Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 37

The Big Damn Angel Rewatch S01E03 “In The Dark”

CONTENT WARNING: MENTIONS OF PEDOPHILIA, CHILD MURDER

In every generation, there is a chosen one. No, shit. Wrong show. What am I supposed to do, now? I guess I’ll just have to recap every episode Angel with an eye to the following themes:

Angel is still a dick.
Cordelia is smarter than everyone.
Sex is still evil.
Sunlight isn’t nearly as dangerous as it was in Sunnydale…
…but its danger is certainly inconsistent.
Vampire/demon rules aren’t consistent with the Buffyverse.
Xenophobia and cultural stereotypes abound.
Women are disposable and unrealistic.
Vampires still @#$%ing breathe.
Some of this stuff is still homophobic as fuck.
Blondes, blondes everywhere

A lot of this shit is really misogynistic.

The Big Damn Angel Damsel In Distress Counter: 7

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Just like with the Buffy recaps, I’ve seen (most) of this series already, so I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So a blanket spoiler warning is in effect.

We open with the messy-haired blonde (#11) from the credit sequence running down an alley. A guy catches her and says a bunch of threatening stuff about her humiliating him or whatever. Just like, generic abusive man stuff. She tells him that someone is going to hear her scream, but he laughs it off because they’re in L.A. and nobody gives a shit about poor people.

Unintentional social commentary.

Anyway, Angel shows up and beats the guy, then rescues the poor, vulnerable blonde, who’d made a deal with Angel to get rid of the abuser. Then, we hear a familiar voice narrating the scene from above:

Spike: “[breathy, high pitched voice] How can I thank you, you mysterious black-clad hunk of a night thing? [cowboy voice] No need, little lady! Your tears of gratitude are enough for me. You see, I was once a badass vampire but love–and a pesky curse–defanged me. And now, I’m just a big, fluffy puppy with bad teeth. No, not the hair. Never the hair. [breathy, high pitched voice] But there must be some way I can show my appreciation. [cowboy voice] No, helpin’ those in need’s my job and working up a load of sexual tension and prancing away like a magnificent poof is truly thanks enough. [breathy, high-pitched voice] I understand. I have a nephew who’s gay, so– [cowboy voice] Say no more! Evil’s still afoot, and I’m almost out of that nancy-boy hair gel I like so much. Quickly, to the Angel-mobile. Away!

Spike continues to monologue about the Gem of Amara (though he calls it the Ring of Amara) and how he’s going to kill Angel. He does this while smoking a cigarette so #12. Smoking is still evil, but I’m more concerned with the #10 on display up there. For some reason, the writers seem to believe that implying Angel is gay is the height of comedy. I don’t know why. There are two homophobic slurs in there, for god’s sake. This also ties into the uncomfortable woobification of Spike as both of these series go on; he has some extremely homophobic dialogue that everyone kind of goes, “Oh, that Spike!” and laughs off.

After the credits and a commercial from Turbotax that implies we’ll have to keep paying income tax for years after we die, we see Oz drive his van up to the building that houses Angel Investigations. Inside, Cordelia is psyched over the success of their first paying case:

Cordelia: “Everything is going according to plan! See girl in distress, see Angel save girl from druggie stalking boyfriend, see boyfriend go to jail and see…invoice!”

This line has inspired me to keep a running total of people who actually need Angel’s help. So far, it’s all been women, right? So, I’m adding the Big Damn Damsel In Distress Counter. Every time Angel rescues a woman, I’m going to add her. And maybe sometime I’ll get a chance to add him saving a man. I’m only counting Cordelia and Kate once a piece, but it’s worth noting that Cordelia is going to need saving over and over again.

Cordy can’t understand why Doyle isn’t as excited about their first invoice, and he points out that just printing it out and mailing it doesn’t guarantee payment. Cordelia doesn’t grasp the idea of someone not paying their bills, though, so she’s undeterred. You’d really think with that whole IRS thing that happened to her family, she’d be more cynical.

When Oz walks in, that really boosts Cordy’s mood. She calls him the embodiment of all things Sunnydale (which isn’t really that great a compliment) and tells him they have a lot of catching up to do, but she only asks him two questions before the conversation awkwardly fizzles.

Huh. I wonder why he didn’t tell her that Harmony is a vampire now.

Cordelia and Doyle take Oz down to Angel’s apartment, where Oz wastes no time getting to the point of his visit. He gives Angel the Gem of Amara and tells him that Buffy sent it. This really knocks Angel back, while Doyle is freaking out and insisting that Angel put it on. Doyle explains the ring’s powers–render a vampire completely impervious. Oz tells Angel about Spike’s quest for the ring and how Angel is supposed to keep it safe. And then Cordelia points out that Buffy didn’t send anything other than the ring. Not a letter or a message or anything. That bums Angel out pitifully.

Doyle: “Come on, I’ve got something that’ll boost your spirits! Why don’t you put it on, and I’ll stake you! It’ll be fun!”

Angel: “Maybe later.”

I like that he says “Maybe later,” and not “no.” It gives me hope that somewhere, buried deep within Angel, there’s still a dude who likes to party and do dumb shit and says “Hold my beer.”

Although in his human partying-and-doing-dumb-shit days it would probably have been, “Seize thou mine tankard of ale and steady it, for I stand upon the precipice of tomfoolery!”

Doyle says he’s going to go get a drink to celebrate Angel’s new toy, with or without him. And Oz and Cordelia go along. Because this is only episode three of this spin-off, so we need time to see Angel being Very Sad And Alone. He goes down into the sewers, which look a lot like the Sunnydale sewers, and hides the ring in a crack between some bricks.

Not in his apartment.

Where are the weapons are.

And he is.

So he can watch over the ring.

He puts it.

In the sewer.

Between some bricks.

BUFFY COULD HAVE DONE THAT YOU DUMMY!

Seriously, she sent the ring to him to protect it, and he’s like, “Yeah, I’ll just chuck it in the sewer, the sewer full of vampires because we basically treat any underground tunnel like those weird hallways under downtown Houston.” Great thinking. I mean, do I think some vampire is going to check every brick in the sewer? No. But what if they have some magic bullshit to detect other magic bullshit? What if a thousand what-ifs, because this is a wild and free universe of paranormal woo?

Way to drop the fucking ball, dude.

The next morning, Doyle is hung over:

Cordelia: “I think the trick is laying off the ale before you start quoting Angela’s Ashes and weeping like a baby man.”

Doyle: “Hey, that’s a good book.”

Guys? In case you couldn’t tell yet, Doyle is Irish. Get it? He drinks a lot. He loves the most bleakly depressing memoir of Irish poverty ever penned. He’s about six seconds away from singing “Irish Republican Army” and passing a hat around for donations to the cause. I swear to Christ if he references “the troubles” I’m going to write a lot of hate mail I’ll need a time machine to send. Doyle is quickly sliding into the very embodiment of #7.

In Angel’s underground Tai Chi studio of sadness, he’s brooding and sweating and moving slowly when the phone rings. He picks it up and like, you know he’s hoping it’s Buffy, right? But it’s the girl from before the credits. Her abusive ex has been let out of jail “on a technicality,” and she’s frightened. Angel tells her he’ll be right there.

Angel arrives to help her, only to be sucker-hit-in-the-face with a pipe. Spike tells him to give up the Gem Of Amara, but obviously, Angel responds by throwing him into a car. Spike mocks Angel for being a vampire detective:

Spike: “What’s next? Vampire cowboy? Vampire fireman? Vampire ballerina?”

First of all, “ha ha, you’re like a girl” is a #10 as well as #13: A lot of shit is really misogynistic. It not only equates being “girly” as something horrible a man should avoid but it also falls in line with Spike’s whole “gay men are like girls” brand of homophobic insult.

They have this big fight scene, both of them talking tough about who is and isn’t going to steal/protect the gem, and Cordelia and Doyle show up.

Spike: “Cordelia? You look smashing! Did you lose weight?”

Cordelia: “Yes. You know, there’s this great gym on…hey!”

This is a thing I love about Buffyverse creatures. They’re evil and hell-bent on world domination, but they still interact on a human level.

Angel tells Cordelia that she needs to go hide out at Doyle’s apartment because Spike will be back and now he knows to look for her. She’s like, why can’t I go home, and Angel is like, trust me, you have to stay with Doyle because you’ll be safer.

Than you would be with me.

In my underground bunker.

Where I have all these weapons.

And a ring that makes me literally invincible.

GODDAMNIT ANGEL WE HAVE BEEN OVER THIS.

Angel tells them that his plan is to find Spike before Spike can get the jump on him again. During daylight hours, Doyle helps by calling around to all of his weird paranormal connections while Cordelia wanders around, refusing to sit or put her purse down due to the filth of the place.

Cordelia: “I mean, how can you live like this?”

Doyle: “Well, I didn’t until last week. Then I saw what you did with your place, and I just had to call my decorator.”

Cordelia: “No way, my apartment is nowhere near this yucky!”

I swear to god Doyle’s apartment is just Cordelia’s apartment shot from different angles.

Here’s a place where Angel doesn’t live up to Buffy: set design. I realize that the show is set in a major city, but a lot of action is taking place in very generic locations that could have been pulled from any show on television at the time. Contrast Angel Investigations with the Sunnydale High library. Or the bunker from Supernatural. Or the dormitory in The Magicians. You get a sense of location from the individuality of the designs there. On Angel, any scene could be happening anywhere once you leave Angel’s lonely basement. All of the other locations, from bars to streets to apartments look exactly the same.

Huh. That’s probably why there aren’t as many screencaps in the Angel recaps as in the Buffy ones.

Doyle gets a call, but it’s about money he owes someone. He asks Cordelia about how bad Spike is and she tries to downplay it. He sees through her nonchalance. They know they’re boned.

In broad daylight at another, less generic aparment––this one has a kitchen pass through!––Heather, the blonde from before rejects Angel’s suggestion that she stay at a shelter for her own safety. She says she’s craving her abusive exboyfriend the way people crave “rock” and the way the line is written and delivered is so cringey and unnatural that you know the people who wrote it were like, “No, this sounds way more gritty and urban than just saying ‘crack’.” Angel warns her that if she gets back together with the dude, she’s going to end up dead.

Angel: “It’s either go for the easy fix and wait for the consequences, or take the hard road and go with faith.”

He clarifies that he’s not a Jesus person, he means faith in herself.

I’m shocked at how sensitively the scene plays out when contrasted to the way Buffy treats domestic violence. On Buffy, a girl being hit by her boyfriend was depicted as stupid for not leaving. On Angel, a girl being hit by her boyfriend is given gentle encouragement. Way to evolve, Buffyverse.

Back at Doyle’s apartment, Cordelia is giving him a rundown on how terrible Spike is when Angel calls. Doyle has to answer pretending to be a pie restaurant since he owed all his contacts money and has to hide out now. He tells Angel about a lead he got:

Doyle: “Yeah, well, listen, Manny The Pig said he didn’t know aything about a vampire called Spike.”

Angel: “So?”

Doyle: “Yeah, well, he said that before I mentioned anything about Spike.”

Through this entire conversation, Angel is trying on a bad-ass forearm mounted retractable wrist knife thing that, you know, would be great for self-defense if you were trying to protect, IDK, a ring? A human employee? I suppose you could also put them in a totally unmonitored sewer tunnel and an apartment with absolutely no security.

Also, we never see him use this handy weapon in any of the shit that goes on henceforth.

Doyle sends Angel to a dive bar called The Orbit Room. This is my favorite thing ever because when I lived in Grand Rapids, there was a bar there called The Orbit Room and Rob Zombie or GWAR always seemed to always be playing there. So, I guess demons at The Orbit Room are plausible, right? Anyway, Angel goes down to the bar and GWAR is not there, which is unfortunate because that would be a hell of a crossover. What ends up happening is that Angel just tosses a few dudes around and Manny The Pig is like, no, I can’t tell you anything or he’ll kill me and then immediately folds at Angel’s first threat.

Note to demons: Manny The Pig’s snitch switch is more like a hair-trigger.

