Opinions May Vary

I got a kick out of this.

Every so often I google "The Lucifer Messiah." I used to do it a lot, during the first six months after it came out. Not nearly as much lately. The great thing about all this "inter-connectivity" these days is that you can find out all kinds of things you never could have known before: who's reading your book, what they think about it, even where they got it.

You can also get a great, and sometimes humorous, sense of how people think your work ranks compared to other authors.

That's what I found today.

I googled the book and a site popped up that I had never visited before. A reader had posted a whole long list of books that he'd read recently. He categorized them into those that he considered "Good" "Okay" and "Awful."

I already knew my book was on the list somewhere, but I didn't know where. So I scrolled through it.

The good news?

My book is in the same category with novels by Kurt Vonnegut, William Peter Blatty of "The Exorcist," Thomas Harris of "Silence of the Lambs," "Red Dragon" and "Hannibal,"C.S. Lewis and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Fine literary company, indeed, wouldn't you say?

Well, here's the rub. According to this particular blogger, all of us wrote books that fell into the "OKAY" category.

Oh well, you can't please everyone, right?

I suppose I 'd rather be considered "Okay" alongside Kurt Vonnegut than be considered "Good" alongside Terry Brooks and that Christopher Paolini kid. Don't even get me started on that.