Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 55

Tired of caring so much…

The last donation empties my account, yet I’ve only hit send

When another distracting chirp from Tweetdeck arrives

“We need your help! Without your money we will fail!”

So I tiredly make a note to donate when I get more cash

My body is failing, and my dentures need replacement

I’d like to fix my urethra so I can pee straight again

Every time I dilate, it cause me horrible pain and cramps

I have needs, but my conscience says “You aren’t suffering so much!”

There’s so many who need help, and so many who simply don’t care

“I can’t care about you,” they say, “I’m too busy being famous!”

They make me sick with guilt over their lack of concern

So I spend everything I get trying to make up for the me generation

Sometimes I resent the day I was raped, but not for what it took from me

That day my best friend made my ass bleed and implanted in me a conscience

Because then I couldn’t just have sex because it felt good for me

Because I couldn’t scam others without thinking how it would make them feel

Sometimes I resent having so much empathy that I can’t ignore y’all

It isn’t fair that I should feel guilty for not doing enough

God damn it, I’m not Jesus Christ, you know? I’m just a tired witch

So why can’t some of these rich Christians pick up the fucking slack?

Okay, that’s disturbing…

So get this: there’s a site where people tired of the bullying reviews on Goodreads have decided to start outing the bullies by giving out personal information. No, I’m not providing a link, so if you want to find the site, you’ll just have to Google it. This is going to be a short post, because I want to make clear how I feel about this and then move on to other things, like my usual piss and vinegar.

I’ve made it no secret that I don’t like the kind of people on Goodreads who rate a book one-star despite the book not being out in any format, thus making it this side of impossible for the reviewer to have made a true assessment of the work. This is not the same thing as when I get a bad review, earned or not, and anyway, we all know how I handle a bad review…I have a temper tantrum here on the blog and get drunk and pass out on a pillow full of bitter tears. But this isn’t about me. No, this has more to do with people attacking authors they don’t like, even before the books come out. I think that’s bullshit, but the moderators of Goodreads have decided that this trolling is a-okay, because “They may be rating the blurb, and, that’s still valid.” No, that’s piss and rubbish from a bunch of lazy assholes who can’t be bothered to moderate their own site. But it’s their sandbox, and if they say it’s okay for trolls to piss on authors just because “It might be a valid opinion,” then there’s not much I can do about it except stomp my foot and hold a proper temper tantrum.

It’s this trolling behavior which motivates me to only use Goodreads to keep track of my books, and as a matter of health and a desire to keep my blood pressure regulated, I have nothing to do with the people who run the site unless it’s absolutely unavoidable. I find them to be incompetent and their site to be bug-fucking ugly to use, not to mention unreliable (I’ve had books disappear from the listings after “site backups”, which makes no sense at all, but that’s another complaint for another time) and if there were some better alternative where the moderators at least understood the definition of their job, I would happily go there to keep track of my reading habits.

BUT, while I don’t for a minute support the trolls, this practice of giving out personal information just because you’re feeling pissy about an online spat is unconscionable and indefensible. This is just as heinous an idea as outing closeted gays in the GOP, or as outing stealth transsexuals because you think everyone should stay out of the closet. It’s as bad as posting the personal information of a meatspace bully, because it brings with it the possibility that someone crazy could show up on their doorstep and do physical harm to them. This is physical violence just because someone gave you a one star rating for a book that isn’t released yet. Can I make any clearer that this is incredibly petty, cruel, and just generally douchey?

Authors, I feel for you getting a bad rating that isn’t deserved. But the answer to this problem is not to respond to a one star rating with an open invitation for someone to harm the bully. That’s not just sinking to their level. It’s digging under the bullies’ level by about a mile and a half. So for the love of God, don’t go there. If it pisses you off that the trolls rule Goodreads, do what I do and ignore the reviews of other people. Use the site to track your reading habits, and then walk away. But do not report a bully to this badly thought out site for outing bullies. There’s only bad blood that can come of this, and some of that blood will come to stain you. It will harm your sales. It may end any hopes you have of getting better reviews from readers who really would have read your stuff. But worse still, it could lead to someone being hurt or killed because one of your crazier fans takes matters into their own hands. SO JUST DON’T DO IT.

Clear? Okay, good. Now I can get back to bitching and moaning about other stuff.

