Karl Klein

Greetings and salutations.

For the love of all that's Holy, if you're vomiting your hate for women and your mother in poetry or prose, your frustration you can't bang your mother (I'd suggest you put your pen aside and see a good shrink), please don't ask me to read the tripe. I've read enough of this tired, hackneyed and cliché claptrap for a lifetime. Really, isn't Oedipus required reading?

"Good writing is hard work; great writing is damn hard work."

"Many critics too often forget that criticism is supposed to help, not hurt." ~~ Lewis Black

Writing tip of the day:
"Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." ~~ Mark Twain

I write serious literary fiction. I'm not a comment whore; I don't need people to speed-read my work and blow-by a comment. Relax, enjoy -- that's why I wrote it. If you don't have time, that's OK, too.

The careful reader is rewarded.

I've already learned on this site, all too quickly, not to offer honest and candid evaluation in the comments. I use the eMail, if any of my comments can be seen in any way as anything less than high praise and stellar remarks. I can see a time coming soon when I'll stop doing doing this, too. I might just can a trite response, copying and pasting in the comments, forgetting about the email.

Writers. . .

I'm looking to read good writers, people who have more than a passing interest in merely banging out hackneyed self-conscious Oedipal tales or vomiting Bloom's anxiety of influence on their keyboards. I'd like to suggest the writer knows the difference between critique and deconstruction, simile and metaphor and it's and its, but I'm sure I'd be asking way too much. Knowing the difference between literary fiction and popular fiction would be nice as well along with knowing the differences between pornography, gratuitous sex scenes, erotic scenes and literary depiction.

Erica Jong said: "No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks."

To set up a straw man argument, I've been told more than once I should relax and just have fun. This is how I have fun.

Give me a reading request. I'll get to it.

And, let me say: it's nice to meet you.

Note 1: please, no rough drafts. Finished work only.