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The House of Representatives passed the libel tourism bill I mentioned in a post about a month ago, when the Phleabitten war at Goodreads was heavy. And it looks like it will pass the Senate shortly. This is a major victory over those foriegn doody-heads who are persecuting American authors.
Once it passes the Senate, I intend to write a fresh post about Philbin and his extradition threats just to laugh at him.
HEY PHLEABITTEN, NYAH! NYAH!
You’ll notice on the tabs that there is an “About the Legion” page atop my blog. It has been there ever since my last visit from Philbin. I guess he must have gotten unhappy with the fact that I’ve been leaving his name off my tags lately, because he just left two comments on it. The usual shit.
Here, Mikakke, I have put a tag on my blog post with your name on it. Happy?
Edited to Add: and little stinky snookums made a blog entry about me and linked it. Screenshot in case he takes it down per his usual bukakke
Edited to add again: Pacione says we should stop terrorizing Philbin
With a hat tip to Rusty Nail
Secret military files have recently been unearthed! The movie Them has been proven prophetic. A biohazard near Los Angeles has spawned a 50 Foot Ant that is leaving a swath of destruction in its wake. It appears to be headed for Chicago. Residents are fleeing the city.
Sabledrake Loses Fur! Rumor has it that the black dragon known as Sabledrake is going bald. Doctors and Scientists are baffled as the great one becomes a nudist.
REVOLT OF THE MINIONS! Reporters on the scene watch from behind the barricades as maddened minions storm Castle Koehler. Literary vampire quoted as saying that if they keep getting out of hand she will put the bite on them.
Lake Fossil has become an endangered species as Armored Goldfish Invade Chicago River. Conservationists are appalled and demanding military intervention to save the Lake Fossil.
It had recently been reported that SirOtter was seen Leaving a Werewolf Bar. The paparazzi had a field day with candid shots of drunken author with his arms around two furry females in thongs.
Jodi Lee made headlines today when she hooked the Creature from the Black Lagoon while fishing in her neighbor’s swimming pool.
Noted expatriate British author Willie Meikle shaved beard, revealing that he is actually Oscar Wilde.
A tragic misfire occurred in Finland when Autoaim shot the balls off one of the last of the endangered species known as Homo Suidae. Pacione still attempting to sew them back on with pink thread. When interviewed by reporters, Autoaim shook his head and replied, “That wasn’t the part I was aiming for.”
ExposeTheTard Exposed! Noted blogger ExposetheTard was recently discovered to be a frustrated Tallulah Bankhead look alike and small time stripper who calls herself Ninochka. “I’ll strip anyone down to their bare nuts … except Nicky. He doesn’t have any.”
Giant Lobster Hovers Over Oxford! Mike Philbin has been coated in cum from a Giant Lobster that emerged from the Thames looking for Bukkakeworld.
Stephen Theaker just replied to my review of Philbin’s Bukakkeworld with the following:
“Can’t argue (from what I’ve read) with your comment that it’s a disgusting book – I think that’s the point – but it’s very clearly a young woman, not an underage child on the cover.”
I think that’s over stating the obvious. Philbin wanted it to be a disgusting book. However, Philbin appears to want to be appreciated and popular for writing disgusting books. He wants the acclaim he thinks his genius demands. This was plain from his starting that thread at Shocklines to get people to harass me for giving him that review.
The inherent dichotomy of Philbin wanting to force people to grant him recognition as an author while writing books that the majority of readers will find disgusting is schizophrenic in its diametrically opposed components.
Furthermore, if a book is intended to be disgusting, and then a reviewer makes the point that the book is disgusting, why complain about it? The review has merely recognized the writer’s intentions.
None of you write as well as I do.
None of you blog as well as I do.
You want to spread lies around like pastries at a tea party?
You and your shallow lives.
Your petty vindictiveness at trivial insults.