Angel finds Spike in the alley, feeding on some blonde woman (#11). He lets her go and runs away, and Angel tells her to run, so ding, add one to the damsel counter. My favorite part of this scene is that she turns to run away and Angel stops her to hold onto her shoulders and growl, “Run.” Dude. She was running. You just held her up.

Angel chases Spike into an alley that dead-ends in a chainlink fence. While Angel talks tough, a dude comes up behind him and wraps a chain around his throat. I feel like Angel has completely forgotten who Spike is. Spike has never been the guy who gets his hands dirty. We’ve always seen him surrounded by henchmen. If he doesn’t have henchmen, he deputizes whoever is handy. He even got Angel and Buffy to work with him in “Lovers Walk.” Spike is never alone. Surrounding himself with other people is one of his survival tactics.

Anyway, the guy with the chain chokes Angel. You know. The vampire. Who doesn’t breathe? (#9)

Back at Doyle’s house, we’re running into yet another time issue. When Doyle told Angel about Manny The Pig, it was daytime at Doyle’s apartment. The scene with Spike takes place at night. Now, Doyle and Cordelia are sitting by the phone, during the day, in the same clothes they were wearing in the scene before. This is either a continuity error or a characterization error, because no matter how dire the predicament, Cordelia is going to have changed her clothes. She’s not that different from how she was in Sunnydale.

Cordelia is worried that something might have gone wrong since it’s taking Angel so long to get back to them, but Doyle says Angel is probably out enjoying the sun and surf with his new ring. The fact that he has the ring is what reassures him. After all, he’s invincible when he’s wearing it.

So…it probably would have been a good idea for him to have worn it, huh?

If he’d been wearing it, the henchman couldn’t have choked him unconscious. Oh, yeah. That happened. Angel, a vampire, was strangled into unconsciousness and only wakes up at the beginning of this particular scene. So, uh. Yeah. That was a #9 above.

Spike brags about how neat his torture guy is. The guy, Marcus, isn’t just an expert torturer. He’s also a pedophile, something Spike seems particularly enthused about. Remember that when Buffy entrusts her teen sister to Spike for safekeeping in season five of Buffy.

Marcus opens Angel’s shirt to marvel at his abs or something and says:

Marcus: “Over two hundred years of living and so little external damage.”

Yeah. That’s called…being a vampire. They heal from shit. We’ve explicitly seen this happen on Buffy. You know, the show this one is spun-off from?

I know we’re only three episodes in but I feel like this show forgets that its main character is a fucking vampire. Did the writers not watch any Buffy at all? Did no one brief anyone involved in any part of this production on what vampires are or do? I mean, you’ve got this torture scene taking place in a warehouse lit by a giant, sunny window:

I mean, come on. Yeah, it’s visually interesting and gives them the opportunity to do a cool lighting effect, but these are vampires. Why on earth would they pick this particular location? Not just because of the window letting daylight in, but because do you really want someone to stroll on past and look inside and see all of your torture business? This isn’t amateur hour! Spike just led a successful excavation of a Sunnydale cemetery right under the Slayer’s nose! He hides underground! He hides in abandoned, windowless factories! Spike knows what he’s doing until he gets to L.A. and apparently becomes a total n00b.

Marcus the torturer isn’t just interested in physical pain. He examines Angel’s heart and sees that he’s been in love. He also sees that Angel has a soul, which means he has something to lose. Still, it’s not the psychological aspect Spike is interested in, so Marcus gets to work impaling Angel with red-hot pokers while Mozart plays on a suitcase record player in the background.

Torture apparently brings Angel clarity about his own damn show, because he has this exchange with Spike:

Angel: “You hired a vampire. What do you think he’s going to do with the ring when he finds it, huh? Hand it over to you?”

Spike: “Good lord, why didn’t I think of––oh, half a mo, I did! I hired a guy who doesn’t care about the ring or anything else on God’s green earth except taking blokes apart one piece at a time. It’s called addiction, Angel. We all have them.”

Right, and your guy’s addiction is molesting kids…and those are generally out in the daytime…so having a ring that lets him go out would be helpful, right? Even Marcus is listening to this whole schpiel like, “Can you believe how dumb this guy is?”

There’s no reason that Spike needs to tell any of his henchmen the entire plan in the first place. Come on, man.

Spike taunts Angel about how Buffy got her heart broken by the asshole she slept with at college and calls her Slutty The Vampire Slayer (#13). On the one hand, I’m glad Buffy is out of her toxic relationship with Angel. On the other hand, I’m pissed that Buffy going on with her life after Angel intentionally removed himself from it is being mined for his Man Pain.

Leaving Angel in Marcus’s questionably competent hands, Spike heads to Angel’s apartment and starts ransacking the place looking for the ring. Despite having all sorts of sharp tools and scary, carving up people stuff, Marcus decides to take a gun and start shooting holes in the ceiling to let in beams of sunlight around Angel while monologuing about liking the innocence of children.

So, like, your torture plan is to make it impossible to get near your victims without hurting yourself in the process? That’s fucking brilliant, Marcus.

While Spike is still tossing Angel’s apartment, he runs into an obstacle.

Cordelia: “When you’re through giving the place the full Johnny-Depp-over, I hope you have the cash to pay for all of this.”

Spike warns her that she’ll be dead before she can shoot, but Doyle cautions Spike that there’s more to him than meets the eye. So, if Demon!Doyle can take on a vampire, why hasn’t he been doing that all along? Anyway, Spike tells them that Angel dies at sundown if they don’t bring him the ring.

Are you guys ready for another continuity error? Because I for sure am!

Here’s Marcus in front of Angel, lovingly stroking his torture implements that he never uses anyway:

Then the camera cuts quickly to Angel and we see Marcus behind him, his mouth not moving even as we hear his voice speaking:

And then, after a shot of Angel’s feet scrabbling for a broken piece of wood Spike dropped in front of him earlier, we see Marcus again:

And he’s just turned around from his tools, in front of Angel.

The editing on this show so far has been…not the best.

Angel manages to get ahold of a rudimentary stake, holding it between his feet. Marcus doesn’t notice. And we’re apparently supposed to not notice when Marcus pulls out one of the pokers impaling Angel’s shoulder without putting a hole in the shirt it’s gone through, but whatever. Like I said, editing. When Marcus gets close enough, Angel swings his legs up to drive the stake through his heart. Unfortunately, Spike has picked that moment to turn up and he stops him. Then Spike steps in and decides to take the torture into his own hands, and we cut to the outside of the building while Angel screams.

At Angel’s apartment, Cordelia and Doyle have almost given up on their search for the ring when they remember how much Angel likes going into sewers. They head down and start looking around.

Cordelia: “Okay, this is not a needle in a haystack. This is a needle in Kansas.”

While she walks ahead of him, Doyle surreptitiously shifts into his demon form and sniffs around. This leads him to the broken brick where Angel hid the ring. They go to meet Spike in the broad god damn daylight. They demand to be taken to Angel before they’ll hand over the ring. He complies, and they throw the ring into the warehouse, telling him to fetch it. Then they tell him to let Angel go, and he asks if they really thought that was how the whole thing was going to go down. But our heroes had a plan, and that plan was Oz crashing his van into the warehouse. Doyle and Cordelia get Angel loose from his shackles. They load him into the van and drive off, leaving Spike to look for the ring, which is no longer there.

Guess who has it?

That’s right.

Marcus. The henchman Spike was so sure had no interest in the ring, despite being a pedophilic murderer who just needed the ring to allow him easier access to his targets.

After the commercial break, Spike is pissed. He wrecks up Marcus’s shit, monologuing to no one:

Spike: “Son of a bitch! I do the work. I do the digging. Fight off a Slayer, drive to L.A., hire the help, and what do I get? Royally screwed, is what! Well, that cinches it. No more partners. From now on, I’m my own man. Lone wolf. Sole survivor. Yeah. Look out! Here comes Spike! The biggest, baddest mother––”

Then he wanders into a sunbeam from one of Marcus’s bullet holes and sets himself on fire.

Meanwhile, Marcus is strolling around a beach boardwalk, enjoying the sun and the playful shrieks of children. Cordelia, Doyle, and Oz are trying to figure out how to save Angel, since a hospital is right out.

Guys.

He’s a vampire.

Am I the only one, out of all the characters, all the writers, the people who actually made the damn show, who remembers that?

I’m also apparently the only person who remembered that the fireplace poker through his shoulder was on the left side, but the hole in his shirt is now on the right. This is like reading a really good book with every other word misspelled.

Angel tells them to turn around because a vampire pedophile is not going to just stroll around preying on kids on his watch, daylight be damned. Marcus is approaching a group of scouts when Oz roars up the pier in his van. He hits Marcus, sending him flying through the air, and Cordelia jumps out to tell the kids to run. Oz shoots Marcus with a crossbow, which, you know, I thought it was pretty clear that he’s invincible, so it doesn’t even slow him down. Doyle runs up on Marcus and throws a punch, but again, invincible, all-strength-no-weakness vampire, so Doyle gets knocked the fuck down. That’s when Oz throws open the side door and Angel leaps out, into the full sunlight. His super obvious stunt double coated full-body in super obvious gel runs, on fire, at Marcus and tackles him off the pier and into the sea. They emerge in the shade of the pier and fight it out. He pushes Marcus onto a jagged piece of wood, immobilizing him long enough to get the ring off his finger. Impaled through the heart and with no ring to protect him, Marcus dissolves into ash. Angel puts the ring on and emerges into the sunlight, where he walks in wonder along the beach where despite the van that just sped through a pedestrian area just feet from them, resulting in a flaming dude tackling another dude from the pier under which they then have a fist fight until one of them dies, again only feet from them, humans are peacefully going about their business.

Look, I get that California is a laid back kind of place. But…that laid back?

Even more bizarre is the fact that Cordelia, Doyle, and Oz just stand there and look on as Angel basks in the sunlight for the first time in centuries. I get it, it’s a really cool moment, but to all the people on the pier, it looks like Oz just attempted vehicular homicide. And the van is still parked up there. Presumably, someone has called the cops and taken down the license plate number. Maybe it’s time to haul ass out of there and like, lay low for a while?

Anyway, later on, Angel and Doyle stand on the roof in front of a beautiful blue-screen sunset and discuss what’s going to happen with the ring.

Angel: “I’ve thought of it from every angle. What I figure is, I did a lot of damage in my day. More than you can imagine.”

Doyle: “So what, you don’t get the ring because your period of self-flagelation isn’t over yet? I mean, think of all the daytime people you could help between nine and five!”

Angel: “They have help. The whole world is designed for them. So much that they have no idea what goes on around them after dark. They don’t see the weak ones lost in the night or the things that prey on them. And if I join them, maybe I’d stop seeing, too.”

That’s poetic and everything, but like. Maybe if you feel that strongly about it, just don’t go out in the daylight. Plus, this is the third episode and there have already been numerous times that you’ve had to go somewhere during daylight hours. The ring would probably make that more convenient.

The Gem Of Amara is one of those plot devices that can either strengthen or weaken a story and for some reason, the writers of Angel chose to weaken it. I get it. It’s hard to write conflict for an all-powerful hero. He would automatically win every fight. There would never be a sense of danger. That’s why there has to be a damn good reason for the hero to refuse invincibility. “I might forget that monsters exist” is not a good reason when the hero is a monster himself. A better reason would have been something like a history of The Gem Of Amara making its bearer go power mad, like Tolkien’s One Ring. If Angel has this ring but knows it comes with the risk of possibly losing his soul and becoming evil again, that’s a reasonable motivation for not using it. That’s something an audience has no choice but to accept, especially if the hero has been evil in the past. Then we’ve got a weapon that’s powerful enough to seemingly solve all the hero’s problems but that can’t be used without irreparably damaging the hero and making him the problem, himself.

