I have no skeletons in my closet: they’re all hanging from the yardarm

The day started with a post from Nicky to my Daverana Page. He revealed that one of my employees was secretly accessing files on the main company computer and then sending them to him.  So I checked the logs (I’m the only one who can access those) and the most recent person to have a look at my Nicky files was Bob. He had also tried to pry into sections and documents that I had passworded.  I may never know whys of it all, but I am appalled by what I do know.

I had a big fight with Bob and then he threw a link in my face and called me a ‘bitch.”

The link was to a new page that Write Agenda has up on me. I tried several times to make my screenshots larger enough to be easily read.  So, in case you cannot read<a href=”” target=”_blank”> this one, I’ll post what it says beneath my name in tiny type:

Protected: T.W.A.N.G.: Janrae Frank Dossier Project

In Accountability, Alcohol Abuse, Alternative Lifestyles, Cocaine, Drug Abuse, Emotional Instability, Gay Lifestyles, Hollywood, Illegal Drugs, Incitement, Interviews, Intimidation, Investigations, investigative journalist, Janrae Frank, Journalism, Journalist, lawsuits, Legal Issues, Lesbian, Lesions, Polio, Poliomyelitis, Propaganda, Rehabiltation, Sex Change, Spinal Column, The Washington Post, Therapy Sessions on November 9, 2011 at 10:10 pm

They got all of this off my blogs and put some spin on it to make it look like I”m mentally ill. It seems that having been trapped in an abusive marriage for 15 years and developing PTSD as a result of that abuse makes me all kinds of crazy. What does this say about their opinion of other abused women who found the strength to escape dangerously abusive marriages like I did? What does this say about what they believe about women who have survived male violence (as I have) and come out of it battered, but sane?

If people who have had PTSD and dared to talk about it are disparaged as “emotionally unstable”, how does this reflect our returning soldiers? Are they saying the ALL of our returning soldiers are to be treated badly and subjected to their derision?

I may have abused alcohol at times before I got meds for depression, but I was never an alcoholic. I was laughed out of my attempts to join AA. You see, all of the true alcoholics could recognize me as a normie with just a single question. “If you had some money and no groceries to feed your child, what would you spend it on? Your child or booze?”

Sovay never went hungry once I escaped from her father.

I have talked openly about my experiences with meth and cocaine and how I went cold turkey off it in 1988, because I wanted to show others that it was possible to stay clean. I have been clean since August of 1988. But they want me punished for ever having done it.  They want to turn my victories — and by extension all those like myself who overcame their addictions — into defeats.  Guess what, Write Agenda? It ain’t going to happen.

My ex is a transsexual and out of the closet. But by putting that one word there, it suggested that my c-section scars don’t really exist.  If any of the voyeurs reading this want pictures, feel free to ask.

No, I’m not a Lesbian. I’m bi-sexual. There IS a difference. I’m the B in GLBTQ, not the L.  So apparently they are homophobic also. Like the good people who are going around burning queer folks alive and dumping their remains on street corners.

And let’s take a look at how they mention my polio as if that made me mentally ill and of questionable worth.  Are they trying to insinuate that by having had polio at age eight I ought to be condemned?

The only one this reflects badly on is them. Not me.

Seriously, Write Agenda, do you think this is going to appease us?

Write Agenda has twice revised their boycott list. First they dropped everyone (including myself) off their list except for Strauss, MacDonald, Crispin, and Elrod. Then they expanded it again to include people (except me) who have recently blogged disparagingly about them, including Scalzi. This is a case of PHAIL. After all, most of us (including me) will not be letting their travesty of injustice stand unchallenged.

They still have not corrected their lies about the Freedom of Information Act, and until that is removed, I will continue to go after them.

They need to read my curmudgeon’s creed.  My curmudgeonry is one of the things I am best known for.  Sane people do not provoke curmudgeons who know their business.  Curmudgeons have much in common with Daleks: “Exterminate! Exterminate!”

