My discovery of the online critiquing workshop Critters (www.critique.org) lead to an entirely different discovery last Saturday.

My story ‘Prisoner of war’ was up for critique at Critters, and for weeks now dozens of critiques have been pouring in from all over the world, most of them positive enough to make me feel heady.

One of the amateur critics, however, spotted my unusual name and the equally unusual setting of the story, concluded that I must be Dutch (true) and that the mysterious and sometimes outright vague pronouns in the story must therefore be a consequence of my poor command of the English language (‘eutr’, or the opposite of true: every seemingly out-of-place pronoun in the story was chosen carefully, either to sow confusion or to build tension).

I sent a reply to him challenging his presumptions, and, I’m embarassed to admit, pointing out that my English was good enough to win first place in Writers of the Future – so it damn well was good enough for him too.

This kind of ugly arrogance sometimes has an unexpectedly positive result, I’m relieved to say. He sent a reply that, if email could blush, would have borne two bright red spots. And as it turns out, he had read both ‘Meeting the Sculptor’ and ‘Conversation with a mechanical horse’, in Vol.XXI and XX of the Writers of the Future anthology, respectively. He’d even heard my radio interview!

Which brings me to my point: living in Holland and getting published in the States is weird. It’s all too easy to forget that across the Atlantic, there are actual people reading my stories, and listening to the radio show that was kind enough to interview me. It may be a circumlocuitous way to find one of my readers, but it cheered me up… nonetheless*!

* Imagine horse-mounted Bernard Shaw doing a deep and meaningful voice.