Oh damn it, is it time for an unscheduled trainwreck? YES

I should remember that because I have a reputation for humor and sarcasm, I need to start some entries with "I'm totally not joking" and possibly even end on it. The problem with this theory is, I'd inevitably corrupt the sentence and strip it of meaning by using it around a sarcastic post.

Never mind, the point it, I'm really, really just about done here. I'm coming up on the end of my contract with my ISP, but I'll pay for the storage for another year, and I'll re-up the domain name. But I'm going to wander away from the online world from now on and go back to talking to myself. And, if I'm being honest, I think y'all have just about convinced me to give up writing for good. Special thanks go out to Jerrod Balzer, Michele Lee, and Gef Fox for pushing me to consider quitting more seriously.

Five years I been at this, and my wrists are sore. I've worked long into every night. I JUST bought Dragon Naturally Speaking, not for the voice recognition, but for the text to speech editor, so I could fix more typos. And for a while, y'all won't notice that I'm done if all you look at is releases. That's because I'm dropping stuff I've already written, after editing it so it doesn't read like shit. I'm going to try to finish Ginger's story, and Peter's. I'm going to try and write another few books for myself. But I don't guess there's much point to writing more Mystical World Wars books if everyone is going to keep asking me "Where's the good guys?" I told you, I DON'T DO heroes. I don't believe in them, and that's not how I write. And yet every time I turn around, my books and characters are judged based on a checklist of what heroes should do.

When I give you a character who was sexually abused, who moved rapidly from one foster home to the next without any sense of stability, and who spent a year in juvenile detention; I ask you, where is that character supposed to have picked up ANY good moral habits? It's unrealistic to expect that he would have learned them on his own, so when you read Peter's introduction and STILL say, "Well gee, despite what the main character says I'm STILL expecting this to be a happy story about redemption," you're deluded.

And I don't care if that word is divisive, or if this whole screed makes me look bitter as Harlan Ellison the day after he's lost a frivolous lawsuit. What you're asking for from my story, given the circumstances, is deluded. Say it out loud: "But I think a person cursed as a werewolf who was sexually abused by his parents should still behave better than this." And if you nod and think that's a logical statement, here's your sign. It says Deluded. Because you are.

Let's talk about people saying, "Why didn't any of the adults see the warning signs?" in Peter the Wolf. Jean saw the signs early, just days after Peter moved in, and he asked Peter his intentions. At the time Peter could still honestly say that he was trying to avoid Alice. Almost TWO YEARS LATER, but only two months after Peter and Alice's relationship had changed to become more intimate, David noticed and found out that they'd made out, and he made Peter confess to Jean and Beth, and he also made Peter visit a shrink, Dr. Vasquez. Alice's parents forbid Alice from seeing Peter, and she sneaks around to see him anyway. So when she got caught by David, she was escorted home and grounded AGAIN. (Because she was grounded for six months for seeing Peter the first time. So much for "the parents did nothing.") Then if these examples of the adults noticing and doing their jobs aren't enough, the night that Peter and Alice almost kiss in front of the gymnastics team, Alice's uncle John visits Peter's hotel room and asks if they've had sex before, and he is extremely relieved to know nothing has happened yet. Then when Alice tries to sneak into Peter's room only minutes later, Duncan, the team captain, and John bust her before she can carry through with her evening plans. Duncan forces Peter to leave the team to keep them apart, and both Peter and Alice's parents again insist that the two should stay away from each other.

In short, to ask, "How did anyone not see the warning signs?" is to completely ignore the actions of every single adult in the story who did and insert your own personal narrative about "what's really going on." Or put another way, you read my whole book and didn't see anything happening. And if that's how we're going to play, I don't want to play with you people.

I mean, I do, but I have no idea what game you're playing, or what the rules are. All I'm seeing is more flaming hoops and more people telling me "Just keep going!" No. No, I think I'm done with the flaming hoops. I've been burned for the last time by a reviewer who read my whole book and didn't see a damn thing of what went on in it. (And this is just the latest. The first time was with Blind Rage, where the reviewer said "Jobe losing his girlfriend doesn't warrant this level of depression," when the story said Jobe had been abandoned by his foster child, and her brother was MURDERED because Jobe wasn't strong enough to save the kids. Oops, guess she missed reading that whole…paragraph? Page? How much was she skimming the intro to come up with this blatant misinterpretation? Doesn't matter, because the latest reviewer looked like they skimmed the whole book by comparison.)