Your egos without substance like rattling poltergeists
When you, with your comfortable lives
your minor inconveniences
Have walked through the halls of hell
and emerged alive
Perhaps then, you will have earned the right to speak
and be heard.
Because then you will have something
genuine to say.
For now you continue
to spout your shallow claims to empty profundity
while your non-existent souls find
no place to prove you deserve
to exist
__________________
Shelley knew of what he spoke
And all these fools ‘neath ego’s yoke
Are shattered on the desert sand
to be forgot before they stand
Little men of little worth
With empty words do they give birth
To fiction lacking in earnest heart.
Emptiness doth they impart
– anonymous
I admit to the existence of my homophonic hatreds. Homophones drive me nuts. No matter how hard I try, they just get under my skin. I do not believe that homophones should have the right to marry. Marriage should be limited to a verb and a noun. God did not create homophones, Webster did.
Adam Lowe, a new member of the Legion of Nitwits, just accused me of bigotry against homophones.
Actually, the word he said was “homophobe.” I want to know just how a bi-sexual gender queer who makes an innocent remark using the term “gay-dar” is automatically a homophobe? I have been out of the closet for twenty years.
He should have googled me before going off on that rant.
In 1995, my mother, Mickey, moved back to California. She befriended H over the months that their home and business in Texas were up for sale. The last thing she wanted was for H to bolt and disappear, taking Sovay and me with him. She even paid for H’s eye examine and bought him two pairs of glasses.
I had finally reached the point where I was more afraid of H than I was of Mickey. Shortly after Mickey and Mike moved, H needed to borrow a lawnmower. So he asked to borrow hers. She came, but did not bring the mower. She brought their big truck and left with me and Sovay.
I hated playing the tranny card, but I had saved pictures of H in female garb with enough makeup to make a streetwalker look tame. H went to the American Bookseller’s convention looking like a whore. Everyone remarked on it and his agent, Bert Holtje told him to tone it down.
I made it clear to H that the state of California would not look kindly on that.
Now, if you have read all the way back, you will find me talking about a certain piece of paper that allegedly gave H full custody of Sovay. He had held Sovay hostage with it.
I was doing the research for one of H’s best-selling books, and I used that time to go to the courthouse to check records and I got a copy of the document I had signed, but been too out of it to know what I had signed. Here’s the serious irony. All the document did was forbid me to take Sovay out of California.
With a copy of that document in hand and those photos, I fled to Mickey’s home with Sovay and there was not a damned thing that H could to to stop me.
He singled out the only two women to post to that thread and told us to f**k off. He was too afraid of all the males posting.
I have a single thing to say to Mike Philbin:
Fook off, ya bloody cock-eyed creep.
Too often over the past couple of years, I have seen an increase in newbies complaining when someone points out the flaws in their work, especially (but not limited to) grammar, spelling, and poor or stereotyped characterization.
The typical outcry has been “It’s the story that counts,” or “I’m a story-teller, my sentences don’t have to be perfect.” There are a thousand variations on that.
It starts out as defensiveness and escalates into rage.
Bad writers are a dime a dozen. And these days a dime is worth less than what a penny was ten years ago. Frequently these people either self-publish or they sell to little 4thluv ezines that have no quality control and low standards.
Some of them, especially the loudest voices of the Legionaries, take it another step forward and employ tactics of lies, false allegations, and attacks on established pros. They claim that their work is revolutionary. They claim that a conspiracy is holding them back. They claim that industry elitism is holding them back, and they claim to be the voice of the masses.
They also seem to think that playing a game of up-roar is going to get them the PR to make their writing popular. They look at all the views they get when they are hassling someone with far better credentials and say, “See, by complaining about our tactics, you’re making us famous and more successful.”
When the phrase, “There is no such thing as bad publicity” originated, it was referring to people who had skills and talent. Not people who fail to have the skills to write their way out of a used condom.
In the end, the work speaks for itself.