I find your momentary attention…troubling

This is going to be a shorter post, because I don’t need to do a full rant on such an unworthy topic. But I’ve had a couple people recently tell me “I’m not going to buy your books because ___.” Well, that’s…special. Mostly, these statements come across as “Listen, you better talk more nicely online, or else you won’t make any friends.” Uh-huh. Well I got lots of friends online, and most of my real friends don’t read my books. It’s nothing personal. I’m just not their cuppa. But my real friends don’t need to say that, or tell me that I’d better watch my mouth around them.

Look, I don’t care whether people decide not to read my books for whatever reason they come up with. But as I said to Scott Colbert on Twitter, this isn’t about your choice to engage in a boycott of my work. It’s about you deciding to contact me about it. I seriously doubt anyone who decides not to read King writes to him to say “I’m not buying your books because of that comment about the connection between illiteracy and Iraq.” And if you do, why? What point is there to you telling someone you’re not buying their work over an opinion they hold? You’re not likely to change the author’s mind. It’s the equivalent of stomping out of a room and slamming a door because you don’t like the direction a conversation is going. It’s seriously childish shit, man.

And the other thing is, you people who are doing this probably wouldn’t be buying my books anyway. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about my writing or my stories. You’re just judging me based off of something I said in the comments of a blog somewhere. Again, let me use King as an example. King can’t stand Meyer’s vampires? Well hot damn, I’m never reading King again… Oh wait, yes I am. I’ve got a copy of The Dark Half on my TBR pile, and I may reread Cell later this year because I loved the slow burn of that story. King is a master of his craft, and even if I think he’s wrong about Meyer, I’m not going to boycott him over a difference of opinion. His opinions have got nothing to do with the art he produces, and that I enjoy.

Most of you who engage in this behavior only do it to indies, and I think that’s because you feel we’re more approachable. We have to make ourselves available online, and that accessibility empowers you to say whatever you like. But if all you have to say to me is “I’m not buying your books ever,” I don’t care. I don’t because you weren’t going to buy my books either way. What you’re doing is little more than a petty smack at my digital person because I’ve wounded your delicate sensibilities. So what? Grow the fuck up, m’kay?

Let me be clear: I write about queers and perverts. I write about the abused and the tormented. You want books about heroes saving the world, grand fiction that feeds your need for escapism. I don’t do that. It’s not that I dislike those books, or that I think my stories are superior. I read those books and support the writers of said stories. But there’s so many artists covering that shtick that I prefer to do something different. I write off the beaten path, and I don’t expect to be fitting for a lot of readers. But the vast majority of the mainstream readers feel no need to write to me to tell me in unfriendly terms that they aren’t buying my stuff. So if you feel the need to do that, you’re a shallow person. And if you’re that shallow, so shallow that you have to smack me to feed your ego, I don’t want you buying my books anyway. It would only lead to a one-star review because you’re not deep enough to understand how to read between the lines.

Did that piss you off? Well, there’s the door. Slam it on the way out if you like. I still don’t care.

When bullying is a-okay

I tell you, these days, I’m on an emotional roller coaster every day. I have lots to be happy about in my own life. This month’s sales are my highest ever. People are buying Peter’s books and not asking for refunds. (Wish I could say the same thing about Sandy. *Sigh) I’ve been able to get some decent reviews and ratings, and I’ve used some of my profits to make donations to people in need of food or medical help. And all of that feels good.

But my mood crashes because I go online and watch people make up complex rules about when it’s okay to bully someone. For instance, it’s not okay to bully Anita Sarkeesian, as now evidenced by the number of blog posts criticizing male gamers for their reaction to her Kickstarter campaign exposing the sexism inherent in their hobby. I wrote a post about that not too long ago, and here’s another viewpoint of the topic, and yet another.

BUT, it is okay to criticize E.L. James ad nauseum, and people are really starting to get “creative” in all the ways they hate the series she wrote. Detailed analyses of the writing, fake twitter accounts, or parody versions that are written worse, but funnier. And the more success she has, the louder the attacks become. I can in fact only recall meeting one person who liked the book, and everyone else can’t wait to tell me how much they hate E.L. James.

