by Kathleen Marple Kalb, reprinted with permission
Sooner or later, you’re going to get an online assault.
It may come as a one-star review from someone who informs you that you can’t write and don’t deserve to be published because they don’t like your values—or your background.
It may come in the form of a comment on a post about your writing career, with some keyboard warrior telling you why you don’t deserve your success or why you should stop trying.
However it comes, you need to recognize it for what it is: an assault.
And you need to treat it as such.
If you got mugged, you wouldn’t sit around wondering about the creep’s deeper motivations—and you sure wouldn’t think they had a point. You’d report the attack, ice your bruises, and keep on walking.
Same thing here.
An assault reviewer or poster is not in the business of offering constructive criticism. That’s a gift among thinking people, and an entirely different conversation. Someone who posts deliberately hurtful comments about your work, or you, is not trying to help you improve. They’re attacking you. Their only aim is to hurt you.
We don’t need to waste our time on why they feel a need to hurt you. That’s not the point.
Don’t engage unless it rises to the level of reportable threat—and then pursue it to the fullest extent. Otherwise, delete or ignore it, and move on.
Your mugger doesn’t get a spot on your internal soundtrack. Full stop.
Cozy Mystery Village admin Kathleen Marple Kalb is a weekend anchor, weekday mom, and finally, award-winning author of several mystery novels and many published short stories, after two earlier projects, a couple hundred rejections, and a family health crisis. So she knows.
