Back from ALA, and had a blast! More on that later, once I’ve unpacked and figured out which bag I left my brain in.
For now, I had two links two share from my Google Reader feed, before Google permanently retires that service.
1. The Mary Sue has the First Clip of The Legend of Korra, Book Two. ::Bounce::
2. This made me smile. It was built by True Dimensions, whose Flickr page has some other nifty builds as well.
July 7 Update: Per Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor with Tor, James Frenkel is no longer with Tor Books.
ETA: Elise has said she’s comfortable with the following comment being shared. “My name is Sigrid Ellis. I was one of the co-hosts of the party Elise mentions. The person Elise reported for harassment is James Frenkel.” (Source)
I am beyond furious.
In 2010, in response to a series of specific incidents involving an editor in the community, I posted a list of resources for Reporting Sexual Harassment in SF/F. A number of people made reports about this individual.
I thought those reports had made a difference. I was wrong.
What follows is an account and essay from Elise Matthesen describing the process of reporting an incident that took place this year at Wiscon. While I’m not in a position to name names on my blog, I will say that the individual in question is the same one I was hearing about in 2010.
I ended up speaking to this person a while after I wrote that original blog post. He seemed genuinely contrite and regretful. I thought … I hoped … that he had learned, and that he would change his behavior.
I was wrong.
From what I’ve learned, nothing changed. Because the reports weren’t “formally documented,” this person was able to go on to harass other women.
Please read Elise’s essay. I’ve bolded one section about filing a formal report. If you’re aware of the situation and want to do so, I’ll be happy to do whatever I can to help hook you up with the appropriate contacts.
My thanks to Elise for her relentless work on this.
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We’re geeks. We learn things and share, right? Well, this year at WisCon I learned firsthand how to report sexual harassment. In case you ever need or want to know, here’s what I learned and how it went.
Two editors I knew were throwing a book release party on Friday night at the convention. I was there, standing around with a drink talking about Babylon 5, the work of China Mieville, and Marxist theories of labor (like you do) when an editor from a different house joined the conversation briefly and decided to do the thing that I reported. A minute or two after he left, one of the hosts came over to check on me. I was lucky: my host was alert and aware. On hearing what had happened, he gave me the name of a mandated reporter at the company the harasser was representing at the convention.
The mandated reporter was respectful and professional. Even though I knew them, reporting this stuff is scary, especially about someone who’s been with a company for a long time, so I was really glad to be listened to. Since the incident happened during Memorial Day weekend, I was told Human Resources would follow up with me on Tuesday.
There was most of a convention between then and Tuesday, and I didn’t like the thought of more of this nonsense (there’s a polite word for it!) happening, so I went and found a convention Safety staffer. He asked me right away whether I was okay and whether I wanted someone with me while we talked or would rather speak privately. A friend was nearby, a previous Guest of Honor at the convention, and I asked her to stay for the conversation. The Safety person asked whether I’d like to make a formal report. I told him, “I’d just like to tell you what happened informally, I guess, while I figure out what I want to do.”
It may seem odd to hesitate to make a formal report to a convention when one has just called somebody’s employer and begun the process of formally reporting there, but that’s how it was. I think I was a little bit in shock. (I kept shaking my head and thinking, “Dude, seriously??”) So the Safety person closed his notebook and listened attentively. Partway through my account, I said, “Okay, open your notebook, because yeah, this should be official.” Thus began the formal report to the convention. We listed what had happened, when and where, the names of other people who were there when it happened, and so forth. The Safety person told me he would be taking the report up to the next level, checked again to see whether I was okay, and then went.
I had been nervous about doing it, even though the Safety person and the friend sitting with us were people I have known for years. Sitting there, I tried to imagine how nervous I would have been if I were twenty-some years old and at my first convention. What if I were just starting out and had been hoping to show a manuscript to that editor? Would I have thought this kind of behavior was business as usual? What if I were afraid that person would blacklist me if I didn’t make nice and go along with it? If I had been less experienced, less surrounded by people I could call on for strength and encouragement, would I have been able to report it at all?
Well, I actually know the answer to that one: I wouldn’t have. I know this because I did not report it when it happened to me in my twenties. I didn’t report it when it happened to me in my forties either. There are lots of reasons people might not report things, and I’m not going to tell someone they’re wrong for choosing not to report. What I intend to do by writing this is to give some kind of road map to someone who is considering reporting. We’re geeks, right? Learning something and sharing is what we do.