The Nature of the Freedom of Information Act

The Write Agenda claims to have used the Freedom of Information Act to discover that NOTHING existed in regards to lawsuits filed against American Book Publishing. First, the Freedom of Information Act is used to force the release of information. One of the most recent cases is where a group forced the release of Sarah Palin’s emails during her time as governor of Alaska.  While 47 states have statutes providing freedom of information, these are not the Freedom of Information Act per se.

Using the Freedom of Information Act requires paying fees and filing papers. It is actually a long process, even at the state level.  No one does it for free because it costs the legal bodies time and money to comply with it. They have a lot more on their minds (and pocketbooks) than replying to someone’s butthurt reports. For this reason only individuals with deep pockets or organizations proceed with Freedom of Information Act filings.

The Freedom of Information Act is never used in the manner that The Write Agenda claims to have used it. And if they have used it, I would be forced to wonder where they got the money to pursue it.

Getting back to my original direction, in order to use the Freedom of Information Act, information must already exist on the subject.  If, as they claim, no lawsuits were ever filed against American Book Publishers, then they could not have used it.

The federal Freedom of Information Act has served as a template for legislation passed by the various states. The names of the state legislation varies.

Therefore I challenge The Write Agenda to give their “investigation” its proper name for the state in which they claimed to have used the Freedom of Information Act and to tell us how much it cost them to file the requests in each and every one of those law enforcement bodies listed on that kitchen sink list of theirs.

 

The Write Agenda is Wrong

I could not lodge a reply because of a time limit, so I’m putting my rebuttal here. And then I will cross post it across all of my other blogs, including myspace.  Here’s what they had to say:

The Write Agenda has not questioned the fact that Writer Beware has helped numerous individuals over time. They have without question. Somewhere along that positive history something has run afoul. The claim that “American Book Publishing has been the subject of at least one police investigation” is a primary example of how Writer Beware has forgotten its original mission and responsibility to provide true information.

This gist of this is that a single bit of information that they are trying to challenge is worth all of the over the top reaction that includes multiple nearly identical blogs and websites.  Clearly, they were one of the scammers that Writer Beware caught with their pants down.  At one point they even had books out on Smashwords repeating this garbage. I posted a note on Mark Coker’s (the owner of Smashwords) facebook to alert him to what was going on and he banned them for TOS violations.

Had I not known otherwise, I would have thought this was all the work of an angsty hyperactive adolescent. But, no, these are adult(s).

The real “intimidation” is the fact that Victoria Strauss, Ann “A.C.” Crispin and Writer Beware have posted this information, refuse to delete it and refuse to provide documentation that proves the claim. This is neither a grand jury investigation nor an investigative newspaper report. Both of these examples are not entitled to the protections of confidentiality and would be not be deemed privileged information; not to mention the fact that Victoria Strauss is not a professional investigative journalist and would not legally be permitted to claim these privileges to protect herself. The Write Agenda’s request has nothing to do with protecting police investigators. Police investigators could not remotely be claimed as “sources” as Janrae Frank would have you believe. Think about it, don’t individuals go “to” the investigators? Don’t “investigators” write police reports? Isn’t it not true that police reports are assigned incident numbers?

I never claimed that police investigators could be claimed as sources, although a lot of major columnists (New York Times, The Washington Post, et al) have done so.  Government officials speak with anonymity to reporters and columnists. That’s how it is done. What TWA were demanding were the names of people who had complained about them. American Book Publishing had it written into the contract that any author complaining about them would owe them $10,000 in damages.   

Good way to keep the victims silent.

Contrary to Janrae Frank’s unfortunate “smoke screen,” the information contained within any “police investigation” is subject to discovery, available under the Freedom of Information Act, has an incident number and is not subject to any protections under the law (assuming that it actually exists). The fact here is that there never was a “police investigation” conducted against America Book Publishing. Victoria Strauss, Ann “A.C.” Crispin and Writer Beware know this and they cannot produce 1) an incident number; 2) what was American Book Publishing Investigated for; and 3) the name of the investigating police agency. This is true “intimation” and a it’s scam that has been perpetrated by Victoria Strauss, Ann “A.C.” Crispin and Writer Beware. Now, Janrae Frank has made the personal choice to attempt to deliberately cloud this further; that’s very unfortunate.

