It’s another night and I should be writing Sophistication. And I am. I jotted down 500 words. Now, however, I’m taking a break because I have the attention span of a hamster and it’s starting to ruin my life.

Sometimes, I check in to see what people are writing about my first book. And by sometimes, I mean daily. Even when readers are critical — and thankfully, this happens infrequently — they oftentimes deliver really good feedback. Honest, undiluted criticism. And their points are usually valid.

Not always. One guy dedicated two paragraphs of his critique to his belief that I misused the word ‘donned’ in the novel. Then it donned on me — he’s a gods-damned idiot. JK. I know the difference, people. He also insisted I misused the word ‘strafed.’ He was, of course, full of shit. I play video games, including lots of first-person shooters, for a living. I’m intimately familiar with strafing. But I digress, as I often do — you know, because I’m usually drunk when I post here.

Tonight, though, I read a review of my book that I loved, and not just because it was praise. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got no complaints about that. What makes this review so special to me, though, is that the reader clearly understood why I wrote Dead Weight. I love dystopian fiction, but authors always tend to muddy it up with zombies and vampires and characters who seem to possess endless knowledge and superhuman abilities. I wrote Dead Weight because I wanted to throw away those cliches and instead focus on a relative doofus as he struggled with the apocalypse.

Here, now, is a lovely review from someone who appreciated it — and I gotta tell you, this singular feedback means the world.