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I view author's notes with a jaundiced eye. I want to read a story that will hopefully pull me in and hold my attention. Author's notes are jarring and drop me back into reality with a resounding thud. It's unpleasant and mostly unwarranted, because if you need to explain to your readers what you're doing in a chapter, either you are not writing clearly or your readers are potted plants.

I agree it's hard to swallow your pride and take concrit. But if you want to improve as a writer, you need to be able to put your emotions to the side and analyze your work more objectively than that. Needing to improve does not make you a failure. Allowing concrit to turn you away from even trying is failure, because you've let yourself become defined by what you are (a writer) as opposed to WHO you are.

I know that we ALL have seen this one... you open a fiction because you see it had a score of 5 out of 5 and glowing reviews only to find that it is so poorly written and has such bad grammar that it's all but unreadable. Then you begin to wonder just how it got those reviews and the rating it has. My question is this... are people who do such a thing doing an author a bad turn by only giving praise and not pointing out serious issues? Does it help them in any way other than to feed their ego? Should people really make those reviews and ratings count by giving the story just what it deserves rather than artificially elevating it? What do you think?

To be honest, as a reader, it's distracting. If I were reviewing that, I'd ask you to pick a colloquial and stick with it. I'm tossed back and forth between British and US American -isms and it detracts a bit from your story, because I'm thrown out of the flow while my brain tries to reconcile US and British terms.

Actually, I'm published as erotic romance author and those terms you just used? I had to change them. They bluntly told me to change them. They don't want the flowery language in romance/erotica, they want the naughty and heat generated from it. It sets a tone in something that they want and appeals to a different kind of nature. That's the standard preference to the masses, not the anatomical of anything unless it's a description in a non-erotic part of the story for something. Are they overused? Depends on the term and the context. That just comes from you being able to use a name or description is all.

Actually, that 'slang' as you call it is what publishers want. They WANT cock, balls, pussy, etc instead of more mainstream terms. They want heat and heat tends to not come from proper anatomical terms. The whole point of reading some of this is it's 'naughty'. And the naughty parts come from the word usage. Last three go 'rounds with the pro edit i had to change terminology to something more heat driven from the mundane to amp up the heat level. So, it appears, what people want is the naughty, not proper terms.