So I reported it to the convention. Somewhere in there they asked, “Shall we use your name?” I thought for a millisecond and said, “Oh, hell yes.”
This is an important thing. A formal report has a name attached. More about this later.
The Safety team kept checking in with me. The coordinators of the convention were promptly involved. Someone told me that since it was the first report, the editor would not be asked to leave the convention. I was surprised it was the first report, but hey, if it was and if that’s the process, follow the process. They told me they had instructed him to keep away from me for the rest of the convention. I thanked them.
Starting on Tuesday, the HR department of his company got in touch with me. They too were respectful and took the incident very seriously. Again I described what, where and when, and who had been present for the incident and aftermath. They asked me if I was making a formal report and wanted my name used. Again I said, “Hell, yes.”
Both HR and Legal were in touch with me over the following weeks. HR called and emailed enough times that my husband started calling them “your good friends at HR.” They also followed through on checking with the other people, and did so with a promptness that was good to see.
Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal. Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that had ever been formally recorded.
Corporations (and conventions with formal procedures) live and die by the written word. “Records, or it didn’t happen” is how it works, at least as far as doing anything official about it. So here I was, and here we all were, with a situation where this had definitely happened before, but which we had to treat as if it were the first time — because for formal purposes, it was.
I asked whether people who had originally made confidential reports could go ahead and file formal ones now. There was a bit of confusion around an erroneous answer by someone in another department, but then the person at Legal clearly said that “the past is past” is not an accurate summation of company policy, and that she (and all the other people listed in the company’s publicly-available code of conduct) would definitely accept formal reports regardless of whether the behavior took place last week or last year.
If you choose to report, I hope this writing is useful to you. If you’re new to the genre, please be assured that sexual harassment is NOT acceptable business-as-usual. I have had numerous editors tell me that reporting harassment will NOT get you blacklisted, that they WANT the bad apples reported and dealt with, and that this is very important to them, because this kind of thing is bad for everyone and is not okay. The thing is, though, that I’m fifty-two years old, familiar with the field and the world of conventions, moderately well known to many professionals in the field, and relatively well-liked. I’ve got a lot of social credit. And yet even I was nervous and a little in shock when faced with deciding whether or not to report what happened. Even I was thinking, “Oh, God, do I have to? What if this gets really ugly?”
But every time I got that scared feeling in my guts and the sensation of having a target between my shoulder blades, I thought, “How much worse would this be if I were inexperienced, if I were new to the field, if I were a lot younger?” A thousand times worse. So I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders and said, “Hell, yes, use my name.” And while it’s scary to write this now, and while various people are worried that parts of the Internet may fall on my head, I’m going to share the knowledge — because I’m a geek, and that’s what we do.
So if you need to report this stuff, the following things may make it easier to do so. Not easy, because I don’t think it’s gotten anywhere near easy, but they’ll probably help.
NOTES: As soon as you can, make notes on the following:
And take notes as you go through the process of reporting: write down who you talk with in the organization to which you are reporting, and when.
ALLIES: Line up your support team. When you report an incident of sexual harassment to a convention, it is fine to take a friend with you. A friend can keep you company while you make a report to a company by phone or in email. Some allies can help by hanging out with you at convention programming or parties or events, ready to be a buffer in case of unfortunate events — or by just reminding you to eat, if you’re too stressed to remember. If you’re in shock, please try to tell your allies this, and ask for help if you can.
NAVIGATION: If there are procedures in place, what are they? Where do you start to make a report and how? (Finding out might be a job to outsource to allies.) Some companies have current codes of conduct posted on line with contact information for people to report harassment to. Jim Hines posted a list of contacts at various companies a while ago. Conventions should have a safety team listed in the program book. Know the difference between formal reports and informal reports. Ask what happens next with your report, and whether there will be a formal record of it, or whether it will result in a supervisor telling the person “Don’t do that,” but will be confidential and will not be counted formally.
REPORTING FORMALLY: This is a particularly important point. Serial harassers can get any number of little talking-to’s and still have a clear record, which means HR and Legal can’t make any disciplinary action stick when formal reports do finally get made. This is the sort of thing that can get companies really bad reputations, and the ongoing behavior hurts everybody in the field. It is particularly poisonous if the inappropriate behavior is consistently directed toward people over whom the harasser has some kind of real or perceived power: an aspiring writer may hesitate to report an editor, for instance, due to fear of economic harm or reprisal.
