Okay, if you’re on my Goodreads, you will see this post. That’s because my blog posts pop up on the feed there…even if I’m not on Goodreads myself.

So, I left Goodreads for the time being — time being could be a long time but I’m not swear­ing off the site all together, I’m not stick­ing a fin­ger up at it or any­thing. This has noth­ing to do with cen­sor­ship or peo­ple being par­tic­u­larly “mean” but rather antic­i­pa­tion of peo­ple mak­ing me cry, even if they don’t mean to — if that makes any sense.

You see, deep down I am a frag­ile lit­tle flower (dif­fer­ent from a spe­cial snowflake). And though I’ve writ­ten over thir­teen books (a pen name book, four novel­las and seven nov­els in Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror, two books in The Devil’s Series, and three in The Artists Tril­ogy), and have had my work absolutely bru­tal­ized, torn-apart, made-fun of, my skills and tal­ent skewed, etc, etc. I thought I had devel­oped a thick skin.

Well I have in the sense that I don’t com­ment on neg­a­tive reviews. And I do under­stand every­one is enti­tled to their opin­ion (after all, I leave bad reviews too). And one person’s opin­ion doesn’t mean every­one will feel the same.

But in the end, when I see that some­one doesn’t “get” what I’m try­ing to do, it can hurt.

I don’t like to hurt. Some­times you can push off the review — as I have been doing for two and half a years since I have been pub­lished — and say, well, dif­fer­ent fucks for dif­fer­ent ducks.

And some­times I can’t. Lately…whether it be stress from writ­ing or stress from this dark, dark indus­try (let me spin you a tale there, because whoo boy you have no idea how cut­throat and unsta­ble the pub­lish­ing indus­try is these days), I can’t NOT take things personally.

Look…I know this last book in The Artists Tril­ogy is going to dis­ap­point some peo­ple. They they won’t be happy with it. And yeah, maybe it’ll ruin the whole series for them.

But I ended the book the only way I knew how, the way I had planned from the very begin­ning. I knew how Bold Tricks would go when I started writ­ing Sins & Nee­dles, that is how I plot ALL of my books and series — way the fuck in advance. It’s the only way I know how to write. I dropped clues the whole time, I mea­sured out hints, I made sure that hope­fully some peo­ple would have an idea of what was to come. My char­ac­ters did stay true to the peo­ple that I knew them to be…deep inside.

I’m fuck­ing proud of the series and that book. Bold Tricks is my favorite book because I finally got to wrap things up and give it an end­ing I found fit­ting. I cried, I laughed, I swooned and I was fuck­ing high for days when I wrote THE END. Seri­ously. It was an AMAZING feel­ing I can’t even describe.

I real­ize MANY peo­ple will not agree with me. I know I have to let it go.

There are also peo­ple who will appre­ci­ate the vision — I got a four star amaz­ing review in PRINT for Bold Tricks in the Roman­tic Times Magazine…how cool is that?

But it still stings when you can’t make every­one happy, you know? And peo­ple have their right to wish I had writ­ten an entirely dif­fer­ent book. I didn’t. But they can want that.

So really, the best thing is to keep away from the neg­a­tiv­ity and Goodreads. I’ll miss the good reviews here but I’ll also miss the bad. The point is I love the book and it told ELLIE’S STORY the way I meant for it to be told. Dis­agree with me all you want but…I won’t see it now. And I’ll prob­a­bly be a LOT happier.

That said, one of the great things about Goodreads is find­ing other books to read and leav­ing and rec­om­mend­ing books of your own. It’s hard to do that as an author because you see your own reviews a lot. So, I’m mov­ing over to Book­Likes. I already have a page there. I plan to use Book­Likes just to blog about the books I’ve read because I love doing that and hav­ing discussions…about other people’s work.

In the mean­time, I’m still on Face­book. I am on Twit­ter (see side­bar). And I’ll keep blog­ging here so peo­ple on Goodreads can still have it pop up on the feed. I’ve got more book announce­ments and cover reveals and give­aways and all sorts of things. And if you want to drop me a line, you can always email me at AuthorKarinaHalle@gmail.com

Thanks for being so great Goodread­ers for all these years!! Remem­ber, it’s not you…it’s me. And it’s just time for me to step away.