Maybe if he wrote about more showers

Writing is my skill set and what I know the most about.  I can’t tell anyone how to write the perfect book, but that’s because art doesn’t work that way.  That I know.

I’ve posted about lacking expertise in authors who display a severe lack of kindness and common sense—or maybe just an intense hatred for reality—but authordom, while something I’ve longed for all my life and have barely achieved, it seems to be something that has been strange since before my time.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s work was highly unappreciated by publishers and scholars, even quoted to be ‘the death of literature.  No one wanted to print his trilogy, college classes didn’t want to listen to it, and his friends and peers didn’t want to read it.  No one wanted to pick it up when published… until the hippy revolution started.

Hippies and flower children flocked not only flocked to the books, but thanked Tolkien profusely and constantly about connecting them with nature,  writing valar as gods, and taking them back to their pagan routes.  All of this Tolkien absolutely hated, along with the fans who voiced such thanks.  He called their religion hopeless, the people deplorable, and anyone who interpreted the valar in such as way as idiots.

Tolkien wrote a genesis-like creation of middle earth, which is presented in the Silmarillion.  However, while described as ‘majestic’ the over all reaction was that it was boring, depressing, too difficult to read and remember names in, and The School Library said it ‘was a stillborn post script’ and Peter Conrad said ‘Tolkien can’t actually write’.

In conclusion: I have no idea.  How should one react to fans taking away the wrong message?  Is a different message or religion than what you intended wrong?  Why? 

I did learn one thing: Never let fans get your phone number or they will call you in the middle of the night and brag about how they don’t wash.  That or promote soap in your story.