A great example of a character faced with this dilemma is Simon from Adventure Time. During the Mushroom War, Simon had to make the choice to use his all-powerful crown to protect Marceline. In making that choice, he erased himself entirely and became the Ice King. Simon ceased to exist within him because of the ultimate power the crown gave him. It makes him a villain, but a tragic villain. If Angel were faced with the same choice, it would be understandable that he would reject it because he already knows what it means to be evil.

As the sun sets, Angel takes off the ring and smashes the gem, destroying its power. As they walk inside, Angel says that with a little more torture, he would have given up everything from the ring to Doyle’s mom. Then he asks Doyle how his mother is…DUN DUN DUUUUUHN foreshadowing and the episode is over.

This was just a really weak episode, you guys, for all the reasons mentioned above. And the effects are bad even by early ’00s standards. I feel like a lot of problems in this first season come from outright laziness. “This show is spun off from a massively successful cult hit, so we don’t have to try.” Maybe it’s unfair of me to feel that way, but Angel never seems to get the attention to detail and story that other Whedon shows do. It feels like it was just assumed that it would be a hit no matter how much work went into it.

At least Spike learns his lesson about henchmen.

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Epilogue): What Happened To Sam?

So, we’ve come to the final installment of this series. This is probably the hardest one for me to write because it’s difficult to examine a person you once considered your friend, know all the reasons for the spiral out of control they experienced, and still not want to rekindle that friendship now that they’ve got their shit together. But people have been asking for this part. So, here I go.

If you’ve missed out on the story so far, here are parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.

After Cathy had finally left town for good, it was up to Sams’ friends to help pick up the pieces. The problem was, so many of us had our own pieces to pick up and not all of us were on the same side.

I did my part my part by being emotionally on-call fulltime. Eleven o’clock at night and Sam needs a shoulder to cry on? I’ll get out of bed and race right over. Middle of a family event? Sure, let me excuse myself to have a long phone call. Was this healthy or fair? Probably not, but there isn’t a handbook for how to deal with the wake left by such a toxic person. Plus, I carried an incredible amount of guilt over the fact that if it hadn’t been for me, Sam would have never met Cathy in the first place. I felt crushed by the responsibility.

Unfortunately, around the same time, I got sick. I developed Fibromyalgia shortly after the birth of my daughter and I had surgery to remove a softball-sized tumor from my neck and spine. My husband quit his job to care for our kids and myself. The fact that we were both at home all the time looked to most people like we were living in some kind of trouble-free paradise, so when Sam’s house flooded––he hadn’t realized his new rental was in a notorious floodplain––some of our other friends called on us to help move his things and to adopt his four cats.

“We can’t break them up,” one friend explained to me on the phone. “They were littermates and they need to stay together.”

At the time, I had three cats of my own. “I can’t afford to have seven cats. Not even temporarily.”

I was seen as unreasonable and uncaring for putting my foot down and stating that I would not take on four additional animals while I recuperated from surgery, struggled with an undiagnosed illness, and took care of a new baby, all while my husband was out of a job and I was the sole earner for the household.

We were also unwilling to help move him. Again, this was seen as unreasonable because Sam and Cathy had helped us move from our Grand Rapids apartment and into our house. But I’d already said that after having helped Sam and Cathy move from a house to an apartment to another house to Sam’s house, we were done. Even without my physical issues, I refused to engage in the near-constant game of musical rentals Sam had become mired in.

At least, he had a place to go. He’d begun dating a woman who owned her own house and had no issue with him moving into her spare room since her roommate had just moved out. I questioned the wisdom of this arrangement. The woman, we’ll call her Anna, had severe Cathy tendencies of her own, fuelled by the alcoholism that was enabled and encouraged by her own circle of friends. I hadn’t met her, and Sam asked if he could bring her to dinner at our house.

“She’s really, really allergic to cats. She’ll die from even a little bit of cat hair,” he explained.

I looked around at my three cats. “Maybe this isn’t the place to bring her, then?”

“No, it’ll be fine. Just clean up and vacuum the furniture.” Sam had begun to sound a little more like Cathy every day. But I wanted to stay friends and help him through his tough time, so I scoured the house and eliminated any bit of cat hair, closed my cats off in a room, badly burned my hand making a huge dinner, and waited for Sam and Anne. They came separately, with Sam arriving before Anne.

“I don’t get it. She was right behind me,” he said. He called her and found that she’d taken a wrong turn, despite never having to turn off the state highway to get to my house in the first place. Sam explained, “She’s really bad at directions.”

But it wasn’t the directions that had been the problem. Anne turned up reeking of alcohol. She’d gotten lost because she’d been driving drunk, and she’d brought an unopened 750ml bottle of Sailor Jerry rum with her, as well.

Sam passed it off as her being “buzzed.”

With my burned hand wrapped in gauze, we sat down to dinner, just Sam, Anne, my husband, and I. Anne barely ate anything, but she drank the entire bottle of rum in under twenty minutes, after which she ran to the bathroom to vomit. She came out and belligerently blamed it on my subpar cooking. She wanted to leave. Sam drove her back in her car, thank god.

When I tried to talk to Sam about Anne’s drinking and driving, he justified it by saying she did it all the time and had never had an accident or any trouble. I suggested that getting so drunk she’d gotten lost while following him was an instance in which she did have trouble, but he wouldn’t budge. He used the old “safer driving drunk than sober” excuse and I realized any further discussion on the subject would be fruitless.

Sam’s relationship with Anne didn’t last very long but he did continue to live with her. In the meantime, he had casual sex with some of our platonic friends, which was a thing that just happened and nobody really found weird; we’re all pretty sexually free people and before I was in a monogamous relationship with my husband, I’d had a lot of casual sex, myself. Never with Sam, though I was beginning to feel that he saw it as only a matter of time, even though I was married. I’d begun to grow uncomfortable with remarks he made about our female friends, but again, my guilt at having introduced him to Cathy forced those feelings aside. I had ruined his life, I reasoned. I had to stick it out and try to fix it.

While still living with Anne, Sam met a beautiful, funny artist who I am still friends with and very fond of to this day, and whom I will refer to as Becky because it’s a name that doesn’t fit her in any way and will protect her identity. She was everything Anne was not. Namely, sober and invested in Sam’s well-being. She encouraged him to draw, a passion that he’d had to somewhat abandon during his relationship with Cathy, as she’d dismissed his endeavors as pointless. He and Becky shared a sketchbook, passing it back and forth between them in funny art challenges.

But he kept having sex with Anne.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked when he admitted this to me. “Becky doesn’t deserve this. Anne is a mess. You need to move out and cut ties. And you need to be honest with Becky.”

I can’t remember if he ever told Becky that he’d been cheating on her, but he did move out, into a house with no roommates. Things seemed to be getting on the right track, but Becky realized that the relationship would be far more work than she was willing to invest. After trying several times to make things work, they broke up.

This set the stage for a parade of girlfriends that lasted a few weeks each at most. With each one came the expectation that I would become close friends, as close as I had been with Cathy. But I knew they weren’t going to last and frankly, I became very rude when faced with them. He brought one along to my house without warning me he was bringing anyone, then launched into a sales pitch for her. I cut him off and addressed her directly. “I’m sorry, but I have enough friends right now and I’m not looking for more.”

As expected, two weeks after they’d begun dating, Sam told me they were “working on their relationship.”

“If you’re two weeks into a relationship and it’s already requiring serious work, it’s not going to be a successful relationship,” I warned him. I found myself passing out that warning a lot. Everyone in our social circle was tired of the routine, and we were tired of trying to spend time with Sam only to have him glued to his phone in long text conversations with whatever woman he was dating at the time.

Going to breakfast? Sam was going to spend it obsessively checking his phone.

Going to the movies? Sam would have to excuse himself several times to check his phone.

Having a party? Sam would definitely be there, but if his flavor of the week couldn’t attend, he’d spend the entire time sulking on your couch, phone in hand, texting like mad and ignoring everyone around him.

But we all understood that he was hurting. We tried to ride out this self-destructive phase and offer support. For me, the fatigue of listening to his constant romantic woes was starting to outweigh the guilt I’d felt over introducing him to Cathy. It was clear that what he was looking for was an instant leap back into the level of intimacy he’d had in his marriage.

For a moment, it seemed like he would get better. He started a podcast and had success booking some fairly well-known comedians. He moved into a smaller apartment so he could afford the recording equipment and investment of his time. He went back to school.

Then he met Cathy Two.

“I met the most amazing woman online,” he told me. She lived in Seattle. She had a huge apartment downtown and an incredibly successful white-collar career. They shared many of the same interests and were already talking about a cross-country visit.

There was just one problem: Cathy Two was married. She was separated from her husband and in the process of getting a divorce, but they still lived together.

“How long have you been talking to her online?” I asked, expecting to hear that they’d known each other for weeks, or maybe longer. I wanted to think she was the reason he’d made so many positive changes.

“We met on a message board this last weekend and we talked on the phone last night for five hours,” he gushed. “We’re in love.”

The end of our friendship moved very fast from that point. Once again, he tried to force interaction between Cathy Two and I, only relenting when I accepted her Facebook friend request. He went to Seattle for three days to meet her. When he returned, he informed me that he was moving there to live with her.

I exploded. All my frustration at his recent bad choices poured out of me. I realized I was no longer supporting a friend through a difficult time but enabling someone who was making incredibly destructive decisions and I’d had enough.

“This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” I told him. “You want to break into comics or acting! If you want to make a big change, move to L.A. or New York. Not Seattle. Not to live with a woman who isn’t divorced yet and who you’ve only known for a couple of weeks!”

Then I hung up. Instantly, I started receiving Facebook message notifications.

A lot of them.

It was Cathy Two, scolding me for being a bad friend and hurting Sam’s feelings. I was trying to hold him back. I was jealous. I wanted him for myself. I’d never been a good friend to her (we’d never met in person and had never spoken, even to comment on Facebook statuses in the week since I’d friended her). I was unhappy in my marriage so I was trying to sabotage their relationship. She wouldn’t let me take Sam from her. Message after message, growing more and more frantic and threatening, at such a rate that the sound effect for the notification couldn’t keep up. It stuttered and interrupted itself until my computer crashed.

By the end of her tirade, she’d sent me over a hundred messages. In an hour.

I finally managed to get my computer to work long enough to block her. Then I called Sam, absolutely furious.

“She loves me and she’s trying to protect me. What you said was very hurtful.” His tone was incredibly cold.

“You’re really going to throw away fifteen years of friendship because I’m the only person who’s willing to tell you the truth?” I demanded. And in that moment, I realized that it didn’t matter anymore. He didn’t matter to me anymore. The person who was once my friend had become a one-sided obligation, wanting everyone around him to give him endless sympathy for the problems he continued to create for himself. And everyone was giving him that validation that he craved. We were no longer friends and hadn’t been for a long time. I’d just been a crutch.

A couple of weeks after that fight, one of our mutual friends tried to persuade me to patch things up with Sam. “I know that chick kind of Swim Fanned you, but he’s not even with her anymore.”

I was shocked, as you can imagine.

After our friend-breakup, I started hearing from some of his recent exes. One of them told me that Sam had made comments about how I would “eventually” have sex with him. Another said he referred to two of our mutual friends whom he’d slept with as his “mattresses”. This was a side of Sam that I probably had seen but simply hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. I’d been so caught up in blaming myself for bringing Cathy into everyone’s lives, I’d been making excuses for the cheating and the terrible, almost deliberately destructive choices he’d been making.

I closed the door on our friendship and never looked back.

Recently, someone told me that he’s gotten remarried to a woman who is great for him. He is healthier, mentally and emotionally. His life has completely turned around.

“That’s great,” I said. “I still don’t want to be friends with him.”

A few weeks after I started writing the series on Cathy, Sam sent me a message through my public Facebook. All it said was, “I miss you. I’m sorry.”

That’s great. If you’re reading this, Sam, I still don’t want to be friends. “I miss you. I’m sorry,” is not an apology. It’s saying that you want back into my life because of negative emotions you feel. You want to be rid of those negative emotions and absolved of your guilt. I don’t owe that to you by rekindling a friendship that became toxic and untenable. If you recognize and regret the behavior you displayed toward me and the other women in your life at that point, I’m glad. You should. Hopefully, you’ve corrected those attitudes.

