to my own writing. I've got a novel done and a couple more in various states of completion. I have a bunch of short stories and a story that clocks in at about 28K words. I was thinking of eventually trying to put them out there. I've had people "critique" them over the years and the thing that strikes me is that very seldom do two "critical readers" come up with the same criticisms. In other words, what bothers one doesn't seem to bother the second. So which is right? Are they both right and everything needs to be changed? Or are they neither right nor wrong, and it's just a matter of taste?

I suppose that in the end, if people like the stories I may tell, they might download my works. If they don't, they won't. I guess the only way to find out is to actually put them out there.

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