STAY SAFE: You get to choose what to do, because you’re the only one who knows your situation and what risks you will and won’t take. If not reporting is what you need to do, that’s what you get to do, and if anybody gives you trouble about making that choice to stay safe, you can sic me on them. Me, I’ve had a bunch of conversations with my husband, and I’ve had a bunch of conversations with other people, and I hate the fact that I’m scared that there might be legal wrangling (from the person I’d name, not the convention or his employer) if I name names. But after all those conversations, I’m not going to. Instead, I’m writing the most important part, about how to report this, and make it work, which is so much bigger than one person’s distasteful experience.
During the incident, the person I reported said, “Gosh, you’re lovely when you’re angry.” You know what? I’ve been getting prettier and prettier.
I’ll be at the American Library Association Conference in Chicago this coming Sunday.
This will be my first time at the ALA Conference, and I’m looking forward to it. Particularly given the rather librarian-centric focus of the current series 🙂
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I apologize, but apparently I’ve become one of those authors. The ones with the Secret Projects who tease you about how they’re working on a Nifty New Thing, but never share the details.
This wasn’t planned; I was basically invited to do a project that sounded like a lot of fun, paid reasonably well, and would let me try something new. So after looking at my schedule, crunching some wordcount numbers, talking to the family and a writer friend, I said yes.
And I’m not allowed to talk about the details.
I have no idea when that’s going to change. I may or may not be able to talk about it by the end of the year. Rest assured though, I’ll babble away the instant I’m permitted.
In the meantime, I’ll just say that I’m excited about the project, and it means I’m going to be a very busy writer for foreseeable future. It should make for an interesting year or two.
I don’t know how this will affect things like the blogging or my ability to respond to emails in a timely fashion. With only 24 hours in a day, I’ve had to shift some priorities around a bit.
But hopefully it will all be worth it.
My decision to write and post this came from something Seanan McGuire shared on Tumblr (in which Hannah Goff talks about bodily autonomy and organ donation) and from Wendy Davis’ filibuster of an abortion bill in Texas.
Right now, a sixteen-year-old child is dying of kidney failure. He’s on the waiting list for an organ transplant, but he’s running out of time. Doctors figure he’s got a week left. Maybe two if he’s lucky.
Fortunately, it turns out that you’re a match. You’re the right blood type, the right body size, the tissue matching is positive … your kidney could save this child.
The ambulance will be arriving at your house tonight to take you to the hospital for surgery.
Wait, what? You can’t do that. What about the risks? Kidney donation is major surgery, and there’s always the chance of death by bleeding or infection!
You’ll be happy to know that I’ve considered the risks for you, and I’ve found them to be acceptable, given the stakes.
But I have a medical condition that makes surgery extremely dangerous. There’s a good chance this could kill me.
I’m sorry to hear that. Please make sure you don’t eat or drink anything from now until the procedure.
The surgery requires three weeks off of work. I’ll lose my job! I’m a single parent trying to look after three children.
Your inability to plan and manage your own life shouldn’t cost this child his chance.
Hey, I just read the file on this kid, and he’s much sicker than you said. Even if I donate my kidney, he’s still going to die.
That doesn’t matter. Your kidney is a match, so you’re required to donate. If you refuse, you’ll be arrested and fined, and the procedure will be performed in the prison hospital.
Who’s going to pay for the procedure and the medications I need while I’m recovering?
You’ll need to pay those costs out of pocket. Insurance companies don’t like to cover this stuff.
Look, I’m a compassionate person, and I don’t want this kid to die any more than you do. But what gives you the right to force me to donate my kidney to save him?
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A while back, my mother chose to donate a kidney to a family friend. Because my mother is awesome. The procedure went great, and our friend is doing much better. Mom is back to running ridiculously long races and doing karate with me on Monday nights. And y’all should totally sign up on the organ donor registry, if you haven’t already.
But here in the U. S., nobody has the legal right to force you to sign up to donate your organs. Every state requires your legal consent for organ donation. Even if the surgery wouldn’t cause you any serious complications or side effects. Even if it would save a child’s life. Even though more than 6000 people die each year for lack of available organs.
The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 2006 “strengthens the power of an individual not to donate his or her parts by permitting the individual to sign a refusal that also bars others from making a gift of the individual’s parts after the individual’s death.”