I’m not angry at you. I’m sad that a person I considered a friend only considered me useful in his life until I acted the way a friend should act by cautioning you away from a bad choice. I’m sad that our friendship ended the way it did and that I brought Cathy into your life. I will forever be sorry for that, for the physical and mental abuse you endured from her. But you apparently spent most of our friendship seeing me as a sexual goal despite knowing I was happily married and despite the fact that my husband considered you a trusted friend. You degraded other women, ones who had trusted you enough to have sexual encounters and relationships with you. That means I can never trust you again, no matter how much you may have changed.

I still don’t want to be friends. Please, never contact me again and don’t come here to read my page. I found your timing creepy and invasive.

A note to my readers: I will forever be grateful to the friends I made through Cathy, the support we were able to show each other, and the friendships we have now. That chapter is thankfully behind us.

I wish I didn’t care about whatever Cathy is doing now, how she’s undoubtedly hurting other people. I heard through the grapevine that she’s had more children. Hopefully, she leaves them before they’re old enough to remember her, so they don’t experience the trauma her first son did. But I’ve learned a hard lesson through all of this: I can’t save the world from toxic people. Cathy is still out there. She’s probably still destroying lives. And there are millions of other Cathys doing the same thing.

I hope that next time, I’ll be able to recognize the signs. And I hope this story might help some of you recognize them, too.

I watched Faleena Hopkins’s scary video. All 1 hour and 39 minutes of it.

Hey everybody! I will be MIA from the cyberbullying and mob of haters for a few days because I’m going to beautiful Mackinac Island tomorrow and I’m not coming back until Friday. But I’ll leave you this tweet. Follow it for a very long thread recapping the bizarre and infuriating video Faleena Hopkins made on Facebook Live in the middle of the night.

Highlights:

We’re mad because we’re jealous of her fame and success
Bring on the hate. She can take it.
But she has to have someone else read the mean comments so she can protect herself
She isn’t hurting the authors she’s sent takedown notices to, their readers are hurting them by attacking her
Also, you can’t attack her because in doing so you’re calling autistic people stupid
Oh, and she’s a descendant of a slave so you really can’t attack her
(But apparently, most of the authors she’s targeted with takedowns are black)
Authors whose books have been removed or retitled are pretending to be victims for attention
“You know who you are.”

The first tweet in the thread is below, go check it out if your morbid curiosity leads you there.

 

Because there’s never been a cringefest I could walk away from, and because I’ve got some friends here and on FB who’ve been blocked by #ByeFaleena and can’t see her video, I’m gonna grab some coffee, watch, and live tweet. I am unsettled.

—

Don’t Do This, Ever: Faleena Hopkins Cocks The Whole Entire Fuck Up

Have you ever noticed how a lot of erotic romance novels have similar titles? For example, Fifty Shades of Grey spawned titles like 12 Shades Of Desire, and after the publication of Beautiful Bastard and Manwhore a ton of books came out with increasingly profane titles? For the last couple of years, the word “cocky” has been popping up on romance novel covers. A lot of them.

Author Faleena Hopkins certainly likes to use the word in her book titles. See, Hopkins knows the importance of a brand, as she discusses in her blog post about being the first self-published author to ever photograph her own cover models (she is definitely not). Other authors were copying her on purpose. By…using stock photos that she had coincidentally also used:

My readers were starting to get upset when they saw the Cocker Family on other authors’ covers and/or advertising. I began getting messages. My readers posted on Facebook, on my Fan page, my personal page, and in my group.

“Isn’t this Gabriel? Why is he on this author’s ad? Is that legal?!”



“Look at this! They’ve got Jaxson on their book, same photo. Who do they think they are?” 

I told them about the licensing, because most readers don’t know about the biz.

But their instincts that some – not all, but some – of these authors were copying me on purpose, were founded in truth.

Anyone who reads erotic romance can look at a stock photo and tell you exactly which twelve books it’s on. There are some very popular stock guys out there. For example:

Blond Guy With An Untied Tie Around His Neck Unbuttoning His Shirt
Guy With Head Down, Face Obscured By Shadow, Wearing An Open Hoodie With Nothing But Abs Underneath
Guy In A Suit Facing Windows, Definitely Not Inspired By The Fifty Shades Of Grey Movie Poster
White Guy In White Tank Top Biting His Thumb And Pulling Up His Shirt To Reveal His Abs
Headless Tuxedo Man And His Headless Pink Dress Girlfriend

and many, many more. But Hopkins knows everyone is copying her, despite the fact that very few authors or readers had ever actually heard of her and despite the fact that her allegedly original and striking covers are indistinguishable from hundreds of other erotic romance novels that predate hers.

But Hopkins decide that she needed to protect her brand. Since her Cocker Brothers series all have titles that start with “Cocky,” the next obvious step was to actually trademark the word “cocky.”

Because no one in their right mind would think, “I need to monitor all the notices and postings about potential trademarks in case someone tries to pull some shady bullshit and trademark a common adjective used on erotic romance novel titles,” no one had enough notice to challenge it. She now owns the word “cocky” and it’s no longer usable in any romance novel title.

The issue came to light when authors suddenly received copyright violation notices from Amazon and Audible informing them the word “cocky” was trademarked and therefore could not be used in their titles. Now that she owns “cocky,” she’s dead set on forcing everyone to remove the word from their book titles…even if they were published prior to her own series or prior to the application date of her trademark.

On social media, everyone weighed in on whether or not the trademark is enforceable or if she can retroactively enforce the trademark for books that predate her application. But I don’t believe it was ever Hopkins’s intent to actually enforce the trademark. She knows for a fact that threats work because authors have already changed their covers and titles out of fear of a lengthy and expensive legal battle. And she’s not shy about openly threatening the work, promotion, and royalties of other authors:

Before I end this blog post, Faleena, I have some words for you that are original, not copied from anyone, and straight from the heart:

You are a nasty piece of fucking work, lady.

Nobody was ever copying you. Nobody knows who you are. The most common reaction seen on social media when your name started coming up was, “Who?” followed by “Who does she think she is?” We had to ask these things because we legitimately had no clue you existed. But boy howdy, do you exist now. See, you’re not famous, but you’re infamous. You probably thought all publicity was good publicity. That is not the case if the publicity you’re getting is just making people become more and more furious and fed up with you. I haven’t seen anyone say they planned to read your really interesting and unique books as a result of your Highlander mentality. I’ve seen a lot say the opposite.

You have burned a bridge the size of the Mighty Mac, Faleena. Not just burned. You blew a bridge up, but you didn’t quite get off it in time and you’ve blasted yourself into the ravine below. No one is going to invite you to their signings. No one is going to include you in their anthologies. If you have the courage to show your face at an industry event, you’re going to find yourself sitting alone at the bar. You might get a drink thrown in your face, soap opera style. I hope someone gets a photo.

Professional organizations will likely not allow you to join. Traditional publishers aren’t going to waste their time on your books now that you’ve shown your entire ass. You have poisoned yourself with your own bile.

I know you said in that blog post:

We indies work in the grit and grime of the biz, so we see more than an author who is protected by a big publishing house, one that does all that grit/grime work for them.

But I wouldn’t trade positions with a trade-pub author.

I have never submitted to a publisher, nor do I want to. Even when judgmental friends or people in the industry assume that if you self-pub, you must have been rejected.

Um…how about if you never sought approval in the first place, dinosaurs?

Readers are an Indies only judges. If they don’t like our books, they don’t buy them. And they happily leave one-star reviews telling you what a pile of horse manure it is.

Give me that over, “Please sir, will you publish my manuscript?” any day of the week.

but no, sweetie. You’re not indie because you’re above it all. You’re indie because you’re too insecure to try. You’re afraid that you’ll be rejected. You’re afraid you can’t hack it when compared to other authors. And that’s why you’re trying to sabotage them. Because you’re afraid that you’re not good enough to succeed on your own merit.

You’re not, by the way. I picked up one of your books. Congrats on being the third overall Kindle return I’ve ever made. Jesus, you’re not even good enough to be first at that. How embarrassing for you.

So, you think if other authors can’t afford to publish, if they can’t promote their books, if you hit them where it hurts, you’ll be the only one out there. You think you’ll get their readers. You won’t. And you won’t ever receive support from anyone in the community. Ever. You’re pretty much universally hated, so…there’s the door. Bye-bye. You can’t sit with us.

PS: your “cocky” series debuted a year after Vi Keeland and Penelope Ward’s Cocky Bastard became a huge hit. So, who’s copying who, you busted ass bitch?

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 17 The Lovers, or “Shot through the heart/and you’re to blame/darlin’ you give love a bad name”

Wherein Lani Sarem explains how her fraud job was all just a big misunderstanding. Oh, and also everyone in YA is a big meanie and the New York Times caved to their whims. They would have like, totally let the book stay there if not for those meddling kids!

Maybe you’re looking for some Twilight––I mean, Handbook For Mortals––merchandise:

 

When Twilight is your only source of ideas for merch and marketing pic.twitter.com/F2I9Tsdd3M

— Jeannette Editor (@Polar_Bear_Edit) May 1, 2018

We left off with Zit just moments from death in her bedroom back home. Now, let’s journey together through a long-ass story that her mom chooses to tell rather than saving her life.

Dela began to tell Mac the story of how my parents met and how I came into existence.

Okay, let’s just skip over that second part, Dela. We don’t need to hear that, and certainly not through the filter of your daughter.

As I scanned through Mac’s recollection of her telling him the story, I was reminded that my mother can be a magical storyteller, weaving the words of any story into a beautiful tapestry so vivid you’d swear you were watching a motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

Wait a minute. You don’t have to actually write well? You can just tell the reader that your words are really good? What the fuck have I been wasting my time on, then, trying to write decent books with sentences that make sense and aren’t super repetitive? Why have I been laboring tirelessly to improve my craft with each new book, when I could have just told the reader flat out what a great writer I am?

A smile spread across her face and both Mac (who had no idea where the story would go) and Charles (who had lived it with her) both leaned forward to hang on her every word.

They’re so entranced by her cinematic storytelling that they no longer care that the clock is ticking on saving Zumba’s life, apparently.

It was 1977.

Remember the last recap, when you guys were talking in the comments about how weird it was that her parents met in the seventies but she would have had to have been born in the mid-nineties to be in her twenties now? Well, I tried to find some information about the author, namely, her age. Because we know that Zard is Lani, has always been meant to be Lani, and that Lani even went so far as to cast herself in the lead role of Zuck in the film version, I saw 1977 and got suspicious. It was surprisingly difficult to find an age for her listed anywhere, but a modeling profile puts her at thirty-six. No birthdate listed. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that she lowballs her age publically and that she was born in 1978, based on the fact that she seems unable to separate herself from the character and as such can’t stand to alter the book’s timeline from her own. It probably never occurred to her that Zud couldn’t be in her twenties in the book if her parents got down together in the seventies, because that would be when she was conceived and she is Zarck.

The setting now is a traveling circus, complete with that g-word slur.

In one of the smallest tents sat a gorgeous, young girl who was wearing a beautiful long skirt of vibrant colors that rippled as it fell toward the ground, her brown sandals peeking through past the hem of her skirt. One leg crossed over the other, she was swinging her foot slowly. Her off-white cotton top had slipped off her left shoulder and the front was open just enough to show a little bit of cleavage.

Remember also during the last recap, when you guys were discussing in the comments that Lani not only has to be Zanadon’t, but also Hey There Delilah? You were bang-on with that. Now that Zagnut isn’t there to be the center of attention, the mother has to become Sarem’s avatar, as evidenced by the fact that aside from Zalt And Lepper, no other characters receive this level of detail when they’re described. For example, the first appearance of Charles in this flashback reads like this:

Her long hair fell in front of her face and blew slightly when the tent flap opened and in walked a young and very handsome man.

Young and very handsome. Charles is arguably an equally important character in the scene, but he gets two adjectives in comparison to the paragraph Dela got describing her clothes, shoes, posture, and cleavage.