There is, I think, a direct correlation between her success and the amount of “humor” directed her way about her books. Writers who are all writing beneath this level of success cannot wait to retweet yet another bad review of the book. They call these attacks “entertaining.” These same people would be devastated if it was their book targeted for this level of hate, but of course that can’t happen because they aren’t hacks like E.L. James.

What-EVER.

You know, if I wanted to hate on a writer for their success, I’ve got no end of targets among the books I’ve read recently. I don’t know these writers personally, so there’s no reason for me to feel any empathy toward them. But shit, aside from writing up a review one time, I’m done with that author. I’m not going to RT every single lousy review that author ever got in a continuing feeding of my sense of schadenfreude.

And that’s what this is, and way too many people don’t want to admit what bitter little shits they’ve become lately. People are bitter about someone they feel is inferior having great success. They’re so bitter about not having the same success that they have to keep attacking that person, whether the target is aware of the abuse or not. It’s one thing to write a bad review, but to keep passing along every joke you see just because it feeds that bitterness inside you, it’s the exact same mindset that’s incited the gamers to attack Anita.

Gamers can’t stand that Anita is making all this money and having success at the expense of their hobby. They feel persecuted already for their hobby, and yet, they’ve gone and put their foot in it by invalidating one of their own arguments. Yes, video games have conditioned them to be more violent, and to be less tolerant of others. One only needs to look at their rape and death threats to see that. So they’re going to have a harder time screaming “Don’t judge me” when they’ve proved a lot of people right.

But the authors perpetuating the attacks on E.L. James see themselves as being different form the gamer bullies. After all, they aren’t writing to the object of their hate. They’re writing about her. That’s totally different, you see. And hey, they’re not even doing the attacks personally. They’re just passing along the attacks of other readers, perhaps with an added “ho-ho-ho” because it seems like everyone hates this book. And man, doesn’t it feel good to be validated in your belief that some other author’s success is perhaps unfairly earned? Doesn’t it feel good to remind your audience over and over, “I’m so much better than this”?

I’m going to go back to a comment I’ve made before about a running gag in horror, that if you’re an indie author looking to make a name for yourself, you attack Brian Keene and/or Nick Mamatas. This gag came about because there was a lot of little fish saying they wrote better than these guys. And usually, these little fish were less talented. But they wanted a hook to reel in an audience, and they felt that being better than Brian or Nick was that hook. Maybe it is a hook, but it’s one cast out without bait. There’s nothing enticing offered to the readers to convince them to swallow the hook. So the few people they can get are the fans of these authors who are looking to disprove the claims (Not really a hard task in most cases.)

So most people know it’s not okay to attack Brian and Nick, and they don’t do it. And really, I have to admire Brian, a guy who seems to write a new novel or comic book script every week. I seem to recall seeing he recently wrote 40K in one day, which is roughly two and have times higher than my best day. I digress, most authors find other ways to talk up their stuff, and some are more successful than others.

But a lot of writers who speak out against internet bullying have no trouble accepting that certain writers are okay to bash. It’s not really a gender thing, because Dan Brown is in that list of authors who it’s okay to hack at. Ho-ho-ho, Dan can’t really write, so it’s just pure dumb luck that his books have sold millions and been turned into movies that grossed millions worldwide. Yes, not any prudent planning or anything like a good marketing plan. It was all just dumb luck, and ANY OF US could get that kind of success if we only had a lucky break.

And that’s just it; this isn’t about the skill of the author or the lack thereof. It’s a vain salve meant to sooth the burn of our own continuing lack of success. It’s that nagging question, “How did that lousy fucker sell a million copies a week when I’m just barely clearing 50 a month?” And it can’t be that people likes them a good stupid story now and then. NO. It must have been some lucky break that makes people temporarily dumb, and one day, ONE DAY, they’ll turn around and recognize real writing talent. Then we’ll be the one at the top of the sales pile, laughing at Dan and E.L. and they tumble into artistic obscurity.

I’ll say it again: what-EVER.

And I’ll let you know something about me. Yes, I would love to have more success. Yes, I would love to one day have the mainstream look at Peter’s series and say “Hallo, what’s this then?” I feel confident that one day it could happen. Not because the story is pure brilliance. It’s because the masses love crappy pop art, and bitches, I EXCEL at making crappy pop art. It’s this mindset that keeps me from biting at the Casts for their slut shaming vampyre books, or from spending my weeks scouring the internet for bad reviews of The Hunger Games to share on my twitter feed. I’d much rather spend my time promoting other authors who I think you should read. I’d rather find better ways to promote me and my work than cast hooks into successful writers and feed myself more bitter schadenfreude.

