If you can't take critisism, don't go requesting reviews

[ENugent]

@markn_1

Just based on the writing, I’m willing to bet that Klein provided the entire copy for the article.

This is almost certainly true.

[Kent_Clark]

@Infovore

Newspaper article (badly in need of editing) about the books:
Religion mixes with thrills in local author’s trio of books

My daughter has been following this trainwreck on a writer’s board. A couple of days ago she came to the conclusion that Klein is a technical writer who decided there were big bucks to be made in Christian fiction.

The article mentions he his background is in science.

But Klein, who grew up in New Jersey and worked for many years as a technical marketing director and consultant, says he has always enjoyed writing.
“Every job I’ve ever had has involved a great deal of writing,” Klein said.

And this nugget from his biography.

Mr. Klein has written professionally for years. While employed at SRI, Mr. Klein’s reports were published worldwide, read by senior managers of major U.S., European and Japanese firms.

He’s a guy who manages to put down one word after another in such a fashion to explain something to someone who’s already sort of familiar with the subject, and his reports are coherent enough to not get him fired. To top it off, he has a pretty thin skin.

If that were enough to make you a writer, I’d have at least three novels published, instead of two slim volumes that are closer to user’s manuals than non-fiction.

[Lare]

@naita

Gil swiftly and with great haste absconded Robin from her secure perch in the automobile, that ubiquitous child of Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford, in a manner which bestowed upon her the energy required to leave his hands, in the manner of the cannonballs in Newton’s illustration of how ballistics and orbital mechanics are one and the same, in the way a brick does, and a bird doesn’t, unless it folds it’s wings in, or is dead, and in the fullness of time land on that piece of land beyond the shoulder of the road which one can never quite decide whether is part of the road or beyond it.

Thank you, **naita **, for this. It made my day.

I was reading bits of this thread and the linked review to my wife and when I got to your post was literally laughing too hard to do more than helplessly point to it so she could read it herself.

[naita]

@Lare

Thank you, **naita **, for this. It made my day.

I was reading bits of this thread and the linked review to my wife and when I got to your post was literally laughing too hard to do more than helplessly point to it so she could read it herself.

And thank you for the kind feedback.

[Derleth]

@Patch

Gads, I’m reminded of a anecdote about some classical author who wrote the same way (can’t remember who). Some other author of the time wrote a short bit about being in a cab with him, and he stops to ask directions. After a similar verbose question, the other author says to the confused pedestrian, “he wants to know where the Inn is.”

Think it came up on this board somewhere in the last few months, if that rings any bells?

Henry James, one of my bêtes noire:

@Edith Wharton

The most absurd of these episodes occurred on another rainy evening when James and I chanced to arrive at Windsor long after dark. We must have been driven by a strange chauffeur—perhaps Cook was on holiday; at any rate, having fallen into the lazy habit of trusting him to know the way, I found myself at a loss to direct his substitute to the King’s Road. While I was hesitating and peering out into the darkness James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. ’ Wait a moment, my dear—I’ll ask him where we are’; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.

‘My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer—so,’ and as the old man came up: ’ My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.’

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: ’ In short’ (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), ’ in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to . . . ’

‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, ’ do ask him where the King’s Road is.’

‘Ah—? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?’

‘Ye’re in it’, said the aged face at the window.

And, of course, I could hardly get away without quoting myself:

@Derleth

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It is an over-wrought over-written travesty of a book and do not tell me it was the style at the time. I’ve read Poe. I’ve read Bierce. I’ve read Mark Twain and I’ve read Saki, O. Henry, and Bret Harte. I have loved all those authors because they actually wrote. They did not plant kudzu in their garden and capture it between pages after training and stultifying it to within an inch of its life.

Faulkner once referred to Henry James as the “nicest old lady I ever met”; I consider that a calumny against old ladies, who are, in my experience, capable of getting to a point without exhausting all the air in the average zeppelin.