Unfortunate? Are you threatening me?

Now let’s take a look at the Freedom of Information Act.

How fascinating. The Freedom of Information Act only applies to the Feds.  Guess that means that The Write Agenda could never have used it to harass the state and local officials.

Janrae Frank, who is a well-respected American journalist, knows for a fact that “police investigations” are subject to discovery under the Freedom of Information; it is the most commonly used tool of any investigative reporter. Considering that Ms. Frank chose  to weigh in here, without any appreciation for the actual facts, it appears that she is more interested in participating in this viral controversy as a means to help her slumping book sales. Self-serving conduct? It appears to be. Her current Amazon Sales Rankings range from 315,555 to 3,405,977.  As an industry standard, an Amazon Sales Ranking of 100,000 equates to 1 copy every 5 days; 2,000,000 equates to 1 copy every 1000 days. (We’ll track this and see if her strategy works.)

Hey, Stupid! Guess what? The majority of my sales are through Smashwords, not Amazon. We quit using Amazon months ago. Check the dates on those books up there and then compare them to what is out from Smashwords!  HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA. My book sales are going great, just not through Amazon. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

The Write Agenda then lists a kitchen sink full of officials who would not be affected by the Freedom of Information act. That act is for politics, not local law enforcement. The only way to get information from law enforcement like that would be to file suit against them.

Furthermore, criminal suits as well as civil suits are matters of public record.  There would not be a reason to invoke the Freedom of Information Act in the first place. Just call the county clerk’s office. Or go down and look it up for yourself.

I think that about covers it.

Oh, wait a minute. Clearly they are not familiar with the little thing I wrote seven years ago: The Curmudgeon’s Creed.

Healers

It was reading the TSR novels such as Forgotten Realms that first made me sick of healers and healing potions.  Reading some of (but not all of them)  Mercedes Lackey’s novels renewed my reaction to healers who could heal just about anything single-handed and with very little muss and fuss.  I felt that it cheapened the danger to the heroes of the books.

Healers became a pet peeve of mine.  I had a tree that produced a magic elixir, a healing potion, in the garden of the sun god.  And then the trickster goddess, Dynanna, got a mad on at him and filled his garden with gophers.  If you look really hard, you might find one of those potions.  But it might be centuries before the magic tree recovers.

I put mine under the umbrella of healers.  I know that people probably think D&D type, but I don’t have them.   Instead, I have a variety of specialists.

My lifemages can do nearly all of it depending on their affinities, but the sa’necari necromancers came close to killing all of them.  Reason: the lifemages can destroy the undead.  They are the top of the healing chain, but usually work in groups in rapport.  Having the talent does not mean you have enough energy to sustain the healing process solo.

Spiritworkers share some gifts in common with the lifemages, but can’t heal.

Spellbreakers can cure arcane wounds made by certain types of cursed weapons commonly wielded by the sa’necari, but they do it by ripping the spells apart in a brutal crude fashion and often leave their patients crippled since they can’t fix the the other aspects and any prior damage.   So they are usually the last resort.

Menders can grow organic material back together, such as bone, muscle, organs.  But without proper training in anatomy they can have the occasional ooopsie of growing it back to the wrong thing (like attaching a severed lung to your kidneys instead of the other piece of your lung)

Readers.  All magical healers are also Readers.  Top level Readers can see into the body right down to the molecular level.  However, most Readers are not healers.  They are diagnosticians.  Readers make impressive surgeons.

Down at the bottom rung are the types most prevalent.  Surgeons, physicians, mid-wives and so forth.

Cahira Sinclair, a lycan mage (lycans produce albinos more often than mages) is a Mender.  she is also a translator of obscure languages.  When a cache of books was found by the dwarves of Iradrim, the Tsar asked her (yes, Russian dwarves.  The god of the dwarves gathered up all the dwarves he could find and dumped them in one spot and told them to build a kingdom that worshipped him.  Norse, Gaelic, and Ruskies.  The Ruskies fought their way to the top and now they have a tsar) to translate the medical books found there.  As a result they now have hypodermic syringes, primitive blood transfusions, and stethoscopes.

