This doesn’t explain why you keep getting erotica books when you don’t like them. Okay fine, when the book involves significantly more plot elements than the erotic content, but when it’s clear the explicit sexual content is the front and center draw, what exactly is anyone gaining from your reading and reviewing? To put it another way, let’s say that I am a potential reader. I am interested in the erotic content of books. Why would I read your reviews when you A) make it clear you don’t like erotic content and B) you don’t review that erotic content? You don’t talk about whether the erotic content is hot/good, and why. If the sex is quite prevalent then clearly it’s important and should be discussed; merely saying “There’s lots of graphic sex” only tells a person the quantity. You’re not the intended audience for the book, and I think your site’s readers are going to reflect this.
perks ears
I can see how that would have been a bit difficult to do, so when I come across it I will keep that in mind. The only way I can think of at the moment in a situation like that is to say something along the lines of “You have to read to the end of this story to appreciate it fully.” or something similar.
I’m glad to hear that you thought it was a good surprise ending though. ;D
I would also like to thank you for the review of Trick or Treat, Fred. If you have a Goodreads account, I would love for you to post it there if you have the time.
No, I do not have a Goodreads account. And, Rechan, I review furry eroticism and pornography mostly because if I didn’t, the books would not get reviewed. As we have all been saying, there is a serious lack of reviewers in furry fandom. FurPlanet and Sofawolf send me those titles to get them reviewed. (Rabbit Valley makes me buy their books, which in my case means finding someone else to treat me to them. For those who don’t know, I have been paralyzed and in a convalescent hospital since 2005, except when my sister Sherry takes me out in my wheelchair. Medicare and Medi-Cal pay all of my medical expenses, but require that all of my income goes to them in partial reimbursement. As a result, I have 0 money to buy books, and I am reluctant to keep asking Sherry to buy them for me.) Sherry brings me books from the public library, and there are four large public libraries in this area – Burbank Public Library, Glendale-Pasadena Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, and the separate County of Los Angeles Public Library – so between them, I can get almost all of the furry titles from the major publishers that will not send me review copies.
Flayrah has just published my review of Rechan’s “Taboo”.
Just out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on mainstream works for which erotica is a primary component? I’m thinking specifically of Eric von Lustbader – yeah, I know the name is hilarious – but there’s also Anita Blake and others. There’s an entire genre of “adult fantasy” that use sex in their narratives, but which are not “pornographic” per se, on the grounds that they’re not just about sex, and those are the closest equivalent to which I usually point when I’m analogizing.
Frankly, I tend to not read them because they don’t appeal to me. For the few that I have read, mostly in the paranormal romance genre, I skim past the erotic interludes and start reading again when the plot starts back up, except for spot-checking to see if this erotic interlude offers anything original that the majority of other erotic interludes don’t. I seem to have a low sex drive, and reading about people having hot 'n heavy sex is usually same old, same old stuff. I did enjoy Richard Prather’s Shell Scott comedy-mysteries, because his private detective was almost always enjoying sex under highly unusual circumstances, or having it interrupted in amusingly embarrassing (rather, what would be embarrassing to most readers; nothing embarrassed Shell Scott!) ways. Of course, those weren’t really erotic or pornographic; they were titillating to set up a comedy-relief scene.
The physical-telepathic sex scene in Kandrel’s “The Dog Star Miracle” in Rechan’s “Taboo” was pleasantly original. The human-centauroid feline pornography in Kenneth Fox’s “Joined in Mind and Body” has its moments, such as when the protagonists start telepathically broadcasting their most lustful moments all over the giant spaceship and all the cat crewmembers join in. That’s a novel, though, with room for several erotic scenes, and Fox tries to not repeat himself. Most short stories don’t have that much room, and the single sex scene is less imaginative than the rest of the story.
Just throwing out that link in case some folks don’t know about it. It doesn’t get many posts though, last one is Rechan’s review of Beautiful World from 2011.
The pro is that it’s already there, has an existing community and anyone can use it.
The con is that it’s on LiveJournal, which I find most people have abandoned these days in favor of other social media. Not everybody, of course, but there has been a definite exodus. 
I think a new site would probably be a better idea. (For which I’ll point people at the other thread I started about revamping Claw & Quill to be that site, if there’s interest from a few potential reviewers.)
Regardless, it’s worth looking into! Thank you for sharing, Fuzz!
A change in topic, somewhat: one of the reasons why I do not review that much is because many of the books I have read in the fandom recently have been books I have had a hand in producing for Sofawolf, such as God of Clay and Uncovered. There are professional concerns both with giving a good review to a book you helped create as well as giving criticism to books produced by a publisher you work for. I’ve put up one, very short review of Hot Dish on its Goodreads page, but otherwise have avoided reviews do to my association with Sofawolf.
This is one of the reasons I haven’t reviewed any of the anthologies I am a part of. Too often I have seen people give five stars to an anthology JUST because they are in it. I don’t think that’s right, and I don’t think they should do that. If you are going to review your own anthology, I think you need to state that you are reviewing all the stories but your own. (and even then, you are risking pissing off your fellow writers)
I am somewhat miffed by the lack of reviews of my own anthologies, “Already Among Us”, “The Ursa Major Awards Anthology”, “What Happens Next”, “Five Fortunes”, and “Anthropomorphic Aliens”. If it were not for FurPlanet telling me that the second through fourth are selling well (I haven’t had a report on the newest yet), I’d assume that furry readers were ignoring them. We definitely need more reviewers of furry titles.