I don't buy this bullshit idea that it's a lack of cultural sensitivity that makes it harder for some people to understand the perspective I'm presenting. Because the only other reviewer to trash Peter's book knows exactly what it's like to be abused. But it appears she couldn't express any empathy for the abused main character because the book triggered her when Alice got molested. Instead of admitting that her personal history made her sensitive to the topic, she attacked the only two other reviews that were out for not talking more about the utter filth within. She attacked them for being positive, completely removing her ability to be objective. And after she dared other people to like the book, one of the first reviewers edited their review to say that in hindsight, the book made him ill. She didn't make an objective review. She attacked other people for liking the book, and she forced another writer to edit his review for fear of harming his reputation. She made her review personal, and her review led to a shit storm with my other friends.

After that, I got attacked as a pedophile, on Twitter and on a forum. People who had formerly claimed to be friends slammed me in their favorite haunt, and rather than bother with rebuttal I just gave up on them. I was told by the same person days later that I'm a sexual predator, even though I haven't even had sex in nearly a year because my hubby (who's fifteen years older than me) had a heart attack and can't get it up anymore. I've been hit on by a bunch of teen guys during the Summer and I always turned them down. I don't even look at women regardless of age because I'm trying to stay faithful to hubby's request that I locate a suitable trio partner. (I could find someone willing to play with me, but they usually balk at hubby's hirsute appearance.) I'm bordering on being sexually repressed at this point, but because I wrote a little girl getting molested and didn't murder the molester in fictionally acceptable homicide, my hypocritical friends in the horror world chose to abandon me and attack me as gutter trash.

I want to make this last point very clear. At EVERY turn that those people had problems, I sent a donation. Didn't matter who; didn't matter what the reason was. I gave everything I had, and when I could, I helped out writers by buying their books. Some of them, I can call myself a genuine fan of their stuff. But because those hypocritical motherfuckers don't like the direction my art is heading, they've decided to break me off as a sexual predator promoting sexual deviance. FOR THE CONTENTS OF ONE SCENE IN ONE BOOK. And one of those motherfuckers completely ignored my history of donations and behind the scenes help, and they declared that I had "abandoned my people." Did the community come to my defense and say, "Well wait, Zoe has done a lot to help others, and maybe what happened in this story isn't any worse than the rapes and murders we read about in our preferred genre all the time"?

No, the community walked away from me and said I was the one wrong for taking offense at a personal attack. The writers didn't abandon me because of anything I did in the real world. They left me for writing something more realistic than they were comfortable reading. Think about that. The people who read Jack Ketchum, Wrath James White, and Ray Garton bashed me for one fictional relationship that I wrote.

(And to be clear, I'm not saying these guys write badly, as in a lack of skill. They have mad skills. I'm saying, they wrote worse deeds. Ketchum even wrote a book, Girl Next Door, based on a real case of rape and murder of a teen girl. That's writing that all my reviewers dug into. But then they turned around and said they couldn't read my "filth." Hypocritical? Sure. Par for the course? Yes. Will it ever change? No.)

I've stewed a while over this, and over other writers telling me, "Well Zoe, maybe you shouldn't say anything at all." Oh right, I should let the guys who published a story with a father molesting his daughter turn around and call me a pedophile for writing a story with a similar scene? No, I don't fucking think so. And more to the point, I'm sick of being out in public, begging people to read my stuff, only to have them whine at me that I'm not doing this right. I'm sick of trying to court horror readers, because they haven't read anything from me. I'm tired of trying to reach any and all readers. Fantasy, sci-fi, weird, dark, whatever.

You people say over and over that what you want is "realistic writing" but you DON'T judge books that way. You judge them based on their ability to appeal to your personal vanities and ideals. You ask that characters speak in ways that NO REAL PERSON would ever use. If writers try to add in a few ums and ohs to approach realism, you bitch about "unrealistic dialogue."

And people, the characters you like in fiction and praise can't exist in the real world. Because they're not heroes. They're assholes who step on other people and project their fake moral values on everyone else in their story. It's not realistic writing. It's all delusion and vanities. I'm so sick to fucking death of seeing more books about heroes saving the world, or confronting "ancient, hungry evil." I wanted to write something really, really different, something that walks away from all of that insanity that passes for "realistic" mainstream fiction.