Overall, they have a crystal based technology that makes possible invitro-fertilization, some radical methods of birth control, and other amusing things.

And then there is Rashid, a polyarcanist surgeon.  That’s probably my strangest form of healer.  He works with herbs and chemicals that are placed in crystals that will dissolve in the human body.  They are implanted to provide healing.  He also does organ transplants through arcane blastemas (see that crazy Mexican salamander that regenerates), and he taps into auric fields to create nets of healing energy produced by crystals.  He’s very expensive and usually only works for the nobility and others who can afford his prices.

and that’s my healers.

Searching for a Scribe

The transient nature of the internet allows people to become lost.  This especially holds true for people who create things: artists, authors, bloggers, and font designers.

And therein lies the tale.  I want to use fonts by Mike Allard in the headers of some novels we are bringing out.  It’s shareware.

His work is elegant and readable.

I want to give him some money.

But the last known whereabouts of Mike is two years old and there are two of them.  By now any forwarding order with the post office has expired.

I emailed him at the last known addy.  I messaged every Mike Allard I could find at facebook.

Mike Allard, where are you?  I want to give you some money.

Polio

I had polio when I was six weeks shy of age 8.  Because I had a damaged immune system, I contracted it from the vaccine.   I had to fight hard to learn to walk again.  I’m bringing this up because I would like to share with you a book I found about another woman who had polio as a child.  Ironically, we’re both named Janice.  Twin Voices by Janice Flood Nichols is a fine account and shares some similarities with my own.  While I blog about my difficulties  from time to time, I don’t have the kind of courage that she does to write a book about it.

I also want to share a link to Children’s Hospital’s site where they have some excellent information about the disease. I am very pro-vaccination.

Trees and plants

The first Godwar saw a lot of destruction on this alternate earth.  The west coast is now the area where the Rio Grande sits.  Most of Texas survived in geographical terms, but the vegetation and general environment has altered.   The states of Washington, Oregon, and California were mostly sunk.

The island of the Fae sits atop the ruins of Los Angeles in the middle of the much larger version of the Mississippi, whose course was shoved far west by earthquakes and other phenomena as the gods set off all of the fault lines in North America simultaneously.  By the time that the war ended most of the indigenous populations had perished.

So they brought in immigrants from old earth (ours).

These immigrants frequently brought plants, cuttings, and seeds with them to restore the areas.  So we end up with odd combinations.

We have giant flightless birds on the Great Plains as well as cheetahs and lions and native species.  We also have the survivors of the previous high level society’s genetic engineering experiments.

Trolls, goblins, and orcs were the product of those experiments.  The immigrants gave them those names, because that is what they looked like to them.  Their original names have, in most cases, been lost.

The gods have been doing a lot of terraforming and are sometimes capricious in picking species and modifying species.

The Sinclair Family

I decided to share a few facts about the Sinclair family.  A good writer knows a lot more than they tell the reader.  The founding ancestor of their family was a human, Colonel Aristotle Sinclair.  Toward the end of the previous godwar he met and married a lovely lycan bitch named Pandeena Moonbow.  It was not until he entered middle age that he noticed she had never aged at all.  Throughout their long years together she never looked older than eighteen.

As readers of the Lycan Blood series know, Pandeena is the youngest of the three  goddesses of the lycan race, known as the Holy Mothers.  The Sinclairs inherited their incredible strength and longevity from Pandeena.

The Baron and the Old Monster

My company website features two monstrous columnists: Baron Hieronymous of the Undead Smart Set and his nemesis the Old Monster.  It’s a cultural war between a force for good taste and a purveyor of dreadful habits.  They poke at each other, leave comments on each other’s blogs that arrive at Daverana through a direct feed, and yield up a wealth of humor.