On a related topic, I have just received e-mails during the past week from Eddie Drueding, Alan Loewen, and Paul Kidd, all saying that they have just sent me their latest novels to review for Flayrah. Becoming known as an established furry book reviewer is a great way to get free books. Flayrah IS willing to post reviews of the same titles by different authors if it gets them; hint, hint.
I think I’ve reviewed Already Among Us and The Ursa Major Awards Anthology for Flayrah, and assuming C&Q gets its act together (read: I get my act together) What Happens Next will be reviewed there. I suspect I should not review Five Fortunes.
I have the Ursa Major anthology in my bookshelf and when I read it I will be doing a review of it for sure.
Huskyteer wrote a review of Five Fortunes over on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20560539-five-fortunes?from_search=true
Thanks. I did not know about this.
Hi everyone - excuse the resurrected thread, but it is relevant I promise.
Last summer we were talking here about the role of furry criticism, which I promised to eventually spin into an [adjective][species] article. That article was just published:
http://adjectivespecies.com/2015/05/04/the-role-of-criticism-within-furry-or-buy-this-article/
As part of my research for the article, I wanted to pen some criticism on a furry work myself. I ended up reading Kyell Gold’s Green Fairy, and wrote a (long) review that was accepted for publication on Hooded Utilitarian last month:
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/04/a-look-at-green-fairy-the-pinnacle-of-furry-genre-fiction/
I wanted to make a few notes here to supplement those two pieces, talking about the experience from a personal point of view.
Firstly, reviewing is pretty easy as long as you have something meaty enough to write about. Green Fairy definitely fit the bill, and I had plenty of ideas for my review. Because Green Fairy is a relatively experimental work, I decided to compare it to similar (non-furry) works, using the comparison between literary fiction & furry fiction as a general theme. It’s a long review and could have gone on longer. In general, my review was a lot easier to write than the companion [adjective][species] article, despite being longer.
A big challenge was reviewing objectively. I met Kyell at a recent Confuzzled and we immediately got on well. My guess is that it’s a near-certainty he would read my review, and I never quite managed to put this to one side while I was writing the piece. It’s entirely possible that I was too positive in parts because of this, and equally possible that I over-compensated and was too negative.
I’ve written a few reviews for [adjective][species] before, but only where I’m looking at work that I’m already a fan of. That’s easy: everyone likes it when you only say nice things. This was less easy, and it gave me new respect for Fred, who writes on pretty much everything he reads. (I suspect this is why, in my opinion, Fred is a “friendly” reviewer - he could be a lot more negative.)
This forum thread was near-unanimous in agreement that there needs to be more longform criticism, on sites like Flayrah. However I can’t help but feel that anyone spending time on reviews is going to get much positive feedback, especially from authors (especially if they are honest). Kyell is as close to critic-proof as we have within furry, however that’s not the case for most writers. Kristina got in touch asking if I would like to review one of her works: concern about how I’d manage more critical comments was one of the reasons I declined.
I was going to comment on this at the site, but it’s probably not that relevant: About the friend who bought the ebooks based on blurbs and rating – that’s pretty much why I don’t buy ebooks (furry or non) without reading a sample first.
Having just read both articles, both of which were very interesting reads (especially the [adjective][species] article), there are a couple things I feel are worth discussing.
First, in the Green Fairy review, there are several paragraphs that discuss some of the problems of mixed species society, pointing out the fact that the main characters all have two parents of the same species, yet seem to regard members of other species as potential romantic interests. Also mentioned is the mix of carnivores, herbivores, and so forth, as well as the question of where does meat come from. The issue I have with the review is that these are presented as issues that the author dances around and avoids going into too much detail with, and suggests that the fact that these kinds of issues might not stand up to a more detailed analysis could be taken as example of poor world building on Gold’s part. My response to that is that these sorts of issues have been fodder for discussions about furry literature dating back to when I started reading furry literature in the 1990s and probably before. Some of these questions simply don’t have good answers if you go far enough down the rabbit hole, and I think we’ve kind of set up some unwritten rules within the furry community what’s become acceptable in such settings, what we’re willing to overlook and walk past, if you will. As such, having foxes and otters and goats and tigers living in the same communities is such a ubiquitous element in furry settings that it’s disingenuous to imply that Gold is at fault for following what has become more or less standard fare for at least two decades. Granted, every author has a certain amount of flexibility to rework the rules and put their own twist on them, especially when it works to the advantage of the works in question, so it would be fair to criticize Gold’s take on it as portrayed in Green Fairy and other stories in that setting, but recognize too that a lot of it was following what’s become common practice over 20+ years.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that while Kyell Gold is admired by many in the furry community, it’s certainly not universal. One reviewer (whom I don’t recall you mentioning in either article) in the furry fandom who has been critical of Gold’s work is Isiah Jacobs. Personally, I’ve enjoyed most of Gold’s works that I’ve read, and I’ve enjoyed Jacobs’s reviews, so I appreciate both of their efforts (disclaimer: I’ve also met both of them), so I’m not going to take sides. I’ve read stories I didn’t like by authors I know well as fellow furry writers, some of whom I consider friends. I can name other authors who have gotten usually positive reviews; even so, I doubt if there is such a thing as an author in the fandom whose work is held in almost universally positive regard.
Anyhow, that’s enough for one post. Thanks to all who read the whole thing.