Wonderful post! So insightful and well-put. In the future, instead of trying to explain my motivations for writing difficult and/or unlikable heroines, I’m just going to link here.

Plenty of people out there are loved and they do not deserve to be. And plenty of people who deserve to be loved, aren’t.

This. This, exactly. And to add to it, the amazing, wonderful thing about love is that true love sees flaws and loves not despite, but because of those flaws. Love is diverse, love stories should be, too. There is no universal standard of lovability. The very qualities that make me hate a person could be the reason someone else is head-over-heels in love–and I think that’s awesome.

I know quite a few very nice men who are married to very mean women. For a long time I wondered what they saw in each other, until I realized that perhaps each saw in the other qualities that they, themselves, lacked. The reason those men are so nice is because they don’t have to be mean. Their wives are the ones who demand better seating in restaurants, and tell people talking in movies to shut the hell up, and bitch out people who don’t treat their husband right.

As cheesy as the phrase “you complete me” is, if we’re lucky, that’s just what we get when we love–we are complete. Not completely good, but whole and functioning and happy. And when I get to the end of a romance novel, that’s the way I want to see the hero and heroine–not shagging from sunrise to sunrise, not having scads of babies or fostering deserving orphans, just happy, whole, and better than they were before.

But the really sad part is, at least when it comes to the over-the-top and unethical alleged behavior regarding Amazon Reviews, I can kind of understand what motivates it. Authors are sensitive creatures. We get freaked out easily. I totally understand that first rush of horror and anger when you read something that seems to threaten or disparage your work. It seems so unfair!

Sitting in front of a computer as much as we do, it’s easy to get sucked into the Internet and imagine that it actually matters (see my irrational mini freak-out over the other Bettie Sharpe, below). The important thing is to step back, relax, and remember that the only graceful response to a negative review–if you must respond–is, “Thank you for reading and reviewing my work. I hope you’ll enjoy my next story more than you enjoyed this one.”

Kinda makes silence look appealing, doesn’t it?

Yeah, what she said: Shiloh Walker has a calm and collected post on the matter. Want to read more? Go there.

It has a coherent explanation of the plot, nuanced descriptions of the characters, quotes from Sherry Thomas’s lovely prose–the works. Go read it.

You may have read her book reviews on I Swear it’s Not Chick Porn, or her short story in “The Serial” but if you haven’t read her blog, you are missing out. Her blog posts totally rock. They’re insightful, interesting, and thought-provoking. They are, in short, the kind of blog posts I would want to write if a magical fairy one day floated down from the heavens and blessed me with the gift of Good Bloggery.

She has a marvelous ongoing series of posts on classifications of Romance novels. Her posts on fairytales are tons of fun. And she dares to ask the question, “What in the bloody hell is up with the anatomically misplaced hymens in so many Romance novel love scenes.” Okay, maybe she didn’t say “what in the bloody hell” because as she has wisely pointed out, “why in the bloody hell” is not terribly British.

Anyway, point is, this is a blog that always gets me thinking, and if you haven’t read it, you should give it a try.

Yeah, What She Said is an ongoing series in which Bettie will discuss the blogs she reads instead of writing her own blog.