Dela, just eighteen at the time, didn’t even bother to look up.

If Dela is eighteen in 1977, that makes her fifty-nine in the present, meaning that for Lindt Zuffles to be twenty-five, Dela and Charles would have to have been in their mid- and late thirties when they had their ill-advised young love. We know how old Charles is now, too:

Twenty-year-old Charles […]

Making Charles sixty-one…

Now, you’ll notice that Copperfield’s birthdate is 1956, meaning that in 1977, he would have been twenty-one. So obviously, Copperfield and Spopperfield are two different, distinct persons. Don’t worry, that’ll get taken care of later. Right now, I want to focus on this, just a few paragraphs down:

Dela still hadn’t looked up, while the boy who was known as Charles […]

He’s twenty! He’s a twenty-year-old man. He’s not a boy! There is such gross, gross age stuff going on in this book, in terms of language.

Anyway, in all of that, Dela asks Charles why he’s there, and he’s like, you’re a psychic, you should know why I’m here, which has to be like, the most annoying joke to a psychic.

Though she still hadn’t looked up, Dela knew that he was tall and handsome, with tick and wavy dark brown hair, his piercing blue eyes glancing around the room.

Dela is telling this story, so it’s default in Dela’s POV. If she didn’t see him glancing around the room, she can’t tell us that he’s glancing around the room. Full stop.

This whole time, Dela is laying cards out on a table and reading them, but we never learn what she’s reading about, just that she’s flipping over cards. She tells Charles that she doesn’t see something if she’s not trying to, and he asks her what she means by that.

Dela finally looked up and made a huffing noise, exasperated; she shot him a look while scrunching her nose. He found the annoyed Dela to be very cute somehow and thought she looked utterly adorable when she scrunched her nose. He had noticed how stunningly beautiful she was the first time he had met her but they hadn’t exactly hit it off then.

Again, Dela is telling this story. Which means she’s telling Mac and Charles what Charles is thinking inside his head. She’s also describing at length how attractive she is. Not only is that weird, it’s just plain not possible from her POV, especially since she’s already told Charles that she can’t see things she’s not looking for. So, unless Dela is using her psychic powers to find out if Charles thinks she’s cute, she can’t tell us any of this.

We find out that Dela thinks Charles is pretentious and she refers to him as a “so-called celebrity,” which makes me wonder why he’s working at a circus if he’s already famous. But whatever.

Charles––even at that young age––was not used to girls who didn’t immediately fall all over themselves in front of him. He didn’t know how to deal with a girl who didn’t care. He also didn’t believe in what she did and he didn’t understand how she could take herself seriously.

So, Charles sounds like a real winner, huh? POV skew aside, I’m sure this is meant to show us what a pig Charles used to be, so we can see how much he’s changed now. And by “so we can see,” I mean, “so the author can tell us” because so far, he’s still treating women like worthless objects. All of his behavior toward Sofiaeoeouuuu is going to be either justified by some bad action on her part or we’re going to be expected to just pretend we didn’t read about it.

Charles was so busy thinking about how he might charm her that he almost didn’t pay attention to her response––which would have annoyed her more (which he would have found also cute and therefore might have been a win-win for him either way).

Whose POV are we in? Are we in Charles’s POV, or Dela’s, since she’s telling the story? Of course, we’re in neither. We’re in Zwiss Chard’s omniscient POV because god forbid she not be the focus of even her parents’ meet-cute.

Dela tells him that being a psychic is like being in a house and looking out the window to see what’s outside. If she could see everything all the time, she would be overloaded and go insane.

Charles tells Dela to focus on him and tell him why he’s there. The reason he’s there, as revealed by our omniscient narrator, is that he’s trying to figure out how Dela manages to trick people into believing that she’s psychic. She makes a crack about how she’s being tested by him, but agrees to read his cards, anyway. And to prove that Dela really is mystical and powerful and majikkahlly delicious, we get this:

Dela couldn’t help but notice that, when he sat, he loooked exhausted. He almost melted into the chair. Across the table from him, Dela also noticed the deep, almost black looking circles that were under his pretty blue eyes, and she could see that his skin looked dehydrated and showed some redness––all signs of a lack of sleep.

Leaving aside for the moment that his pretty blue eyes and dark circles are across the table from him, Dela: Psychic Dermatologist is doing what we in the business call a “cold reading.” A cold reading is something fraud psychics do; they pick something obvious and ask leading questions like, oh, I don’t know…

“Are you sick?” she asked without looking up.

and, when Charles says he doesn’t think he’s sick:

“Having trouble sleeping?”

If you want to see an example of a cold reading, check out any John Edwards video on YouTube. He’s one of the worst, most obvious cold reading frauds because he sets himself up as a medium communicating with the dead, so he’s already got people who are highly emotional and willing to believe they’re actually communicating with their loved ones because they want to believe. He’ll say something like, “Someone passed away in a car accident,” and a person in the audience will obviously know someone who died in a car accident, because, duh, car accidents are common. Or, he’ll say, “I’m getting a message from someone, starts with a J…starts with a J…I’m getting a Jessica or a Jennifer,” which are both incredibly common names. When he manages to get someone to answer, he continues to ask questions like, “Was there a lot of tension in the family following her passing?”, that will obviously apply to literally any death. Maybe the person in the audience who knows Jessica is wearing a breast cancer awareness pin. “Did Jessica pass away from breast cancer?” Yes, how amazing that he picked up on that detail! People then pour out more and more information so that he can narrow his specific answers. Yes, they know a Jessica. Yes, there was a lot of tension in the family following her passing because her brother decided to turn off her life support and some of the other family members disagreed with that decision. They’ll tell John that detail about the life support, then he’ll ask a question about it phrased in such a way that confirmation bias will convince the grieving person that he supplied those details. I’ve never been able to figure out how people fell for him because he’s just so super clumsy and obvious.

Anyway, that’s what Dela is doing in this passage. She’s looking at Charles, taking in details about his physical appearance and presenting them as though she’s getting the information psychically. In other words, it’s possible that the author of this book is such a con artist herself, she can’t write an honest character.

Charles isn’t falling for it:

That could be a good guess, he thought. I have deep circles under my eyes and I look sleepy. Not impressed yet.

Me neither.

Want more evidence that Dela cold reads?

“You’re having nightmares.” This time she didn’t ask but told him; she was pleased that she could get some information about him so clearly and quickly. She knew that each time she read for someone new the person could turn out to be an “easy read” or a hard one.

I mean. If that doesn’t sound sketch…

Well, that’s a very logical reason for not being able to sleep, so I’m still not impressed.

But don’t worry, dear readers. Dela is the real deal.

After a few moments, with her eyes still tightly shut, she reached out and grabbed Charles’s hand. She gripped it hard and both of them felt the jolt of energy.

If she’s able to just touch someone and tell their fortune that way, why does she need the cards?

Dela tells Charles specifically what his nightmares are about: getting shot in the chest.

Charles’s eyes got big, and he shook his head a little in disbelief. He ran his fingers through his soft and silky hair and his eyes shifted away from hers.

Does anybody really stop to think about how soft and silky their hair is when they’re disturbed by an uncanny experience? Or is this Zambot telling us about her dad’s hair and how soft and silky it is? Not knowing whose POV we’re in, either Charles is super vain or Zuul is telling us about her hot dad.

Charles tells Dela that she’s hit the nail on the head. But he calls her Dely, and you know how the author of this book feels about mispronouncing names.

“Don’t call me, Dely. You know I hate that. I don’t serve sandwiches,” she snapped at him.

Why does he call her Dely in the first place? It’s not like it’s a shorter version of Dela. It’s exactly the same number of letters and syllables. It’s like Sofia’s nickname being Sofie. It doesn’t make any sense.

Charles tells her that she should give away free sandwiches with every reading to increase sales, which they both find very funny.

She couldn’t help but notice how amazing his smile was and how handsome he was––not handsome, actually, but stunningly gorgeous as she watched his amazing beautiful blue eyes light up. He’s funny, too, apparently, she realized.

Good for her, because I’ve yet to realize it, myself. Will there be proof of his hilarity at some point?

One good thing about this chapter is that Sarem doesn’t go into detail about the cards in the spread, so I don’t have to bore you all with a half-hour long video ranting about shitty tarot. All we’ve gotten at this point in the reading is that she’s shuffled the cards and laid down “three more” after we’re told she’s “stacking them in sets of three.” So, it looks like it’s another “just turn over cards until they say something you want them to say” scenario. Like I said, at least she doesn’t go into detail. Charles just looks at the “colorful” pictures on the cards and the “subtle details that seem to point to hidden meanings.” He asks her how she got all that stuff about his nightmare from pictures.

“I’m both clairvoyant and clairaudient. ‘Clairoyant’ you may have heard of. It means you can see things like they’re happening on a TV show. ‘Clairaudient’ means you can hear it just like when you listen to he radio. The cards are tools, but I can see and hear things too. I saw your nightmare just like you do.”

Clairvoyant doesn’t mean you can see things absolutely clearly like they’re being acted out in front of you. For some people, yes, that’s the case. For others, it’s just snippets of mental images or even just persistent thoughts of a certain number or symbol. One of my second cousins is clairvoyant and she knew that her husband had died because she had a vision of leaves and knew exactly what that vision was showing her. Clairvoyance is rarely like how it’s portrayed in the movies. Clairaudience is usually described as hearing the voices of the dead or spirit guides inside your head. I personally feel clairaudience is the most common form of psychic ability. Almost everyone I know (who doesn’t think all psychics are delusional frauds) has had a clairaudient experience. But what both of these things are? Not like they’re being described in the book.

Dela asks Charles if he wants to know what the dream is about, and he’s like, yeah, duh, obviously.

“Shuffle the cards then,” she said as she leaned foward. In her hand she was holding a well-worn deck; he could tell she had been using it for quite a while.

Now, here’s an example of how to not sprinkle your description in. Charles has already looked at all of these cards closely to the point of examining small details. Now, he’s noticing that the deck is worn? That’s a macro detail. The hidden symbols in the illustrations are a micro detail. Don’t describe micro details before macro details unless there’s a good reason, i.e., Wil Graham noticing a missing cat that nobody’s brought up yet.

Dela hadn’t asked Charles to shuffle the deck before, but she has reasons for him to do it now:

“I was just looking at the present. That’s the easy part. I need to look at the past and future now. If you put your energy into the cards it will be much easier. They don’t bite, I promise. I may, but they don’t.” She knew how to be witty as well.

Did she, though?

Charles laughed a little at her joke and, being a twenty-one-year-old guy, he was instantly intrigued to find out if she really did bite.

Screeching brakes. He was twenty earlier in this scene. How long does Dela take to do a reading? And remember when I told you not to worry about Charles not being David Copperfield because it would be corrected later? There you go.

Dela could tell he was nervous, but she didnt know that it was both because he was not completely convinced the cards wouldn’t bite––and he was also still wondering if she might.

The first rule of comedy is: if you find a joke that makes only you laugh, repeat it over and over until it’s even less funny than it was the first time.

“Clear your mind and do your best to keep it clear for the next few minutes. Try not to focus on any one thing or let your mind wander if you can,” Dela instructed him.

Charles was starting to believe her, but he wasn’t sure how to fake not wearing the vest while actually wearing the vest.

If you can figure out how to fake sawing someone in half or cutting them into three sections in a cabinet or floating them in the friggin air, you can figure out how to disguise a bulletproof vest. Or, I don’t know, make it part of the act, like Penn and Teller do. Either way, there’s nothing stopping her from just shooting you in the face. Maybe pick a plan that doesn’t involve allowing your stalker to aim and fire a gun at you.

Dela basically has the same reaction I did, which was, okay, well, don’t wear it and die. Then an old woman comes in for her psychic appointment, Charles kisses Dela’s hand––which of course he’s a friggin hand kisser, why wouldn’t he be?––and leaves and the chapter ends.

STATE OF THE TROUT: Where I’ve been, you’re doing fine, and BABY MAKES THREE cover reveal!