So if you read 50 Shades of Grey and thought it was awful, sure, go ahead and take a swing at it with a bad review. But after that, get over yourself, and don’t retweet every single bad review just because it validates your sense of superiority. All it does is show how very bitter you are that E.L. James is selling a million copies a week. And bitterness does not look good on anyone.

Video game review: Gravity Rush

I needed to wait a bit to write this review, because if I didn’t, it would have been laced with a lot of profanity. No, more so than you’ve come to expect from my dainty redneck mouth. Try to appreciate that Gravity Rush was the one reason I laid down a deposit for the PS Vita months in advance, and I was really upset when the release date was pushed back. I had so much hope invested in this game based on the trailer, and on the demo I played in Cannes and the Festival of Games in February.

But unfortunately, Gravity Rush is a great idea burdened by several factors, and the biggest one is that the story was written by a drooling idiot. And I speak after having played 16 chapters plus making an attempt at playing the Spy Pack DLC. I’m not finishing the game, and I’m so unimpressed by the story that I won’t even bother to YouTube the ending. On Twitter, I repeatedly compared this to Red Dead Redemption because I loved the exploration of the game world, but hated the fighting and the story. This is still true, but I at least could suffer the story enough to finish Red Dead Redemption. My hate boner for Gravity Rush is so huge that I don’t even want to finish it. I’m going to take my copy back to the shop for credit so it’s not a total loss.

Before I proceed to the dissection of this stinking shit pile, let me say that graphically, this is a very pretty game. The city designs are distinct and colorful, and Kat’s trip into rift worlds through the city’s creator, Gade, offer lots of graphical variety. When the player is roaming freely in the world to gather gems, there is so much pretty stuff to admire.

The music is fantastic, and like the graphics, there’s a lot of variety to keep it from getting stale. Each city section and rift area has its own music, so level hopping keeps your ears tuned in instead of zoning out.

Unfortunately, very little else about this game works. Combat is terrible, simply put. There’s no way to lock onto enemies, and I spent a lot of time cursing over Kat slipping past a nevi’s glowing weak spot and continue sailing through open space until I could stop and turn around for another attempt. Some boss monsters bob around, making the fights much longer and more aggravating because you’re just about to land a blow when the monster looks away and leaves you whizzing through space, usually growling a stream of cusswords.

But I can actually forgive the problems with combat, if it weren’t for the drivel that passes for a story. I can’t call it juvenile, because I’ve seen better writing from children. You think I’m being mean, so let me give you several examples to illustrate the problem.

The first time I had a WTF moment is when the game had me talk to a few NPC types that talked about a master of disguise named Alias who wanted to take this mystical gem protecting the town. So RIGHT AFTER this plot development, I’m approached by a cop who wants my help in swapping the real gem for a fake. While it’s obvious to me what was about to happen, Kat agrees to the plan despite just being warned that the thief is a master of disguise. But the bigger plot hole that nagged at me is, how did Alias know who Kat was, when she’d literally just fallen into the world, and had only been named Kat by the real detective a few hours before? But plot inconsistencies like this run throughout the game.

In the next example, just before heading into a rift world, Dusty, the astral cat responsible for giving Kat her gravity powers, ingests the contents of a box of Nevi Poison. Now stop and ponder this: the nevi only just started showing up, and the story has said that no one knows how to deal with them. The city is torn asunder, and there’s no industry running right. And yet, there’s a commercially available product out, and a box of it is just laying out in the open. I know the writers needed a reason to strip Kat’s powers, but instead of thinking up a creative way to weaken the bond between Dusty and Kat, they went for the dumbest possible option.

Several more chapters passed, and I was asked by a woman to fetch a letter she dropped over the side of the city. This leads Kat to fly down several miles and get sucked into a gravity storm. Here, the writers could have opted for a symbolic pun, that Kat became curious about how far down the main column of the city went. Instead, she’s just an errand girl for a dumb twat who dropped THE MOST IMPORTANT LETTER IN HER WHOLE LIFE OVER THE SIDE OF A CITY FLOATING OVER A BLACK HOLE. I—WHAT?