Even if they got a million views a day from the pros and their fans, whom they have outraged with their antics, it will not translate into sales. The rule of thumb will always be sales. Sales are the voice of the masses stating their approval of the works the writers have produced.
The quality of the work always speaks for itself.
And bad work will not sell.
Some of them will point to the antics of Harlan Ellison and imply that his antics made him famous.
What they fail to understand is that long before Harlan acquired his bad boy image, he had established his talent, learned his craft, and proved his brilliance.
The work always speaks for itself.
If a writer has to explain what makes their work so brilliant, then the work has already failed.
Outrageous antics will not sell failed fiction. It might get you a million views, but if the material viewed is poor, then those views will not result in sales.
The bottom line is ‘don’t make excuses,’ learn your craft and do your work.
There are some fine books on writing techniques out there; but they only help if you’re willing to learn. It is not that difficult to whip out the Strunk and White to double check things.
Here’s my recommendations for each member of the Legion:
Dagstine: Orson Scott Card’s Characters & Viewpoint; Marc McCutcheon’s Building Believable Characters.
Kristy Tallman: Eats Shoots and leaves; Strunk and White; Rebecca McClanahan’s Word Painting.
Mike Philbin: The same books I suggested for Dagstine, but also, Napoleon Hill’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Nickolaus Pacione: All of the above.
The Legion has it too easy. Scottish poet, William McGonnagall, had food thrown at him during public readings. He was heckled and harassed and chased off the stage.
The Legion only has to deal with words thrown at them. Although in the case of Dagstine, I would welcome a return to the old ways. He would look great with a couple of rotten tomatoes oozing down his face. Maybe some ten-day old rotted pasta dribbling off his chin?
All this over sensitivity on the part of writers who can’t write, or when they can only manage to achieve poor results, belongs with the entitlement generation. Spoiled brats who have no notion how lucky they are to be writing in the 21st century.
The audience has never treated failures kindly. Those who fail to entertain are summarily driven from the stage. It has been this way since the days of Homer; and probably longer than that.
It becomes tiresome when someone who refuses to improve their craft insists upon their intrinsic genius, and screams about conspiracies. While some historical conspiracies have existed, private conspiracies are rare. And a conspiracy of critics even rarer.
Messageboards are the equivalent of town squares. Blogs are the equivalent of broadsheets.
The broadsheets of the periods dating from the Reign of Elizabeth the 1st to the American Revolution, contain enough savagery and vitriol to make even Pacione look mild and harmless.
That is precursor to what we have today with the internet. The styles have changed a bit, but the nature and expression has changed little.
No doubt had Dagstine and I had this battle of words in the 17th century, swords would have been drawn and one or both of us would have died. Or go forward a bit and the flintlock pistols made dueling substantially more dangerous. Twenty paces, turn, and fire, gentlemen.
But the course of history brings changes. The spirit remains the same, but the expression of that spirit is altered by the rules placed upon society in an attempt to buckle a checkrein onto patterns of behavior.
While it is true that actions speak louder than words, today words are often the only weapon we have at our disposals in these drawn-word quarrels. As destructive as words can be, especially lies and false allegations, they are still not the swords and pistols of the past.
Yes, words can injure our feelings; however, they cannot wound our bodies.
So let’s go back to actions speak louder than words and take a look at what actions those might be in these days of drawn-word quarrels.
To viciously attack one’s critics is an empty gesture. Nothing is altered by it.
The only action that can alter matters is an effort to improve.
When H was a young would-be writer, he showed Harlan Ellison his novel. Harlen told him that he should learn to fry eggs because he would never achieve anything as a writer.
Instead of jumping all over Harlan, H went back and continued to improve his work.
Three years later, H’s publisher showed his book to Harlan. Harlan was so impressed that he took back those words about frying eggs in his introduction to H’s novel, Season of the Witch.
Had H resorted to the type of vitriol practiced by the Legion, that introduction would never have been written. Harlan would never have taken back his words and produced it.
