What gets me down
I finished editing my great work, as I call it, Children of the Crescent Moon, yesterday, and hit submit, then went straight onto the 2nd draft of the 2nd book in the series, Eyes of the Crescent Moon. That felt good. Other things did not.
I had to do a personal bio(graphy) for the submission and decided to include my 6 published works, a Choose Your Own Adventure, a short story, a poem, a short story within an anthology, a set of six short stories within an anthology, and a collection of my own works, the latter three being currently available, and it bothered me.
There, in my Facebook inbox, was a message from someone telling me that my cover page for Bob the Potato was no good, and going on for half a page about it. It was an old message, from when that lying person made all sorts of impossible cruel claims about me and encouraged 2,000 people to attack me. I should be laughing at how absurd the complaint was. After all, the reason I didn't have a proper cover page was because the person I had hired to do it, who I paid US $110 to do it, had failed to adhere to their job, doing so because of the lying claims made about me, which was why this person had contacted me to harass me. It was circular logic, but what can I say? Indeed, why am I bothering to respond to someone who harasses me like this because they were told to do it.
It made me think of the various hoaxes that make the rounds on the internet. The one about how if you put in your PIN number on the ATM in reverse then it will call the police. The one about how - well, I don't really need a list. They are everywhere, and stupid people fall for it. They aren't scams simply because they don't include money. It's the same kind of believable lies as the ones who do want money, though. The same people who convince you to give them your credit card number in order to stop you from having a virus - only there is no virus, and it's just an attempt to extort money. Perhaps they are not the same exact people that make the hoaxes, as obviously there is a line in the sand from laughing at someone to laughing and making money at someone, but it's a thin line. Certainly, if you can convince someone to believe that typing your PIN number in reverse can call the police, then you can probably convince them to give up their credit card number too.
Scammers tend to attack the same kind of people all the time. They have them in mind when they launch their attacks. They send out feelers to see if you are going to fall for it. If you respond correctly, then they probably won't bother you too much. I like to think that I respond correctly. Every time I get someone send me a message on Facebook asking me to donate to save starving children in Africa, I block them. Blocking scammers seems to me to be a good way to deal with it.
I have heard that some people go around wasting their time making fun of them, even trapping them, and I tried that myself too, but it just makes me angry. What kind of people would do such evil things?
And then I remember: the same kind of person that would write a lying blog post about someone to try to ruin their writing career.
They attack me because I am a good victim for them. It's not like this is the first such attack I've ever had. I had someone else, a year before this, write some nasty lies about me on his own writing group. In fact, I'm near certain that the two are related. That guy was doing it to cover up the fact that he routinely lies about people and is a gigantic bully. So a second gigantic bully lied about me to cover up his lies. Sighs.
He wasn't the first, though. I had a guy who was going around blackmailing celebrities who took a break from it to try to ruin my life, just for fun. There was no reason for it, and he gained no money out of it, he just liked the fact that I had a diagnosis of autism. And it was really hard to get rid of the lies too.
Encyclopaedia Dramatica, one of those lying places inhabited by trolls, created a page for me that was based on the lies told by the person who was blackmailing celebrities. I decided not to bother complaining about it. After all, people that go there know that they are full of lies. The more I complain, the worse it gets.
The only difference between the earlier efforts and this one is that this one is protected by Wordpress.com (or perhaps .org) who don't allow anyone to sue them without a US court order, a specific type of one that is difficult to get, and even harder if you live outside of USA. I did my sums and worked out that it wasn't worth it. They know that the blog post is defamatory. They know it is illegal. They just simply do not care.
It's the kind of thing that put me in a difficult position. For it to be worth it for me to sue them, I'd need for it to get a lot worse than it is now, and yet I don't want it to get worse.
The writing community is toxic, at least for me. Perhaps people attacked me just because I was worried that they would attack me, which is kind of like a red rag to a bull, or perhaps it is just that people like the abusive lying blogger are running things. After all, writing is about entertainment, and lying about people is entertaining.
One forum website, meant to be for writers, has "Learning About Thick Skin" as its first badge. That's code for "we encourage bullying", of course, which is precisely what they do. They not only told lies about me, but told lies about everyone else too, and told lies about me because I corrected some of the lies they told about everyone else. Yes, bullying for trying to stop their bullying. It's just not worth it.
Perhaps, if I looked through the community, I would find that they are just protective of their members, and my "behaviour" by challenging them about their lying and bullying of others, triggered something.
Yeah, nah, not likely.
If nothing else, life is a lesson, and I have come to learn that it's just not worth it to even respond to certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of responses.
So that person who wrote me half a page going on about a cover that I didn't have anything to do with, and then spent the other half of the page talking about how my story, which I wrote when I was 14, looked like it was written by someone who was 15, and how I should improve it, and I was left with my face in my palm.
There are things I could say, but that person would have to be pretty stupid to come up with such rubbish. Pretty gullible, I should say.
Probably the sort of person likely to fall for a scam to steal their credit card.
And perhaps I can take some solace in the thought that the people who abused me as a result of such an obviously false blog post about me are very stupid and are likely to get scammed by a credit card scammer.
The only problem is that I hate credit card scammers.
If only the world had true justice and it was actually fair.