But okay, once down in the storm, Kat finds a bunch of lost kids, and she fights the same boss, over, and over, and over. Then she gets hypnotized by one of the children who is really another creator posing as a child, and thus enters her own mind. The level is pretty and a bit different from the rest of the game worlds, but the stupidity of this story was starting to burn my brain badly. I finally got Kat free to leave, and had to fight the same boss again. Then the kids are loaded up on an Ark (OF COURSE) and… the same boss shows up and knocks Kat into another gravity storm.

So, I finally get Kat back to the main city, and the repetitive boss is killed by the army. It’s revealed that a year has passed since Kat left, and the lady who dropped the letter is like “Oh, what? That piece of trash? Whatever. Can’t you see I found another guy already? Kindly fuck off.”

Now, I’m already pissed and ready to throw my Vita, but the very next mission is about a scientist, a dude with goggles peering down over the edge of the city who says “Oh thank goodness, it’s the gravity queen. I dropped my—”

And I screamed “FUCK YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKING SON OF A BITCH!” I didn’t mean the scientist, either. No, I meant the writer who couldn’t think of anything better for a flying superhero to do than to recover shit for clumsy assholes. The fact is, I just finished a mission to retrieve a letter for an ingrate, and the VERY NEXT mission is a repeat of the same theme? Are there no actual writers working for video game companies? Is there no budget after graphics and music to pay someone who isn’t a complete moron to pen a scripts? Or are game plots all designed by committee? Because this is a shit sandwich, super runny and with extra peanuts.

But okay, I had already bought the Spy Pack DLC, so I figured I’d try it out. And here’s the premise: Syd, a perpetual fuckwit working for the now militarized police, asks Kat to infiltrate a group of pirates dressed in a cat outfit. Kat is only the most well known person in the city, even with a year of absence, so why she’d make a good spy fails every logic test possible. Adding a cat suit to a woman named Kat is only slightly more insulting to the intelligence of the pirates. So of course they recognize her right away. Kat makes up a story about being tired of being asked to do stupid shit for others, so the pirates say she can join their gang…if she can win a race against a rocket ship.

I shut off the game here, and I won’t turn it back on. If you have access to someone who can alter gravity and commit all kinds of crimes, why would you care if she can outrace your badly constructed rockets? But beyond this bit of idiocy, why would there be pirates roaming freely around the military-controlled airspace when the military has locked down on everyone else? Company bosses are taken away for talking back. The school students are forced to conduct military drills, and all the factory workers are being forced to produce military good. Even the dread nevi have been wiped out, but these assclowns are okay? No, not fucking buying this horseshit.

I really cannot express my disappointment strongly enough in this game. What we have is a great idea that’s brought lower by hands down the worst game writing I’ve seen in a long time. I want to give the game a higher score for the pretty graphics and the great music. But the crap combat system and awful writing pull Gravity Rush down to 2 stars, and I don’t consider it worth the long wait. I want to be a Sony fangirl, but this is yet another half assed effort that makes me feel like I’ve been cheated out of my money. I can only hope that the games coming out in the second year have a little more thought put into the writing, because this game has almost no thought at all put into the plot. Just about the worst story I’ve ever seen, and even Shinobido 2: The Revenge of Zen makes more sense then this meandering piece of shit.

TL;DR: I waited five months for THIS? Fuck you, Sony. Eat a pus-covered dick.

About yesterday…

If I never understood the term “it was the best of times, it was the worst of time, I do now. Yesterday should have been the best of times for me. I had a new reader who just finished Peter the Wolf who wanted to buy all the rest of my books in one lump, and even after I offered a 20% discount, they paid full price, plus a $5 tip. (Or for those of you who hate math problems, that’s $100 in sales from one reader, basically.) I got a pay statement from Lightning Source and had my dad check my account to find that I had $213. Lightning Source only sells ebooks for the Campaign trilogy and print copies of Redemption Lost, and I make a LOT of money of that first series. Even rounding down, I realized Wendy has sold over 2,000 copies at this point.

That’s a good day, right?