The only thing that changed Harlan’s perception of H from that of a talentless wannabe to a talented newcomer was hard work.
As crazy as H was, he remained a brilliant writer and became an early collaborator with Larry Niven.
The legion would do well to find it in themselves to take the same route that H did with Harlan.
All over the net, at one blog or another, a writer is catching hell from the critics. There is a community at Livejournal devoted to slamming the works of Laurel K. Hamilton. Snark reigns supreme on the internet, especially when it is deserved.
Dagstine attempts to turn a tragic event into PR for the Legion.
Everyone knows about the Megan Meiers tragedy. Furthermore, I doubt that anyone with a teenager in their family has failed to witness the effects that encounters like these have upon their children. I went through it with Sovay. She was lonely at the time. We had just moved to Massachusetts from California, leaving all of her friends behind. The emotional games played by teenagers upon each other on the net can become extremely savage. Eventually, Sovay and I decided to pull the modem out of her computer. By then she had become nearly catatonic with emotional pain and spent most of her days curled up on her bed. She lost a year of high school. Her therapist was begging me to allow him to hospitalize her, and I was refusing because I felt that it would put her over the edge to be caged up like that.
Instead, we overcame it together.
There is one major difference between what happened to Megan (and Sovay) and people like Dagstine and the members of the Legion.
Megan was a young girl, a private person.
Writers are forced to put up with people poking fun at them for one basic reason. Writers are public figures. Even the least and most insignificant of them.
Dagstine would like to see everyone cease to point and laugh at his drama queen bullshit. He trots out the infamous Nickolaus Pacione, who is more famous for abusing and stalking people than he is for his writing. And claims that Pacione is innocent and undeserving of the heckling.
We have come a long way from the days when it was socially acceptable to throw rotten vegetables and fruit at people like Dagstine and the Legion. Instead, we throw words.
Heckling, as I have said before, is an American tradition.
We are not going out there and entrapping an innocent and inexperienced young girl when we heckle writers. We are simply giving our opinion of their version of the peacock’s mating ritual.
Dagstine spreads his tail feathers, struts about, and indicates that he wishes to hump the readers and his peers.
I am morally and ethically appalled that Dagstine could equate the natural phenomena of readers heckling writers (the pea hen’s rejection of a lame peacock) with the deliberate entrapment of a young girl. It is so self-serving and opportunistic as to be disgusting.
We aren’t dealing with a bunch of internet virgins.
Dagstine and the Legion will never be able to shut down the voices of their detractors so long as he and his cronies are out in public, demanding that the public notice them.
We noticed you already, Dagstine.
We have given you our opinion of your antics.
It’s called editorializing and opinion pieces. DEAL WITH IT.
It’s not stalking if all we are doing is noticing you and reacting. You are a public figure. Not a virgin girl surrounded by cocks and singing to the sound of fornicating clocks.
Don’t worry, Dagstine. I have a cell phone and I’ll call the Waahmbulence for you.
Although I have read a great deal on mental health and taken a couple of basic college courses in psychology, I can only make guesses about a lot of things.
H had patterns that I only recognized as patterns after I had been free of him for many years. It took time and distance to begin to figure out what had actually been going on.
He cried at movies, cared for animals, and wrote Sovay christmas stories. Each December, on the first of the month, he would write a new ‘chapter’ of a story that featured her stuffed animals, adding another chapter each morning, and by Christmas morning the story would be complete and the stuffed animals would save Christmas. He did that from the time she was four until she was ten. We left him successfully three months after she turned eleven so, of course, there was never another story.
It delighted her.
I was married to him for fifteen years. He had cycles, just like a bi-polar, but instead of them taking days, weeks, or months; they took years. Nothing I have been able to find in researching this in the years since we parted matches up with it.
All that I can do is describe the pattern. At one end of the swing, he was sweet, caring, almost vulnerable. At the other end of the pattern, H was a raging maniac, destroying everything around him in a borderline delusional fit, certain that anything he wished to do was right and just.