In other words, U. S. law gives you control over your body. Even if that means someone else will die. Even after you’re dead and presumably have no further need of those organs. Your corpse has the right to bodily autonomy.
I’m not going to argue about when a group of cells transforms into a human being, whether that happens at conception or birth or some nebulous time in between.
But if the “right to life” is so important, why don’t we have mandatory organ registries in this country? Why isn’t everyone required to have their blood type and other information entered into a national database? Why don’t we require living organ donations, since most of us have some redundant organs we could give with no significant loss to our own quality of life?
Why have we so enshrined our right to control our own bodies … unless you happen to be a woman?
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I’m closing comments on this post. I love you all, but I know how emotional and contentious and complicated this issue is. Given the state of the Internet these days, I don’t trust what would happen if comments were left open, and I don’t have the time and energy to clean up that mess.
Joe Schreiber’s Death Troopers [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] was presented to me as “Star Wars with zombies.” And now you know everything you need to know to decide whether or not to read this one.
It’s a fairly standard zombie story. The Imperial prison barge Purge encounters an abandoned Star Destroyer. They investigate, return to the Purge, and then a mysterious illness begins killing both the crew and the inmates. Will our handful of survivors manage to escape the uprising?
There are references to Darth Vader, but the only familiar characters were the “two smugglers” who had been conveniently isolated in solitary confinement, and thus didn’t get infected right away.
There were a few points where I struggled with suspension of disbelief. (Yeah, I know. Star Wars and zombies. But still…) The one that comes to mind was the behavior of the zombie-goop when the doctor (the only female character, I believe) was trying to prevent another character from becoming infected. I got stuck on, “Wait, how exactly is that supposed to work?”
There are moments of genuine horror — the wookiee scene in particular, and Chewbacca’s reaction. For the most part though, I didn’t feel like I was reading anything new. I was left asking myself, “Why was this a story that needed to be told in the Star Wars universe?”
Schreiber has written another zombie Star Wars book, Red Harvest, which introduces a Jedi and a Sith Lord into a zombie story. I suspect that one could do a better job of bringing the Star Wars universe and mythology into things. How does the force affect the walking dead, and vice versa? What’s the impact on the larger political struggles we’re familiar with?
I have absolutely nothing against trying to write something popular, and zombies have been hot for a while now. The fact that Shreiber wrote a second of these books suggests that Death Troopers sold well, and I’m always happy to see a fellow Michigan author succeed.
Personally though, I wanted to see something new, something that managed to feel like both Star Wars and zombies. For me, it accomplished the latter, but failed to do the former.
I mean, if you’re going to do this, you’ve got to include at least one zombie Ewok trudging along, groaning “Nuuuub… nuuuuubbbb.”
I should be working on Unbound. (30K words and counting!) But I wanted to put two things out there first, both about the call for “civility” I’ve seen in various quarters.
1. Author Kari Sperring wrote this week about civility both as a protective mechanism against abuse, and as a behavior enforced by the threat of violence and abuse:
I absolutely support the right of those who are subjected to abuse, oppression, elision and exclusion to shout back, to push, to demand. This is not an area in which there can be compromise.
But there are also people of all races and backgrounds for whom this option is never available and they may speak and act as they do because it is their only safety.
2. I know many people have seen and quoted this already, but there are more who haven’t. What follows are excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
The whole thing is worth reading, but these bits struck me as particularly appropriate, given certain conversations I’ve seen and participated in recently…
Last night, I posted the following on Facebook and Tumblr:
It’s not that Ken Hoinsky ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund his book, “A Guide to Getting Awesome with Women,” filled with advice for aspiring rapists, like “Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant.”
It’s that 732 people backed his project on Kickstarter. That they donated more than eight times what Hoinsky was asking for.
Think about that the next time someone belittles the idea of rape culture.
This led to a side discussion about what “rape culture” meant. The suggestion came up that the phrase is a dog whistle that prevents honest discussion and implies all men are rapists and rape-enablers.
Okay, given the seven billion people in this world, I’m sure you can find one who believes all men are rapists, but that isn’t what that phrase has meant in any conversation I can remember having. (It is what I’ve seen some “Men’s Rights” advocates try to claim it means, because it gives them a way to derail discussion.)