Well emotionally, I wasn’t doing so good, because something in the air triggered my MS. I didn’t notice the physical symptoms first. I became agitated and went on Twitter to complain about the difference in sales between the Campaign trilogy and the Peter the Wolf series, pointing out how Wendy’s first book was about a serial killer slaughtering kids, and that was okay for readers. But they wouldn’t read Peter’s book because of one molested girl? I declared that I would never understand people as long as I lived. While this is true, I’d no sooner wrote it when I started asking why I was so upset. After all, I was having a great day.

It was perhaps twenty minutes after this that I noticed the tingling in my skin, followed by pain in my hands and difficulty sitting still. I decided to disengage slightly from Twitter, instead just retweeting links for others with the occasional pasted links for my own books. While I waited out the attack, I shook like a leaf caught in a breeze, and every time I turned my head, it was with an exaggerated snapping motion. Things at the corners of my vision made me jumpy, and I couldn’t suppress my need to be snappy. Then as suddenly as it arrived, the feeling was gone.

This is what I can’t get others to understand about me, about my precarious mental state. I lose a lot of people because they’re on the wrong end of one of my snapping fits, or because they see something I said while having an episode and decide that I’m just being selfish. This is why I can’t have a real publisher, because publishers scan people’s social media to look for “crazy talk,” and they don’t care to look and see if this is a real mental illness. Even if it is, they unrealistically expect people with mental illnesses to only talk when they’re in a good mood. And putting it bluntly, I never shut up. Good times or bad, I have to keep talking. That’s why I have over 100,000 tweets, yo.

Yesterday was my best sales day ever. I made enough money to cover the cost of a new bike (did I forget to mention someone stole my bicycle last week? Yeah, someone stole my bike last week. Now you know.) and I confirmed that my first series is still selling like hotcakes without me having to do anything. But yesterday was also one of the worst days I’ve had all week because my MS triggered me into a agitated mental state, and I was stuck on the roller coaster with no way to calm down. And thinking on it now, I only wish the people I’ve pissed off or sent off would read this and understand, often it’s not you or something you said that started me in my snit. Often, I’m triggered by the weather, or just by a change in the barometric pressure.

Or if this is TL;DR already, I’m sorry that I offend you for being crazy. If I could keep myself under control, I would. But very often, I’m not the pilot in this body. I’m just a passenger watching an inevitable crash. If you expect me to self-censor like a sane person, then I’m sorry, but you don’t know me or want to understand what’s gone wrong in my head after roughly half a dozen brain injuries and another half dozen MS scars making holes up in there. I’m sorry if this post upsets you, but this is what’s wrong with me, and none of this is my fault. I can apologize for causing offense, but I can’t apologize for being crazy. I’ve done it way too often, and I’m tired of people blowing me off and saying “Oh, you’re not really crazy.” Yes, I am. I only wish you people could understand that and stop walking away from me just because I snapped and acted out. Cause this isolation technique? Not really healing the damage in my head, nor is it convincing me to behave better. If I could do that, I would.

Internet bullying: a conversation that needs to be taken seriously

By now you probably know about this story of a game made to allow gamers to “punch Anita Sarkeesian” for her campaign to talk about tropes vs women in video games. This latest chapter involves the maker of the game, Ben Spurr, being exposed, and totally not getting that what he’s done is bullying. But this is the part of the conversation that we need to focus on most of all, because it’s this idea that there’s nothing wrong with assaulting someone online. After all it’s only words, and there’s not really an effect to these threats of rape and violence.

Except there is an effect, and it’s horrifically tangible. Thousands of women have fled social spaces time and again because men violently dominate the conversation. Threats are only one aspect of this. Women who dare you disagree with men are called stupid, delusional, ugly, or shrill; they’re attacked as prudes and sluts. Men tell them they wouldn’t have sex with these women, and then turn around and suggest that they’re uptight because they need to get laid.

Guys, it doesn’t matter if you think what you’re doing is no big deal. What’s happened is that you’ve taken the internet from being a level field of discussion to being a male-dominated medium where women who disagree with you are subjected to constant harassment. Beyond the insults and threats are men who report women’s accounts and attempt to get them pulled off the internet. These are not the actions of open-minded, good people. These are the actions of cowards who are so afraid of losing a debate that they would rather silence the other debate team rather than admit that they are wrong.