Hey there, everybody! You might have noticed that I didn’t post anything last week.

That’s because I was dying.

Okay, not dying. I’m still alive (though I don’t believe anything so insignificant as death would ever stop me from blogging), but a really horrible plague hit our house. Fever, chills, cough, chest congestion, sore throat, earache and the drainage. My god, the drainage. All of this happened while I was trying desperately to finish the latest Ian and Penny books. Once I got those off to my editor, I allowed myself to take some much needed time off and just lay around eating popsicles and soup like a kid recovering from tonsilitis.

Anyway, I’m recovered and hopefully will remain so for a while. Fingers crossed. But while I was gripped by the miserableness, I had some thoughts about my fiction writing and how basically awful I’ve been to myself over it lately. I talked about this on Twitter but I think it’s important enough to share here, too.

My last release, The Sister, came out in August of 2017. I planned to release Baby Makes Three in February of 2018 at the very latest. But I only just now handed it off to my editor. Since January, I have been so brutal in my interior criticism of myself. I started writing Baby Makes Three in September, for god’s sake! Now, Baby Makes Three won’t come out until May? That’s eight months! Eight months between releases! How can I possibly sustain a living that way? We’re going to be poor again! We’re going to be on food stamps again! I should just stop writing and get a real job since I’m obviously no good at this one!

Obviously, this constant litany of self-hatred wasn’t conducive to my creativity. I would go days without writing. At one point, it took me a month to finish a chapter. After I got over the mid-book slump, though, things started to pick up. By the time I sent the book off to be edited, I realized I’d been way, way too hard on myself. During the writing of these books, the following things were going on:

The school year started.
My daughter was in a play, requiring me to sit through nightly rehearsals.
I ended up working on props for that play.
The holidays happened.
I worked tech for another play.
My daughter was involved in another play, herself.
My mother-in-law died, leaving us to clean out her apartment and take care of her estate.
And the whole time, I’ve been homeschooling my son.

Now, granted, I didn’t have to do the theater stuff I did, but we know what happens when writers are all work and no play. There’s a whole horror novel about that. On top of all of those things, I neglected to remember that:

I wasn’t just writing one book. I was writing two at the same time.
I was working on this blog daily.
Both books turned out longer than I expected, by about 15,000 words.

So, while I was freaking out about not working enough, not getting anything done, I was really writing about 15,000 words per week here and doing things for my mental health so that I could continue to function. On top of that, I was writing basically 160,000 words of fiction in eight months. That’s four months per book. I was doing just fine.

If you’re writing and you’re frustrated by how little you feel you’re getting done or how long it’s taking you to finish, I want you to drop what you’re doing and take stock of your life and what’s going on. Are things at work stressful? Are you putting in a lot of extra hours or coming home mentally sapped? Are you reeling from the loss of a loved one or a major upheaval in your home? Did a pet die? Did you or someone else lose a job? Maybe you’ve taken up a new hobby and it’s taking up time you would have spent on writing (which is not necessarily a bad thing, if it’s keeping you on an even keel)?

No matter what it is, stop being hateful to yourself. I love these books, but it’s always going to be tempered with a little bit of sadness that the writing of it was so brutally un-fun. I shouldn’t have done that to myself, and I’m going to try not to do that in the future. I hope you can join me in that. Let’s make a pact right now: we’re not going to be awful to ourselves for not being mindless writing machines with no other needs or desires in life.

So, after all of that, do you want to see the cover of Baby Makes Three? Of course, you do!

Baby Makes Three will be out in May. I’m not sure about a date yet but I’ll have more information as we get closer to the release. Thanks, everybody who continues to go on a journey with these characters!

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Part Ten) “It’s All Right Here Waiting For Me”

This is the penultimate post in this series because I’ll follow up on what happened in my friendship with Sam after all of these events took place. If you’ve missed out on the story so far, here are parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine.

There are mentions of rape in this installment.

Cathy being out of our lives was like a fifty-pound lead vest being taken off all of our shoulders. She remained in touch through phone calls, which I took out of a sort of morbid curiosity. She’d moved in with her MySpace boyfriend, Wallace, in Colorado and they’d made all sorts of plans. He would take her on ski weekends with his family, she wouldn’t have to work because he made plenty of money, and she could devote all of her time to her poetry, which he printed in his zine. I asked what he did for a living, that he could afford to support her, and she was cagey about it, finally admitting that he got disability benefits supplemented under the table by generous cash support from his wealthy mother.

As her calls became more infrequent, Cathy’s story about what was happening in Colorado was more difficult to follow. Though she was still dating Wallace, she’d moved out of his apartment and in with some of his friends. She was also suddenly in need of a job. I began to suspect that Mother Wallace had been unwilling to subsidize Cathy’s writing career. There were no more ecstatic boasts of luxury ski trips to be taken, either. Sometime later, she informed me that she’d applied for a job as a nanny. One of the requirements was that she must be fluent in Spanish, as the family did not speak English in the home.

“…you don’t speak Spanish,” I reminded her.

She laughed. “I know, but I took two years of college-level French. It’s basically the same thing. They’re not going to notice.”

Not surprisingly, she did not get the job.

Her next try at employment was working at a rape crisis call center. Allegedly, she was counseling people over the phone. I physically recoiled at that; I’d heard Cathy complain more than once about how ridiculous it was that so many of our friends had been raped and she hadn’t. “I don’t believe her. I’m prettier than her and I’ve never been raped,” she’d said of one acquaintance. She was the absolute last person anyone should have encountered when they called a rape crisis line.

Shortly after she began to work there, she called me and told me that Sam had repeatedly raped her during their marriage. Every boast she’d made about loving to be choked during sex, loving all of the kinky things she’d bragged about had just been a cover for when I’d asked questions about her bruises and the handprints around her throat. I had never once seen a bruise or a handprint. I’d never asked her anything that would have led to her zealous sharing of details I’d never wanted to hear about their sex life in the first place. But no matter how horrible she might have been to all of us in the past, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “You’re lying.” Because I didn’t know. Because it sounded plausible to me, not that Sam would rape someone, but that if someone was being abused like that, they might frame it as a consensual kink to survive. I was absolutely shocked to hear this about Sam. I questioned everything about their divorce and Cathy’s leaving. Had I been unsupportive of a truly good friend going through something terrible, something that had made her behavior understandably erratic?

Then she went on to say, “Yeah, I was doing my training for this job and I was reading about rape trauma syndrome and I kept seeing all of these symptoms that applied to me. Then I realized, I have rape trauma syndrome. I kept trying to think of who could have raped me, and I decided it was Sam.”

Those words gave me instant doubt, and I hated myself for it. I wasn’t supposed to doubt women who had been raped. Only bad people did that, right?

She went on to tell me an incredibly vivid, detailed story of one of the many times he raped her. It was horrific. It was brutal.

The story of the rape was true. It had happened.

But it never happened to Cathy.

Everything, from the very specific events leading up to the rape to the things “Sam” had allegedly screamed at her and the weapon “he’d” used, right down to the exact phrases she’d used to describe the incident, were taken from a story that had been told by another friend in confidence as part of a healing ritual in our Pagan group. Someone had shared their incredibly harrowing personal story of sexual violence at the hands of a former partner, had done so as an attempt at spiritual healing and cleansing, and now Cathy had parroted it back to me as her own experience, as though I wouldn’t remember or would just go along with it.

I immediately called the friend whose story had been stolen and told her what had happened. She was furious at the betrayal of her trust. She’d been one of the people who’d taken Cathy in after Cristin and I had turned our backs on her. Now, this friend had found that one of the most painful times in her life had not only been shared as Cathy’s story but that Cathy had also written about it on MySpace and was currently soaking up sympathy and attention from her new Colorado circle. I’m not sure if the friend ever followed through on reporting Cathy to the rape crisis hotline she worked for, but within a week, she no longer worked there.

When I told Sam about the things Cathy had been accusing him of, he just shrugged. His shoulders sagged. “What am I going to do about it?” He just didn’t have any fight left when it came to Cathy.

One thing he did stand firm on was that he would not ship her remaining clothing to her if she didn’t send him a money order, first. She complained to me that she couldn’t trust him to not just keep the money if she sent it and that she would be more comfortable if he shipped it first and let her pay him back later. Luckily, Sam wouldn’t back down. Unfortunately, this meant that Cathy––and Wallace––would come back to Michigan to pick up her things. She called Sam and told him when they would be arriving by Greyhound, asked for a ride from the bus station to their hotel, and of course, that he drop off her boxes. I volunteered to save him from having to see her again.

“We should all get together and go for dinner,” Cathy suggested, and by all, she meant me, Cristin, and the woman whose rape story she’d stolen. All three of us were totally in, again, out of morbid curiosity. We wanted to see if Cathy would be able to look our friend in the eye after such indefensible actions. We wanted to know who this mysterious Wallace was. Our lives had become a soap opera and we had a sick desire to see how it played out.

With Cathy’s things in tow, I met her and Wallace at the bus station. Cathy hugged me like we were great friends who’d parted on good terms. Like she’d never threatened to kill me. She threw her arms open and did a little spin in the bus station parking lot. “When I left, Kalamazoo completely stopped existing. But I come back and it’s all right here waiting for me.”

Because none of us, our lives, our families, the physical places where we lived and worked every single day, not of it existed without Cathy’s presence. Cathy saw herself as the force that animated the world.

As I drove her to the hotel, she described “the most racist thing I’ve ever seen.” At the bus station in St. Louis, police had taken aside and searched only black passengers before they boarded the bus.

“It was awful,” she said, shaking her head.

“Did you speak up?” I asked. “Did you say anything about it?”

She pressed her hand to her chest, as though she had been personally traumatized by the racism of those police. “No. But for the first time in my life, I thought, thank God I’m not black. I mean, that could have been me. If I had been born black, that would have happened to me.”

“You’re in your thirties, and this was the first time you noticed that it’s easier to be white than black?” I asked.

Very quietly, she said, “I think you’re being very racist toward me right now.”

It was going to be a long evening.

Wallace was overall a very quiet guy. We dropped off Cathy’s things at the hotel and I drove us over to a local pizza place to meet with Cristin and the friend whose story Cathy had stolen. There was a plan in place: I would get a phone call halfway through dinner that would require me to leave, so I couldn’t drive them back to the hotel. When that happened, the other friend would volunteer. This would give her privacy to call out Cathy about using such a painful personal memory for her own gain.

While we ate, we learned enough about Wallace to finally make sense of what was actually going on in Colorado, versus what Cathy had told us. Wallace was on disability because of a closed head injury sustained in a skiing accident a few years back. The ensuing brain damage had left him able to live on his own, but not hold down a job. When Cathy had moved in with him, his mother (“the bitch”) stopped giving him money and refused to give him anymore unless he broke things off with Cathy and never spoke to her again. Occasionally, Wallace would say something that didn’t quite fit with the conversation we were having and Cathy would be quick to shush him or laugh loudly and tell us he was joking. She talked incessantly about how intelligent he was, in a way that was incredibly patronizing because Wallace was intelligent. He just had some brain damage. It became clear very quickly that Cathy had seen Wallace as a source of income and had no trouble exploiting him, but was embarrassed to be seen with him due to his disability. It was no wonder that his mother had cut him off in an attempt to get him away from Cathy.

True to his word, my husband called me halfway through the dinner. “Oh, shoot. His car broke down and I have to go. It was good seeing you guys,” I said, and left as fast as I could.

The next day, while waiting for my son’s preschool to get out, I went to the coffee shop down the street. I was working and eating a bagel when the door opened. In walked Cathy and Wallace. I considered abandoning my food and making a run for the other door, but she spotted me right away.

“Oh my god, what are you doing here?” she squealed, sitting across the table from me.

“This is where I come while I wait for [my son] to get out of school,” I reminded her.

“Oh right.” She laughed. “I forgot you had a kid.”

She’d forgotten. I had. A child.