Child soldiers

As more and more writers attempt to force the Middle Ages to conform to modern sensibilities  in regards to children, I am more amazed at the facts that they choose to exclude than the ones they bother to include in efforts to prove their theses.

Boys as young as twelve were subject to the draft (calling up the levies) and girls as young as thirteen and fourteen were married off in arranged marriages.  Since both things were a commonplace, it has to be assumed that children grew up faster in this environment.

April updates

The Shadowed Princes, the final book in the Lycan Blood series has been successfully up loaded to kindle and smashwords.  It should be out by Friday.

My company, Daverana Enterprises, is also proud to bring you Dragon Creed by Susie Hawes.  It should be available on Kindle by Friday.

“When you’re the only dragon in a country where magic is illegal, what’s a dragon gonna do?  Fechum is an old dragon, lonely and crippled. Farquarte is his human apprentice. The society they live in is oppressive, over-regulating its citizens and suppressing its magical people. Farquarte decides the government needs an attitude change.

Join him and his beleaguered cohorts as they lock horns with the system. Viva La Revolucion!”

New Installment in Sins of Innocence is up

The newest installment in Sins of Innocence  is up at blogspot

So as not to overwhelm the blog readers, I have been keeping them to no more than two scenes depending up length.  From now on, I will be referring to them as installments rather than chapters.   Next week’s is a very long scene, so I’ll be using a standard text cut there.

Book six of the lycan blood series has been uploaded to kindle and should be available no later than Friday.

The oldest marriage and courtship customs of the lycans (which have mostly died out) were based more on their innate wolfish natures than on their acquired humanity.  They aimed at proving that a male could be resourceful, strong and determined.  One of them is the Wild Cousins Courtship, which features in the Lycan Blood series.

It was a rite of chase and capture and assumed that a female would be as resourceful in the woods as the male.  It was initiated by the female, who threw the challenge at a suitor.  It had a set number of days for each event to happen.  The male had to accept the challenge or abandon the courtship of the female.  The male could not change into a wolf during this period unless the female changed first and was given a head start so that she could disappear into the woods.  If the chase was initiated during the daylight, then it lasted until nightfall and vice versa.  He had to track, trap, and mate with her to prove that he was worthy.  A clever female could avoid him until the time ran out.  The courtship lasted for a year and a day.  If the female defeated the male’s efforts, then he was forbidden to ever associate with her again.  In the backstory to the lycan novels,  Aisha defeated Claw up until the last day when she realized she had fallen in love with him and allowed him to capture her.

Eventually this style of courtship fell out of favor as the lycan communities grew in size and complexity.  It was replaced by a system of courting a family as well as the daughter.  The suitor would give courting gifts to the parents to gain their permission to marry their daughter.  Tobacco and liquor (and other more expensive items if the suitor was wealthy) were given to the father.  Sweets and household goods were given to the mother.  And, of course, gifts for the daughter being courted.

As the lycans adopted more humanish customs, this tradition evolved into brideprice.

Sins Chapter Three

The new chapter of Sins of Innocence is up.

We finally meet the antagonists who have arrived to take advantage of the unsettled situation in Rowanhart.

Book Five of Lycan Blood, The Exile Returns, will be uploaded to kindle today.

Double Standards

All cultures have double standards, some violent and dangerous, others just plain annoying.

All of my cultures have double standards of one sort or another.  Many of them are very “do as I say, not as I do.”  This holds especially true for my lycans.  They are in a period of transition, culturally.  Old ways are dying out and new ways borrowed from the human realms are taking their place.

The rural folk still practice pre-marital monogamy to ensure that they are not marrying a barren woman.  Meanwhile, in the cities, they are starting to place a premium on female virginity.  And yet the upper classes have a saying, “The greatest sign of a thane’s favor is a big belly.”

They worship a triune goddess, but have a patriarchal society.

In law, their women have a great many rights; but in practice very few.

That doesn’t stop strong women from making their way in the various communities.  Aisha Redhand exercises great influence over Red Wolf.  So does Kady Maguire.  Darcy MacIver is a determined warrior who wants to be a general and eventually finds the mentor who can give her that.