There is no defense in this situation. Gamers seem willfully ignorant that half their club is made up of women, and every time we try to point this out and ask for more realistic representation, there’s this back lash that we’re “ruining the club’s fun.” Really? So sexual objectification is your idea of fun? You can’t enjoy that martial arts game if the women had more realistic breasts and dressed in costumes that didn’t accentuate said breasts? You can’t even acknowledge that half of your club is sick of women being relegated to a secondary character in games like The Last of Us or Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, unplayable while the big strong man does all the work? Must we just except that our half of the market will be ignored in favor of yours? You can’t even grant us a public space to voice our concerns without constant attacks?

Well here’s how you come across to us: “How dare you imply that I’m not a good guy! If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’ll find you and rape you to prove what a good guy I am!”

Enough, guys. If you’re really good guys, you need to recognize the rights of women to speak, and to have a contrary opinion. Because if you don’t, you aren’t a good guy. You’re just another chauvinist who isn’t willing to admit that you’re part of the problem.

Peter got fan art!

In all the drama over the last couple of days (mostly generated by myself) I completely forgot to post this sketch from Gina Simpson, who liked Peter the Wolf enough to make fan art. And here it is!

Isn’t it fantastic? Gina has already shown me a sketch she did of Edwina Sullen, the vampy main character from my book, My Gay Sparkly Vampire Romance: A Twilight Parody (still free for download in the sidebar menu if you care to try it), and she’s said she has sketches of a few other character as well as inspiration to do a couple more characters from Dogs of War. SQUEEEEEEE!

Ahem. Now I’m not saying I need fan art from y’all for any sense of validation. No. NO! But damn it feels really good to see someone say “I took a whack at drawing this character from your books.” It’s a good sketch too, and I think the expression is perfect for Peter in one of his more brooding moments. He’s not too muscular, which is fitting given his work in gymnastics, and yet he’s not too thin either. Yes! Zoe totally approves of this fan art. And should she get around to doing fant art of Judy and Tom, I’ll happily show it off here too. And not just because I’m squeefully happy to have fan art. No, it’s because I think Gina’s art is awesome, and I think y’all should check it out too!

In completely unrelated fan squeeing, I’m still deeply in love with Windswept by Gwen Cole. If you haven’t at least tried it yet, consider this my poking you with a pointy stick. Try it. Gwen’s got a great writing style, and I loved every chapter of her story so far. Can’t wait to see how this romantic paranormal YA story of drifters and sliders ends.

Right, that's enough gushing for now.

Chuck Wendig

This is Chuck Wendig:

And this is Chuck Wendig’s web site.

And this is Chuck Wendig’s Twitter account.

And this is a list of Chuck Wendig’s books for sale.

Chuck blocked me on Twitter today because I got testy with him. I don’t care, and will continue to promote his stuff. Chuck will never promote my stuff, read my stuff, or bother to know me. But the feeling isn’t mutual.

So, now you know Chuck Wendig too. You’re welcome.

The wound is still open…

Last night, I had a rather calm meltdown on Twitter, probably the most sedate ranting I’ve ever done. It started because I was having a long discussion with someone about how I should sell my work by giving them hope in redemption. I told them that this wasn’t the point of the story, that much like Humbert in Lolita, I was aiming at showing how a character’s mistakes led them astray. Well, they said “Who’s Humbert?” I responded “I’m guessing you haven’t read Lolita.” They said no, and was it another of my stories? No, I said, and I explained the basic plot before bowing out of the conversation when they again explained that I should sell my story with the promise of redemption. Otherwise it wouldn’t be enticing.

That’s not what led to the meltdown. After that, I’d ask if there was any way I could convince readers to go back to older challenging styles of fiction that didn’t start trying to soothe their vanities right from page one. I suggested that the classic American writers who wrote about destructive and unlikable characters wouldn’t have much chance in a market who must feel good about what they read all the time. And that led to someone saying that I needed to find a group who like miseries placed upon their characters, and who liked supernatural settings. And I thought, but that’s horror, and I got shunned by the horror community.

THAT’S what started the meltdown. There was no explosion, no long cusswords, and no naming names. I just started listing all the horror books I’d read as a kid or a teen where minors were involved in sexually explicit scenes. And this is part of the reason why I chose horror as my starting place for my writing, because I’d already been shown time and again “Here in horror, we won’t judge you for having a dark past.”

HA.