I use “rape culture” to describe a society in which sexual violence is common, underreported, and underprosecuted, where rape victims are blamed or even prosecuted for trying to report the crime. A society that turns its back on rape survivors, or blames them for wearing the wrong clothes, drinking the wrong things, sending the wrong signals, putting themselves in the wrong situation, and so on. A society that treats women as objects and encourages men to be sexually aggressive, to see sex as a game to be won.
Does this mean all men believe women who are raped deserve it? That’s as silly as saying “The U.S. has a strong gun culture” = “All Americans are gun owners” or “Tumblr is full of fandom culture” = “All Tumblr posts are about fandom.”
Okay, fine, the argument goes. But that doesn’t prove this so-called “rape culture” actually exists. You worked as a rape counselor and spend a lot of time talking about this. Doesn’t that give you a distorted, overblown sense of the problem?
My sense has always been that my experience has helped open my eyes to a problem most people tend to ignore or minimize. That experience has included a fair amount of time reading research and articles about rape in our world.
Prevalence:
Back in 1995, the AMA described rape as the most underreported crime in America. It’s difficult to get exact numbers, but here’s some of the research and statistics discussing just how common rape really is.
Men as Perpetrators:
It’s true that not all rapists are men, nor are all victims women. However, the vast majority of rapists are indeed male, and women are raped at a significantly greater rate than men. Looking specifically at men as rapists…
How Our Culture Facilitates Rape:
Once again, these are just a handful of examples that illustrate our culture’s attitudes toward rape and rape victims, and the impact of those attitudes.
You also see these things, if you look, in our daily lives. In reporting that sympathizes with the rapists or emphasizes the victim’s looks, in rape prevention efforts that put the responsibility for stopping rape on women, in the way we conflate rape and sex, in jokes that minimize or belittle rape, in the way we expect rape to be a normal part of our fiction, in stories of police hostility to rape victims, in legal battles where the popular defense is victim-blaming, and so much more.
When I use the phrase rape culture, I’m not saying, “Hey buddy, did you know that you are personally an evil rapist and responsible for all the rape?” I’m saying we have a culture in which rape is widespread, and the reasons are many and multilayered.
When women talk about men as potential rapists, they’re not saying all men are animals who will commit rape at the slightest opportunity; they’re pointing out that because rape is so widespread, and because the perpetrators are so often “normal-looking” men, frequently friends and family, it creates an atmosphere of distrust and fear. Heck, doesn’t the fact that we focus prevention efforts almost exclusively on women essentially require women to treat all men as potential rapists?
And when men respond to these conversations by trying to reframe them as a personal attack or accusation, it takes the focus off of the problem of rape and derails the conversation.
For anyone who’s interested, I updated yesterday’s blog post with information on Mr. Dark’s clients and their work.
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And now on to something more important:Â the trailer for next year’s LEGO movie, at http://youtu.be/lPnY2NjSjrg
To be honest, I’m not sure what to think yet. It’s nice to finally see Superman and Batman in the same movie, and there are a few jokes in the trailer that made me grin. There’s some good voice talent and potential here.I don’t think this first trailer gives us enough information to really judge. I hope they don’t go too silly or cheesy with it, but we’ll see…
I was sitting there with a plate of french toast and checking email when a message popped up from Tom Dark of the Heacock Hill Literary Agency.
“Greetings and Salutations,” he proclaimed!
Well, no. Actually he opened his email by saying, “I see you’re a snide supporter of the ‘Absolute Write’ gang.” He then proceeded to spend approximately 900 words explaining that Heacock Hill has been the victim of a vicious hoax “purposely instigated by ‘Absolute Write’ and/or ‘Writer Beware.'” He described Absolute Write as a cult, informed me that he was not Jewish, and added that he was also not Miriam Silverstein.
All of which left me with three questions.
Question three was easiest to answer, and once I made my way back to the right table, I sat down to examine this email in more detail. As near as I can make out, someone wrote some nasty comments about this guy, including things like, “You want to go around and write your little PEE BOY SQUIRT OINKER BULLSHIT all over my stuff, go ahead.”
This may or may not have been on the Absolute Write site; if it was, the moderators at AW have removed it as inappropriate.
Therefore Absolute Write is a cult. Or something. I’m not sure. I was still disoriented by the french toast mishap.
Absolute Write does have a thread about this agency. Please note: this is the link that Dark himself sent me in his email. Following that link reveals … folks talking about how Tom Dark sends weird/creepy-aggressive emails to people.