At least my book is good. It's probably better if I hide myself in my books rather than put up with the idiots who lie about fellow authors.
I had to do a personal bio(graphy) for the submission and decided to include my 6 published works, a Choose Your Own Adventure, a short story, a poem, a short story within an anthology, a set of six short stories within an anthology, and a collection of my own works, the latter three being currently available, and it bothered me.
There, in my Facebook inbox, was a message from someone telling me that my cover page for Bob the Potato was no good, and going on for half a page about it. It was an old message, from when that lying person made all sorts of impossible cruel claims about me and encouraged 2,000 people to attack me. I should be laughing at how absurd the complaint was. After all, the reason I didn't have a proper cover page was because the person I had hired to do it, who I paid US $110 to do it, had failed to adhere to their job, doing so because of the lying claims made about me, which was why this person had contacted me to harass me. It was circular logic, but what can I say? Indeed, why am I bothering to respond to someone who harasses me like this because they were told to do it.
It made me think of the various hoaxes that make the rounds on the internet. The one about how if you put in your PIN number on the ATM in reverse then it will call the police. The one about how - well, I don't really need a list. They are everywhere, and stupid people fall for it. They aren't scams simply because they don't include money. It's the same kind of believable lies as the ones who do want money, though. The same people who convince you to give them your credit card number in order to stop you from having a virus - only there is no virus, and it's just an attempt to extort money. Perhaps they are not the same exact people that make the hoaxes, as obviously there is a line in the sand from laughing at someone to laughing and making money at someone, but it's a thin line. Certainly, if you can convince someone to believe that typing your PIN number in reverse can call the police, then you can probably convince them to give up their credit card number too.
Scammers tend to attack the same kind of people all the time. They have them in mind when they launch their attacks. They send out feelers to see if you are going to fall for it. If you respond correctly, then they probably won't bother you too much. I like to think that I respond correctly. Every time I get someone send me a message on Facebook asking me to donate to save starving children in Africa, I block them. Blocking scammers seems to me to be a good way to deal with it.
I have heard that some people go around wasting their time making fun of them, even trapping them, and I tried that myself too, but it just makes me angry. What kind of people would do such evil things?
And then I remember: the same kind of person that would write a lying blog post about someone to try to ruin their writing career.
They attack me because I am a good victim for them. It's not like this is the first such attack I've ever had. I had someone else, a year before this, write some nasty lies about me on his own writing group. In fact, I'm near certain that the two are related. That guy was doing it to cover up the fact that he routinely lies about people and is a gigantic bully. So a second gigantic bully lied about me to cover up his lies. Sighs.
He wasn't the first, though. I had a guy who was going around blackmailing celebrities who took a break from it to try to ruin my life, just for fun. There was no reason for it, and he gained no money out of it, he just liked the fact that I had a diagnosis of autism. And it was really hard to get rid of the lies too.
Encyclopaedia Dramatica, one of those lying places inhabited by trolls, created a page for me that was based on the lies told by the person who was blackmailing celebrities. I decided not to bother complaining about it. After all, people that go there know that they are full of lies. The more I complain, the worse it gets.
The only difference between the earlier efforts and this one is that this one is protected by Wordpress.com (or perhaps .org) who don't allow anyone to sue them without a US court order, a specific type of one that is difficult to get, and even harder if you live outside of USA. I did my sums and worked out that it wasn't worth it. They know that the blog post is defamatory. They know it is illegal. They just simply do not care.
It's the kind of thing that put me in a difficult position. For it to be worth it for me to sue them, I'd need for it to get a lot worse than it is now, and yet I don't want it to get worse.
The writing community is toxic, at least for me. Perhaps people attacked me just because I was worried that they would attack me, which is kind of like a red rag to a bull, or perhaps it is just that people like the abusive lying blogger are running things. After all, writing is about entertainment, and lying about people is entertaining.
One forum website, meant to be for writers, has "Learning About Thick Skin" as its first badge. That's code for "we encourage bullying", of course, which is precisely what they do. They not only told lies about me, but told lies about everyone else too, and told lies about me because I corrected some of the lies they told about everyone else. Yes, bullying for trying to stop their bullying. It's just not worth it.
Perhaps, if I looked through the community, I would find that they are just protective of their members, and my "behaviour" by challenging them about their lying and bullying of others, triggered something.
Yeah, nah, not likely.
If nothing else, life is a lesson, and I have come to learn that it's just not worth it to even respond to certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of responses.
So that person who wrote me half a page going on about a cover that I didn't have anything to do with, and then spent the other half of the page talking about how my story, which I wrote when I was 14, looked like it was written by someone who was 15, and how I should improve it, and I was left with my face in my palm.
There are things I could say, but that person would have to be pretty stupid to come up with such rubbish. Pretty gullible, I should say.
Probably the sort of person likely to fall for a scam to steal their credit card.
And perhaps I can take some solace in the thought that the people who abused me as a result of such an obviously false blog post about me are very stupid and are likely to get scammed by a credit card scammer.
The only problem is that I hate credit card scammers.
If only the world had true justice and it was actually fair.
At least my book is good. It's probably better if I hide myself in my books rather than put up with the idiots who lie about fellow authors.
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