I checked the clock. Luckily, I only had about twenty minutes before I had to leave, but oh, what a twenty minutes it was. She and Wallace launched into breathless praise for a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and medium who’d channeled the ghost of a time traveler to write a book explaining that the attacks were planned and carried out by aliens with the full support of “lizard people” who had infiltrated our government. I sat open-mouthed as they explained all of this to me. Both of them were fully invested, but I couldn’t help argue a few points with them. For example, their insistence that “only alien technology would be capable of melting those steel beams,” which I refuted with the simple fact that normal, terrestrial heat capabilities had been used to manufacture those beams in the first place. But the discussion grew tiring, so I finally asked, “So…if this ghost was a time traveler…why didn’t he time travel back and warn us the attacks were going to happen?”

They had no answer.

They also had no coffee. The barista told them they’d have to buy something or leave, and Cathy looked down sadly. “We don’t have any money left.”

They were meant to be in the city for several days. They had a hotel room. I had no idea how they planned to pay for it or where their next meal was coming from. They’d clearly arrived believing that Cathy’s “friends” would foot the bill for the pleasure of their company.

I said, “That’s a shame.”

“Could you maybe give us a ride back to the hotel?” Cathy asked. “It’s like, pouring rain out and we don’t have bus fare to get back.”

I pretended to feel sorry. “Ugh, I would, but I have to go pick up [my son]. But have a safe trip back to Colorado.”

The last time I ever saw Cathy, she was walking with Wallace, head down in the rain as I drove away from the coffee shop. I was so relieved, I cried. Please, just never, never let her come back, I prayed.

A few weeks later, my wish was granted, as per gossip from someone who had stayed in touch with her. Though her parental rights to her son had been terminated, she still owed unpaid child support payments from the previous custody agreement. Her federal income tax refund was seized as a result, so she made a furious call to Martin’s father, demanding that he return the money he’d “stolen.” She insisted that since she didn’t have a job, she was no longer responsible for the previous balance owed. The State Of Michigan disagreed and issued a bench warrant for her arrest, which I personally believe will effectively prevent her from ever returning to the state.

The last I heard of her was a couple of years later, from someone who followed her on Facebook and thought I’d find the news funny: she’d remarried, had another child and was pregnant with a second. But I don’t find it funny at all. Shortly after she’d moved to Colorado, she’d joined several online support groups for parents whose children had died, I assume in an attempt to convince her new Colorado friends that she wasn’t a bad mother, but a grieving one. At the time, I’d just rolled my eyes, glad that she couldn’t hurt her son anymore now that she’d passed him off as dead to everyone in her new life. But now, she has a new family to eventually abandon. New children to chase after her, sobbing as she runs off to “find herself.”

And that’s what people like Cathy do. They destroy and move on. It’s the people left behind who have to deal with the aftermath. I’d like to say that after ten years, the damage has healed. But my friendship with Sam was ultimately destroyed due to the upheaval she caused in his life. I still sometimes doubt my own mind when dealing with new people. I constantly look for signs that someone might “be a Cathy.” That will probably never go away.

I once brought Cathy up to a therapist, to ask her if she thought the years of constant gaslighting might still have a lingering effect (duh). She told me something I’ll never forget: it’s not just romantic relationships that can be abusive. Friendships can, too.

But still, to this day, I feel guilty that I cut Cathy off. I feel guilty that I left her in the rain. I feel guilty that I called Martin’s father. And the reason I feel all of this is because that’s exactly what Cathy wants me to feel.

Next time: Epilogue or “What happened to Sam?”

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 16, Justice or “Girlfriend in a coma/I know it’s serious”

March went out like a failure:

Le Rêve is not a Cirque Du Soleil production. It’s a competing franchise bankrolled entirely by…the Wynn Hotel and Casino, where the magic show in Handbook is set.

You’d think that someone who researched the setting of their book and worked for Cirque would have known that.

We begin this chapter still in Lani’s omniscient 1/3 POV. That’s what I’m calling it. 1/3. Because it’s first and third but only makes 1/3 a cup of sense.

As does the realism of the medical nonsense:

After some paperwork and arranging for medical supplies, an ambulance from the hopsital to the airport, and then a ride on a private jet around dawn, the three of us (though I was still unconscious) arrived in Woodbury.

In the hours between the end of the show and dawn the next day, a man with no proof of paternity has been able to remove his still-hemorrhaging adult daughter from a hospital against medical advice, secure a transport willing to help him, and convert a private jet into an air ambulance.

Okay.

My mom had brought her SUV to meet us at the airport, which is actually just one runway and a tiny office, She decided that the fewer people involved in getting me to her house, in the state I was in, the better.

Oh my god. They just propped her up in the SUV, bleeding. Imagine if they got pulled over and they had to Weekend At Bernie’s her with blood flying everywhere.

Zump describes her mom for us, stating that she’s not a soccer mom despite her SUV. Just in case previous descriptions of her mother, the weird-ass tarot reading, spell casting town outcast, conjured the perfect picture of suburbia. They get Lunk put safely away in her room, where she will be ignored for pretty much the entire chapter.

Mac looked around at the photos, which were mainly of my mom and me. She looked almost the same in every photo, she barely aged; it was how old I was in each framed picture that gave you any real insight as to how long ago the photo had been taken.

I can’t believe I’m sporking two books in a row where we don’t know if the main character is immortal or not. That should be an answered question in literally any book that refers to non-magical humans as “mortals.”

After Mom had taken as much care of me as possible, she returned to the guys and wasted no time getting to what she wanted to know. After all, there was no time really for preliminaries, anyway.

Please keep that passage in mind.

Dela asks if Mac “knows”:

“That I’m her father? He does.” Amid the memories I dug out, I got the feeling that Charles always had a knack for knowing what Dela meant, even though she was the one who could actually read minds. He was pretty sure he knew what she was referrring to when she asked that “he knows?” question, even though there were several other things she could have been talking about.

“Editors Note: How does Charles know what she means? She could be asking if Mac knew about magic. Can Charles read minds like Dela can? Need specifics here.” I 100% guarantee that is how we got that paragraph.

Charles is apparently only ever nervous around Dela:

The thoughts I found in his memories were jumbled, but that anxiety seemed to stem from everything: from how magical and powerful she was, to how madly in love with her he still was, to my condition, and even to just the bold presence my mother possesses.

So, Charles is still in love with Dela. So you can be sure that this will be slowly teased out over several chapters with meaningful romantic tension and a satisfying conclusion.

Dela says something about Charles finally admitting that Lint is his daughter, and he’s like, well, that’s your fault. This is something Dela would have normally gotten angry about, but she doesn’t.

Maybe she realized, as he was standing there––and just seeing how upset he was and how much he cared about me––all the things she robbed us both of by not letting us spend time together. She was aware how hard it was for me to go through childhood without a father and now maybe she was finally seeing that it hadn’t been easy on him, either.

As the child of a single mother who blamed her mom for that every day, I recognize how this got in here. I’m sure it was even cathartic to write, in a wish-fulfillment sense. But it’s bullshit. Dela is majihk, sure, but she’s still just a small town psychic. She doesn’t have the money to fight a famous millionaire’s neverending supply of legal representation in a custody battle that could eke out over eighteen years. Charles is a fucking deadbeat. If he wanted to see his daughter, he could have lawyered up and he didn’t.

For one small moment, they gazed into each other’s eyes before quickly turning away.

Oh, look! There’s that romantic tension I told you about. Get ready for the slow burn!

Mac goes in to sit with Zart. So, you’d think this would be the scene where we see Mac come to terms with his feelings for her, and maybe she’ll see all the love he feels for her when she pulls those memories. There you go with your expectations again. Of course, there’s no developing of the romance between Largo and her love interest. Oh no. No, no. She’s far more interested in the scorching erotic heat between her…parents.

As she gazed at him, she coudln’t help but notice how handsome he still was regardless of the fact that he was almost twenty years older than he had been the last time she had seen him in person. He had some gray hairs now and a few wrinkles on his face but underneath that was the handsome boy she had met so long ago. His eyes still twinkled despite his current pain and sadness.

Is it just me, or is it weird that Linda has mentioned Charles’s twinkling eyes in every scene he’s in and now it’s one of the things her mom finds attractive about him?

I’m starting to think this book is all about how Lugnut wants to fuck her dad.

Charles tells Dela that basically, she’s the only person who could possibly save Zink:

“Hopefully I can. She’s pretty far gone right now, but she seems to be hanging on. That’s a good sign.” My mother tried to sound as hopeful as she possible. It had been a long almost-twenty-four hours for everyone.

First of all, Dela, if your daughter is “pretty far gone” and there isn’t “any time for preliminaries,” what is happening with you standing there making conversation with your ex? This is not how you build a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency would have had Dela’s SUV screeching onto the tarmac, her jumping out and throwing the keys at someone, hopping in back with her daughter and starting her magic work right god damn now. At the very least, they should have rushed her into the house and started the ritual immediately. We would have understood that this is serious and Zib’s life is in danger. What the author has forgotten here is that just because the character survives to narrate the story to us, that doesn’t mean the characters within the story know that’s what’s going to happen. Their disregard for any sense of urgency while continually describing the urgency of the situation is classic tell vs. show, and makes it seem like they really don’t care if the main character lives or dies.

Like the rest of us.

It’s nice to have a time stamp, too. It’s been “almost” twenty-four hours. How long did it take the jet to fly to Tennessee? I’m going to guesstimate this one. To give them the maximum time I can possibly allow for their air ambulance shenanigans, I generously put her accident at 9:00 PM, despite the fact that the show would have really gotten out much later. Then they flew out at dawn. Again, for maximum generosity for the paperwork and ambulance and outfitting the plane, let’s say sunrise was at 8:00 AM. Commercial flights from Las Vegas to Nashville (the closest actual existing airport to Woodbury, where the fictional airport is) seem to be about three hours total time in the air, but a private jet is going to be faster because, well, jets just are faster. Now it’s been almost twenty-four hours. We can only account for about nine hours, total, less than that if we use more realistic estimates for sunrise and show times (and that nine hours had to include imaging, treatment, and probably exploratory surgery to look for the bleed, also incredibly unrealistic). If everything is so urgent…what happened during the other twelve or thirteen hours?

But that’s not important. What’s important is that Charles called Dela “Dely,” a nickname he gave her because apparently “Dela” isn’t short enough. And when a new name is introduced, you know what happens:

It sounds like “Deli,” as in sandwiches, which I guess Charles would claim was a joke about his two favorite things: my mother and submarine sandwiches.

Not Sofia? His long-time, live-in girlfriend and former star of his show? She doesn’t rate above sandwiches? Also, thanks, Lani Sarem, for assuming that your readers are so intellectually beneath you that you need to explain what a fucking deli is. At least I know it’s not a proper noun.

Charles and Sandwich have a conversation about how fantastic Lani––sorry, Zade––is, with her fiery, headstrong temper and traffic-stopping beauty, and the conversation is…creepy.

“She’s as beautiful as her mother, as well.” Charles couldn’t help but say things like that to my mother.

“No, Charlie.” It was a soft no, cushioned by a past filled with affection.

GASP! She called him Charlie! Sofia the evil skank isn’t allowed to do that even during intercourse! THIS IS TRUE LOVE.

Charles responded quickly. “But, Dely, our daughter has become a beautiful young woman.”

But that isn’t what Sandwich is talking about. She tells Charles to stop trying to charm her:

“[…] It’s not going to work this time, Charlie.”

This scene has John and Marcia Syndrome. The characters constantly say each other’s names, a la the credits sequence from The Parent Trap. If you’ve never seen it, here’s a link to when “John…Marcia” starts. Please also take a moment to appreciate that this is kind of a racy movie for its time. A kid’s movie about divorce in 1961? The implication that the dad is boning a lady on weekend camping trips? But at least the kids in that movie didn’t spontaneously hemorrhage to get their parents back together.

Anyway, back to the John and Marcia Syndrome. Writing Tip: The next time you have a conversation with someone, keep track of how often you say each others’ names. Does it sound like this:

John: “Hey, Marcia, did you pick up the dry cleaning?”