Despite the fact that Mr. Dark has a pretty cool superhero name, I was starting to get a little weirded out by this point. I skimmed another nasty comment someone apparently sent, and jumped to the end, where he states:
This little cult that pretends to “protect writers from fraud” have been pulling this sick game for years. Years ago they also attacked our founder, in her eighties, with lies about fees charged. We see how these lies have spread unchecked to sites that also refuse to check up on the malicious libels they’re serving to perpetrate. We see how some sites have falsely characterized this as “a controversy.”
A lawsuit is time- taking and expensive. If we must get around to it eventually, we certainly will, and with the intent to simply get rid of these vicious, hypocritical phonies, very loudly….
Maybe we won’t have to. A little insider info for you: a good many editors are getting sick and tired of this gang of hacks, finally.
He then wished me a fun career, turned into a puff of dandelion fuzz, and floated away in a maple syrup-scented breeze.
Being the inquisitive fellow I am, I headed over to the Heacock Hill Literary Agency where I found, just as Dark had claimed, that they “do not charge up front fees.” I also found zero information about who their clients were or what books they might have sold. So I emailed Mr. Dark asking if he’d be willing to share.
Dark was quick to reply, letting me know that:
We, I, represent a bunch of people, some, real mighty. I don’t care if you know who they are. Couple up and comers are on my personal blog. We do care that those concerned know who they are. We do care that we, and they, don’t have to put up with the rancid lying shit your buddies smear around.
Huh. Okay, I’ll happily admit that one of the comments he sent me included some nasty antisemitic name-calling, apparently directed at Dark. But why did he feel the need to tell me all about all of this? As I explained to him, I didn’t even know who Tom Dark was, nor the Heacock Hill Literary Agency.
To which he explained:
Wasn’t that you who wrote the snide “apology” about some “Write Agenda” thing on your blog? When I looked into these cronies of yours are, what I found from these so-called “sock puppets” independently pretty much matched.
He’s referring to this blog post, which was indeed rather snide in its disdain for the homophobic twits of The Write Agenda.
Oh wait, I see the connection. Mister Dark had a guest post for TWA, wherein he spends 2900 words (yes, I did a word count) to explain that everything Absolute Write said about him was a lie by lying liars who lie, he has lots of important and brilliant clients that he won’t name, and he really was popular, so there! Also, something about flying monkeys.
By now, I was having fun, so I did a little more digging and found a blog post wherein he talks (anonymously) about a few of his clients, including one who sadly didn’t work out.
Now, the crazy lady instead left such a loud-mouthed message on my machine I thought it better we wrote quietly. She wrote back loudly, officiously declaring how to do my business and how this certain last-minute thing I happened to be doing was totally impossible.
Is “stupid c**t” politically correct English? It’s scientific.
So that’s what’s been wafting through my inbox. I’m sad to say that the only things I made up here were that bit about the french toast and Dark’s ability to vanish in a poof of dandelion fluff.
Short version: Classy “agent” is classy.
PS, When Mr. Dark discovers this post, he is more than welcome to share any details he wishes that might help establish his credentials as a successful agent and counter the scammerish red flag of refusing to list any clients or sales. But trolling and name-calling will be deleted and/or kittened, depending on my mood.
ETA: A few people have pointed me toward information about Mr. Dark’s clients.
I know nothing about these writers, and there’s nothing wrong with self-publishing. But I’m having trouble finding any value whatsoever that Mr. Dark brought to his clients.
For Father’s Day, we went out to see Man of Steel. I had been seeing mixed reactions over this one, and been (willingly) spoiled for one of the things that happens at the end, so my expectations weren’t tremendous. Memories of Superman Returns probably helped keep my hopes from getting overly high. But going in with that mindset, I mostly enjoyed the movie. I liked Amy Adams as Lois Lane a lot, and thought Henry Cavill made a pretty good Superman. Laurence Fishburne was sadly wasted in his role as Perry White. I liked a lot of what Russell Crowe did as Jor-El, though.
I think Christopher Reeve will always be my Superman, just like David Tennant will always be my Doctor. Reeve brought a bit more fun and heart, and a less angst. But unlike Superman Returned, which tried and failed to duplicate what had been done before, Man of Steel tried to do something new, and I give them points for that.
Storywise, the last thing I’ll say before moving into spoiler territory is when they do Man of Steel II, I’d like More Character Development and Less Destroying ALL THE THINGS, please.
Spoiler time…
