I’ve mentioned before that I have a column on Black Gate Magazine, where I post bi-weekly fiction reviews and occasionally an interview with a fellow author. But I’ve never actually spent much time explaining what I do as a reviewer, or why I’m still writing for Black Gate after almost two years as a contributor (shit, it doesn’t feel like that long).
My running title for my column is “In 500 Words or Less,” which means my reviews are exactly that: capped at 500 words, maximum, and if I can get them shorter, more the better. When I first started writing this column, I found that my early reviews were really wordy – concision is something I’ve always struggled with when drafting. So forcing myself to stick to a word limit is a useful exercise that helps with my other writing, since I can’t discuss everything about a book. And when I pared them down, I realized that I didn’t need a ton of space to explain why I loved a particular book. I’m not trying to convince anyone to go buy something (most of the time) or change their taste in reading material – it isn’t a five-paragraph essay about the significance of an author’s work (*shudder*). All I want to do is give you a taste of why I enjoyed a particular book, and let you look into it more closely yourself. If you have the same taste as I do, great. If you don’t, no worries. (Read: you’re actually a heathen and we can never be friends again.)
Sometimes keeping to my word limit has been tough, particularly when I read something that I get really excited about, like Robots vs Fairies (edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe) or The Nine by Tracy Townsend. And also because I try hard not to fall into the boring, overly-academic style that a lot of reviewers seem to take. Kinda like this blog, I try to sound like we’re just chatting casually, and I’ll freely admit that’s not easy every time and sometimes I don’t quite hit the mark I want. It also means I throw out the occasional joke or random aside – and maybe eats up my word count. But that’s a small price to pay, as far as I’m concerned, to make sure that I’m having fun and you’re having fun and no one gets bored with a 500-word review.
But the best part about writing this column for Black Gate is that I get to signal boost authors who I think need more attention, like Curtis C. Chen, or get ARCs of books ahead of their release, like I did recently with Steven Erikson’s forthcoming novel Rejoice: A Knife to the Heart. It might not be much, but it’s one more thing I can do for my fellow writers; if it gets even a handful of additional readers paying attention to their work, that’s a win as far as I’m concerned.
The only drawback is that I’m not sure how much impact my reviews actually have – or how much they even get read. I’ve reviewed works by well-known authors, like S.A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass, and gotten more play than I would expect on social media, but when I review an author with less existing notoriety I worry that my words are getting lost in the vastness of the Internet. So while I would never do something as base as asking everyone who reads this blog to spread the word about my reviews, what I will say is that if you’re on the lookout for new reading material and 500 words every two weeks isn’t a huge piece of your free time, maybe check out my column. Feel free to follow any of the links I’ve included so far, and if you like my style, spread the word! The more eyes we get on these reviews, the better for the authors I’m able to discuss.
And if you’re a fan of fantasy and didn’t see this a while back, here’s the ultimate level up for me as a reviewer/interviewer so far: getting to chat with Jim Butcher at ConFusion. So maybe there are fringe benefits to doing what I do… 😉
Brandon Crilly - Writer / Teacher / Human 