A while back I decided that I wanted an honest review of my blog. I wanted to have it assessed by someone who A) wasn’t my friend B) Had never read my blog before C) someone who would be brutally honest and not care if they hurt my feelings and made me feel like a loser and a talentless hack. With all these things in mind, I chose to submit my blog for review at Ask And You Shall Receive, a blog review site that is almost sadistic in their critiques.
Now, this review site isn’t for everyone. If you have thin skin and you don’t want the truth, don’t submit your blog to them. However, if you can take the heat, and you really want to know where your blog registers on the suck-o-meter, by all means, allow them to review it.
Anyway, I submitted my blog for review and steeled myself for the onslaught of public humiliation. It takes a couple of months for them to get around to each blog as they have a backlog of blogs in the queue at all times. However, one day it happened. They finished my review and posted it on their review blog. To my surprise, they gave me 2 stars, which I never expected…and the review, while not being all that favorable was overall not that painful. In fact, the very things they didn’t like about my blog are the very things that I am most proud of.
I have posted the review below, and even though I hate to censor someone’ s writing, I did have to bleep out a couple of the words, as this is a G rated blog and I want to always keep it that way. Here is their review:
Part One: Of Humoration
Friday, April 17, 2009
Leeuna Foster is a professional humoringulist, and though it’s possible I might have copied her byline down improperly, that’s a pretty heavy title. I mean, it’s up there with telling the batter what pitch is coming, or phoning-ahead to tell an embassy when you’re planning to blow them up – telegraphed like a bad pass, and two steps behind what no description would bring in terms of expectation. As things stand now, of course, Ms. Foster has to make me laugh.
Fortunately, she is neither snotty nor condescending, atypical of self-proclaimed humour-bloggers, and I’m assuming that this is at least partially because she is an honest-to-christ professional writer, a paid scribe in possession or her own humour column. This fact cannot be overstated, and certainly not around here, with the limping reams of violently-offensive grammatical atrociousness we receive with regularity. Her work flows, is concise and astute, the very antithesis of what we’ve all come to expect from the humour-blog genre, and my relief is a [bleep-bleep] rainbow of appreciation.
This is what I like to call Grown-Up Writing: mild, inoffensive pabulum, the soft, palatable alternative to the writing that makes you jump out of your seat like both it and your [bleep] were on fire. My pop, Dadjobber, also writes for a newspaper, and his work is very similar: Disneyfied, Nickelodeonized, with an eye to the wide-market, mass-appeal of any newspaper’s circulation. Ms. Foster isn’t, nor is she likely to become, someone who’s going to make me fall out of my chair or spit coffee on the screen; if I’m looking for Jimi Hendrix, which I am, there aren’t enough tie-dyed headbands or gasoline-torched guitars in the universe to make Pat Boone into what I’m hoping for. Ms. Foster isn’t writing for me, nor, presumably, would she or should she care to. She’s writing for people who want the Big Mac and the option of salad, and I’m reading at the greasy-spoon down the street.
My Mind Wandered… (the actual name of the blog, I believe) is observational humour that stands a couple of ticks above, “what’s the deal with airline peanuts?”, and has none of the oomph, the aaag, the omigod-there’s-a-zombie-behind-me-GRAAAAAGH! that I tend to look for whilst clicking through cyberspace. Then again, I need my eyeballs sliced against the edgy writing of surprise, of the inexplicable, of head-scratching delight, so take that into account as I slide into the seamy underbelly of personal preference.
I’m going with a couple of these: ( STARS)
Nothing about Leeuna Foster makes me the slightest bit uncomfortable, and that’s both heroically positive and unfortunately negative, neither of which makes her blog particularly bad.
I linked the comments at the bottom, to the original review on the website and I also linked the name of the website, if anyone wants to submit their blog for review. Warning: the website contains strong language and adult content.
Even though their words are cutting and apt to bruise one’s writing ego to the point of causing a hematoma, you can’t help but laugh at the hilarious and creatively biting way these people can turn a phrase.
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