I was just about wound down when someone who didn’t know the situation tried to sort out where the prejudice against me was coming from. Maybe the people who’d called me names wouldn’t read stories with minors? No, I said, the person who attacked me published an anthology featuring a pedophile ghost sodomizing a minor, incest with a minor, necrophilia with a minor, and necrophilia of a dead teenager. The people who shunned me were willing to read Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, a story about a girl being held prisoner who was tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered. That was based on a true story, and they would read that, but they told me they couldn’t read my dark fiction because I was “doing it wrong.” The person questioning me said, “Maybe they’re prejudiced against women,” and I said no, because the anthology I’d mentioned was all stories from the same woman. Furthermore, another member of their publishing collective was a woman who wrote a book with minors being incestuous, and where the main character was molested by an adult as a child.

And the more facts I laid out, the more this shunning hurt. I have not done anything in my fiction that they would not publish or consider reading. In my personal life interacting with these people, I have donated my time, money, and energy into their projects without asking for anything in return. The first time I’d sent them a story, it was because they approached me and asked me to write a story based on a joke I’d made. I wrote reviews for them; honest reviews, and even some low scoring reviews for the books that didn’t work for me. I was not kissing their asses to get on their good sides. I was just doing my best to support them and the horror market in general.

And so here I am, a day later, and still I have the same questions: if it’s okay for them to write these things and publish them, and their constant spiel is “Don’t judge me for what I write or read,” then what happened that I deserved to be shunned by people who had claimed to be my friends? Why was I shunned and called a pedophile? Why was I judged for what I wrote? It isn’t because I’m a woman. It isn’t because I’m a cling on or a suck up. I gave everything I had to these people, and they cut me loose and said “We don’t tolerate that kind of fiction around here.”

WHA?

So what the hell went wrong? Later on in the night, someone I hadn’t talked to in ages said, “Beat them with a stick,” and I didn’t feel it. I don’t want to hit them. Not any of them. I just want one of them to apologize. And at this point, I don’t even care which one. I just want one of the two people who publicly attacked me to sit down, look at the facts and realize they blew up at me for no good reason. I want them to eventually say “I owe you an apology for how I treated you. You were a good friend, and I shouldn’t have said that.” Failing that, I want someone who shunned me to think about how easily they cut me loose and say, “What I did was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

I still think the market that best fits my story is horror, but the horror market doesn’t want me. And what upsets me, is, I don’t understand why. I’ve written nothing that Ketchum, King, Rice, or Anthony didn’t already write, and I wasn’t nearly as graphic or explicit. So why am I unfit for them? No one seems to have a satisfactory answer, and while I spin the questions around in my head, I can’t get any sense of closure to let me move on. I want an explanation or an apology. I want someone who was there and who knows what happened to acknowledge how unfair this shunning was, and how unfair it is that it’s still going on one year later.

Again, I gave the market everything without asking for anything in return for years. I gave reviews. I bought books. When people got sick or ran out of groceries, I sent money without wanting anything in return. When I finally had a story that I needed their help on, one of my closest friends attacked the people who gave positive reviews and insinuated that I was trying to train molesters. Shortly thereafter, another close friend told me I abandoned my people (It’s not true, I never did. But my financial and emotional support of other trans people is a private matter, not a badge I need to wear on my sleeve.) and that I was a pedophile. (It’s not true, I’m a recovering sex addict, and age has nothing to do with my problems.) And after I called the second attacker a hypocrite in a public space, the whole rest of the community backed away from me and surrounded him. People I’d spoken to for years couldn’t even be bothered to look at how unfair the situation was. They simply chose to shun me. Or to lecture me that I should have taken the attack and just shut up.

And yes, I’m still hurting over it. I’m still wishing that someone would think about what I gave to them, about the hours of work I put in for them, and recognize that I’m at least due an apology in return.

And if I can’t have that, then I fear this wound in my heart will continue to fester. Because I didn’t do anything wrong, and this isn’t right. I shouldn’t be shunned by the same genre that saved me from bullies. I shouldn’t be shunned by the genre that inspired me to write with its stories of minors being mistreated by monsters. I shouldn’t be judged by the crowd whose mantra is “don’t judge me for what I write or read.” And yet, I was judged for what I wrote. How is that right?

It isn’t, and I just wish the people who attacked me would read this and recognize how poorly they treated a longtime friend and fan of the same genre.