And every single story I put out before Peter, I felt was a diluted failure. (Note, I spelled diluted right, and I did not mean to say deluded again.) Even with Little Monsters, I watered the story down in each editing phase because with every beta reading I'd get at least one "it's obvious you developed this in a vacuum." (By the third time, I started taking pleasure in telling them "Actually you're in the latest round of beta testers, and before beta testing, this story had gone to an editor.") But because of those people, Jarred's character got watered down from being a predator similar to Peter to becoming a puppet used by other people. And while I still feel the story is complex and appropriately harsh for a tragedy, I think the central question of the story loses some of its power because of all the diluting. The question was, can a reader feel something for monsters when they experience a personal tragedy? But ironically, I don't think most people make it to the tragedy. Because even after diluting, I think most readers bail on Jarred somewhere around chapter 3, for "not making the right choice" with Linda.

With Peter's story, I felt excited that for once, I'd accomplished what I wanted without diluting my character to the point of weakening their main internal conflict. I'd eschewed hero and anti-hero to present a story about a monster. And Peter isn't just a kind of fantasy monster. He's a real monster, the one real life monster that sends people into a blind panic to get away from a word. But in addition to that curse, I gave Peter lycanthropy. I didn't follow the trend for wolf pack stories, and I opted to go with an older form of the werewolf legend. I went with an original idea that pushed comfort boundaries farther than similar examples of genre writing had tried. I worked to challenge readers, and I avoided stereotypes for everyone. EVERYONE. I busted my ass to show as much as I could through Peter's limited experience, but I felt that his attitude was the best for the story. Knowing himself as a monster, he couldn't judge anyone else because of his past. So he was willing to give everyone else a chance to tell their story. Which is ironic, because it appears Peter is more willing to give people a fair chance than real people are.

And, lest you think this is all about Peter, it isn't. I've released many, many fine books in 2009 and 2010 that got great reviews, and nobody cared. Here in 2010, it's all fire and forget. My first bizarro story? Ignored. My first example of literary fiction? Ignored. My first rhyming novella? Ignored. My first YA? Ignored. I walked away from the Mystical World Wars to give people something new, to see if maybe my lows sales and lack of reviews was just that the series was too big and intimidating. But nothing sold. Oh, with every Twitter pitch session, I'd find all kinds of people saying "Wow, that sounds great, I know I want to read that!" And if I had a sale for every person who ever said that, I wouldn't be in a state of near-constant depression and questioning my value as a human being.

It's always the same. And it doesn't really matter if I write something watered down or if I strip off all the filters and try to write as realistically as possible. It doesn't matter if I offer you a monster like Peter or a virgin like Monica. It doesn't matter if I write a straight character like David or a trans character like Sandy. Nothing I write is worthy of anyone's time.

And please, don't tell me "Just keep going." I said at the start, I've got sore wrists. But I've also got aching fingers, a sore back, an empty wallet (meaning I'm STILL spending more money in my hobby than I can ever hope to get back), near-constant depressions, and still nothing to show for it. No sales, no reviews, no nothing. And when I finally do get a review after two months of silence on all my new releases, I find myself wishing I had the money to fly to them, knock on the door, take out…a copy of my book and take them point-by-point through everything they missed in their "reading" of my story. But if I had the money to do that, I might have the money to hire a publicist. Or better yet, a saner trans actress to play me.

I digress, if you're going to ignore everything I say, even in my stories, then fuck it, I'm done. I will release more stories until there's nothing left in the queue, but I'm not asking for reviews. I'm not promoting reviews when they come in. I'll blog about whatever when I feel like it, but I'm not even going to bother announcing new releases here. Nobody cares anyway. So now, I don't care either. You win. I'm done. I quit.

I'm going to wander away from Twitter and only use it to keep in touch with friends in bursts, so I don't expect to have as many activist stories to share. I am sorry for that, because some of those stories are important and need more outlets. I'm also sorry for all the people I was RTing who won't have me acting as a free part-time pimp. But I am so, so done with asking people to misinterpret everything I do and judge me as a person because I didn't appease your need to be coddled through a story.