Marcia: “No, I didn’t. They were closed.”

John: “Crap. I needed my shirt for Friday. Do you think you can swing by when you get off work?”

Marcia: “Yeah, just text me so I remember.”

Or does it sound like this:

John: “Hey, Marcia, did you pick up the dry cleaning?”

Marcia: “No, John, I didn’t. They were closed.”

John: “Crap. I needed my shirt for Friday, Marcia. Do you think you can swing by when you get off work?”

Marcia: “Yeah, John, just text me so I remember.”

There are two people in this conversation. There’s no reason for them to repeatedly establish who is being addressed.

My mother is very strong willed and when she says no to something it takes quite a lot to get her to change her mind, if she will change her mind at all.

So, Sandwich is not going to get back together with Spavid Chopperfield and that is settled. Settled.

“I still love you, Dela.” He had been in the same room with my mom for no more than an hour and Charles was already confessing that he was still in love with her.

Uh, yeah. We know. We can read it right there. But again, thanks for assuming we’re all so much dumber than you, Lani. Also, he’s been there for less than an hour? So…twenty-four hours? Are we sticking to that? Because it doesn’t even sound like twelve.

So, there’s this other weird thing that happens throughout this section that is, shocker, completely inconsistent with the formatting in the rest of the book. For some reason, even though this is being told from Lancet’s POV, random chunks are italicized:

I had seen it when I was growing up, too. She had always been a head turner for sure and beyond that you couldn’t deny she was just one of those woman that men just can’t can’t resist falling for. Beyond the physical she turns their souls, too, I guess.

This passage isn’t any different from the bit about her mother being very strong-willed above. It’s not a thought, it’s a part of the narrative. There’s no reason at all for this to be italicized. It happens a few times in the chapter.

So, anyway, Sandwich gets upset and goes into the kitchen to cry on the floor, and we get more of Sarem thinking we’re a hundred I.Q. points below her:

The moment the swinging door had completely stopped swishing back and forth, my mom became completely overwhelmed and melted into the floor. She stood leaning against the wall for a moment before sliding down to the floor and beginning to cry.

“See, when I say melting into the floor, I don’t mean literally. What I’m saying is that she slid down the wall to sit on the floor. I know you wouldn’t get that, so I explained it to you because I think you have the intelligence of a bucket of nails.”

The wave of feelings rushed over her like the wave of an ocean would: strong, fierce, and completely engulfing.

“I know that you’ve probably never heard of waves before. It’s a thing water does, especially if you’re doing chaos majjjjjik in a Vegas show, which I know all about because I’m an Actual Vegas Performer. Waves happen in the ocean a lot. The ocean is a very large body of water. You know what water is, right?”

Charles comes in and sees Sandwich on the floor and comforts her with an embrace:

Time means nothing to those who share such a strong bond, it was remarkable to me to see––even through the window of memories––how they actually were in person, and the love that instantly flowed between the two of them despite how long they had been apart.

The strong bond that made him abandon his child without a fight and made her forbid that child from ever seeing him, anyway? There better be a real good god damn explanation about why that was necessary.

Amongst the tears, in almost a whisper, she returned his hug and softly stated, “I love you, too.”

When I was very small, one of my favorite things to do was take my Strawberry Shortcake figures and line them up in rows on the desk in my bedroom. I could do it for hours. But the desk was a little wobbly and positioned right in front of the window, and we had a big dog that liked to jump up and peek in. So, I would have just gotten all of the figures set up in their rows and invariably the dog would pick that moment to jump up and startle me. My knees would hit the underside of the wobbly desk and all the little figures would fall down.

Charles and Dela’s entire romantic conflict being resolved a couple pages after it was first introduced is the literary equivalent of lining up your Strawberry Shortcakes and immediately knocking them over by accident.

Charles had his own irresistible charm and they both had an undeniable draw to each other.

These are your parents.

Mac returns and asks them to explain what’s going on with Zark. He asks Dela what she can do that a doctor can’t.

“More than you’re capable of imagining, young man.” Her eyes glimmered and a small smile crept out upon her lips.

Your daughter is dying, but sure. Draw out the suspense with your cryptic nonsense.

So, as Sandwich has insisted over and over, time is of the essence if they’re going to save Leda’s life.

“Perhaps I should start by explaining to you exactly how Charles and I met. It will have to be the quick version for now as we have a lot to do here.”

Alternately, you could just say, “I know how to do majgikh,” and then, you know. Save your daughter’s life.

If you must.

I guess I’m cool either way.

Now, let’s get ready for INSTANT REPLAY, the game where nobody noticed that characters repeat their actions!

Dela smiled and offered Mac one of the chairs at the dining set in the kitchen.

Mac looked around for a second and then cautiously sat down, […]

And then, in the very next paragraph:

He pulled out a chair from the table in the kitchen and slid slowly into the seat before scoothing the chair really close to the table, his eyes focused on Dela.

And I’m not entirely sure why she thought she had to specify that Mac is sitting in a chair in the kitchen. The scene is taking place in the kitchen. The setting has been established four times already. If she’d just written, “Mac sat,” the reader isn’t going to assume he’s sitting in the living room or the tire store down the street.

Lorf notices that there’s a chair left open.

That would have been where I would have sat, had I been concious, which somehow made me sad.

Again, needless italics. If this were an interior thought, it should have looked like:

That would have been where I would have sat, had I been conscious. Somehow, that made me sad.

The quality of the writing and formatting is declining with each new chapter, which to me signifies that at this point, Sarem got tired of revising or her editors got tired of making suggestions they knew she was going to ignore and just started sticking, “LOVE THIS :D” in randomly to get their paycheck.

“Charles and I were both part of a touring show in the ’70s. I was barely eighteen, and Charlie was almost twenty-one. He was working as a magician, and he was so arrogant; I couldn’t stand him.”

Again, Sandwich Jr. is dying and time is of the essence.

My mother babbled a little, thinking about when Charles was young. The thought of how handsom he had been back then made her crack a smile, until he interrupted.

Did I mention that her daughter is dying? And now Sandwich is thinking about how hot the ex she cut her child off from is?

“And she was just a silly card reader,” Charles interjected. He grinned devilishly, knowing how much Dela would bristle at those words. They apparently still knew how to get under each other’s skin.

I just…you guys. This woman denied this man the right to see his own child, and he apparently didn’t care enough to do anything about it. They can still get under each other’s skin? They should loathe each other. You don’t do shit like that unless there are real, very serious problems. They shouldn’t be acting like old friends. None of this makes sense.

The chapter ends with Sandwich saying:

“Anyway…as I was saying…”

which sets us up for the next chapter, in which Sarem writes out her parents’ love story in flashback to force the title of the chapter to fit the theme.

True Blood Tuesday S06E01, “Who Are You, Really?”

This one is something else! You can find the file here. Hit play after the HBO sound and logo fade.

A Statement On Recent Twitter Activity

Because Twitter has locked my account for encouraging self-harm, I have to make this statement here. The “self-harm” I encouraged was telling an abusive person to “breathe water” after he suggested I “stop breathing.” Why would I do such a thing?

Last night, I said some inflammatory but true things about the NRA. I said they were a terrorist organization responsible for every single mass shooting in the United States.

You heard me. True. That is a true statement.

After a few hundred responses calling me a fat cunt and advising me to die, I tweeted that we should melt down all the guns in the country and drown all NRA members and Trump supporters in the vat of molten metal.

Those who follow me on social media know that this is very on-brand.

I also stated that I didn’t care if Trump voters and NRA members lived or died. This is only a partially true statement, as I was directly addressing the people who were sending abusive tweets. But alt-right troll Jack Probesiec isolated that tweet and broadcast it to his hundreds of thousands of followers. Including other alt-right trolls including Curt Schlitter, Ian Miles Cheong, Joe Walsh, and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch’s husband, whose name I can’t remember because he’s not as important as his wife. There were others with large followings, as well, who decried my “death threat” tweet.

Because to these fools, not caring deeply about their lives and their right to own as many shooty-go-bang-bangs as they can stockpile in their arsenal is a direct death threat. And they responded with:

Various comments about my weight, mental health, sexual orientation, and religion/culture because several of them were convinced that I’m Jewish
GIFs and photos of fat people they find to be abhorrent and grotesque
Remarks about “Arabs,” “Muslims,” “immigrants,” “jihad,” “Asians,” “Koreans,” and “gang bangers”
Comparisons of African-Americans to chimpanzees
Allegations that I’m fatherless…which is true but not really my fault unless you lack critical thinking skills
Detailed fantasies about how they’ll watch me or my children being raped and do nothing
Pity for my “cuck” husband, who is forced to be with me
Various fish-related insults that probably felt very clever at the time
Demands that I come to their house and try to take their guns, that I meet them in person, and one person even posted their own home address
My home address, former name, the names of some of my relatives and even the place of my husband’s employment

Some of them were, ironically, mocking my “large hands”. Considering it’s coming from the Trump crowd, who defend him and his bigly, bigly yuge hands all the time, this seems like a weird criticism. Also weird? The guy who tried to roast me by saying that I can’t give my dad an erection.

How widespread is this? Well, according to Twitter analytics, in the months of March, February, and January I averaged around four million “impressions” per month.

I’ve also averaged four million “impressions” this month. Which is…four days old.

At one point last night, I had blocked 200 people, only to scroll up and find 809 notifications waiting for me.

Not all of the tweets were abusive. A lot of people are “sad” for me. Or they’re praying for me and hoping Christ will come into my heart and tell me to put down the donuts. Many of them were simply telling me how much they don’t care about my opinion. Thousands of people don’t care so much that they had to flood my Twitter mentions, message me on Facebook, find any public Facebook post I’ve ever made, and track down my husband to make sure that we all know they do not care.

And gosh. All of this has just worn me down, right to the ground. And I want to apologize. Because I’m very, very sorry.

I’m sorry so many of you were in the Armed Forces. You should not have been representing our country abroad. I do not thank you for your service, despite the several of you that demanded I do so.

I’m sorry that you feel the best way to communicate your ideas is through sloppy memes of Hillary Clinton.

I’m sorry that one of you has an Abraham Lincoln parody account but can’t appreciate the irony in using it to defend guns.

I’m sorry that so many of you don’t have mirrors in your homes and don’t understand that a fat person calling another fat person fat isn’t the devastating insult you think it is.

I’m sorry that your mom’s abortion didn’t take.

I’m sorry that so many conservative women have figured out how to bleach their hair with drugstore products, but don’t know how to follow it up with toner or conditioner.

I’m sorry that MAGAs uniformly don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re,” and it’s unfortunate that they mix those up while calling people ignorant, idiots, stupid, and uneducated.

But most of all, I’m sorry that you think that because I said I don’t care about you or your right to own your toys, I should be afraid of you. I am not afraid of you. I will never be afraid of you. Because if you need to own sixty guns, you’re a coward. If you need to assert how tough and manly and violent you are, you’re afraid. Because your fear bleeds through every one of your pathetic, uninspired, unimaginative words. You call for civil war, violent revolution, rising up, and then the moment there’s a mass shooting, you move fast to avoid being blamed for it. You’re pretty shitty terrorists if you won’t own these attacks. Even Al-Qaeda took credit for shit they didn’t do.

So, do what you’re going to do. You’re already contacting Amazon (who will obviously be very eager to help Trump supporters right now, I’m sure they’ll get right on that), companies who published my books a decade ago and with whom I’ve burned my own bridges, thanks, people I work with (who are fully aware of who I am and what I represent), and whatever other institution you think is going to come along and spank me for being mean to you about your boomsticks.

You don’t matter. You’ll never matter. You know you don’t matter. And that’s why you need a controversial object in your home to reassure you that somehow, someday, you might be able to prove your worth in a fantasy home invasion or public shoot-out. Continue stockpiling all your unnecessary accessories to make your Great Value rifles look like the video game version of a useful tactical weapon. Because at the end of the day, no matter how you threaten, no matter what you lob at me, I still walk away without the blood of murdered children on my hands.

You can’t say the same for yourself.