As far as I can tell, the swings progressed from the bottom of the curve to the top for periods of around two to three years, cycled down and came up again. So it took years to make the complete circuit. There was always a major disaster when he hit the top of the curve.
It has been postulated that because H was a transsexual, what I was really seeing was the outward manifestations of his inner war between the female and male sides of his personality, with one half being ascendant over the other at various periods. This may well be true, and somewhere in this is the key to it all.
Certainly, once he had fully become she, the anger and rages ceased. But that happened long after we broke up. Five years ago, I received a weeping apology from H, which went on for hours. She hated the person that had been H, as much as I did at the end.
There are many kinds of violence in the world. Each person deals with it differently.
Physical violence never seemed to bother me as much as the emotional kind.
Someone yelling at me, getting in my face with rage, close in on my personal space — it always produced a kind of Body Shock Reaction.
When H went into his rages, sometimes frothing at the mouth, getting right up against me, his face inches from mine. It always produced this reaction in me. I would feel as if I had been hit in the solar plexus. I could not breathe, I could not think. My head would echo and get a cottony feeling inside it.
if he tried to hit me or did hit me, my reflexes and training took over and I decked him.
However, I had no reflexes to deal with that kind of rage.
In the beginning, the trigger word was’ normal’; later it became ‘evi.’
I had therapy sessions. Every so many weeks, there would be a group therapy and the spouses were invited. I got along with the other patients and their spouses. There was one guy in those sessions that was a large Native American. He had been born with a cleft palate and been through so many surgical procedures to repair it since childhood, that he had developed a panic syndrome about doctors and one more surgery was scheduled. H came to only one of those sessions and never went back and pulled me out of them.
The reason was this: H went to that session. When it came time to talk, he said, “yes, but the this is still not addressing the fact that she’s evil. You can’t address the rest of her problems without first getting her to face the fact that she’s evil.”
The big Indian attacked H in a rage on hearing that. The other men in the group had to physically restrain him to prevent him from demolishing H.
Because I had edited so many self help books, I tried to conscientiously apply the techniques in them to get through to H. He would listen to me and then write off everything I had said with a casual, “Yes, but you’re evil.”
As the situation worsened, I went from illegal drugs to alcohol. The pattern went like this.
I would be standing in the kitchen doing dishes and he would come and watch me. Then he would begin a tirade on how evil I was that might last an hour or longer without a break. By the time he finished, I would be shaking so hard I could barely stand. I kept the bottle of cheap vodka under the sink. i would pour a double into a glass and drink it straight to stop the shaking.
When I was working fulltime, i would come home, make myself a screwdriver that as half vodka and half orange juice, drop down in front of the tv and play ninendo games and hope he left me alone long enough to unwind.
In order to sleep through and around his bouts of screaming, I would drink enough booze to knock me out. After a few years of that, the first thing I did in the mornings when I got up was pour myself a drink.
Alcohol did not take away the pain the way that the meth/cocaine had, but it deadened it enough to get through. I went back through my diaries recently and found the pages where I had made a coded chart. After all these years, I have forgotten the codes to some of the main entries. The chart happened to be one that came back to me easily.
Over the course of a year, there was only one day that he did not go off on me. There were only seven days in which he went off into a rage at me that lasted less than four hours all together in a twenty-four hour period.
The one day that he did not yell at me was because he had spent it with his current mistress.
PTSD is an odd creature. One of the side effects is flashbacks and insomnia. They go together. Once the flashbacks get triggered, I can’t relax enough to sleep. Putting my head on the pillow is just asking for another one. The only way to ride them out is to stay so compulsively busy that eventually my body can override my mind and memories.
I fought it. I always do. For a little while, I thought I had managed to derail this round, but about six o’clock, i discovered that they had me by the heels. I know what set them off, for all the good it did me.
When Dickstain (and i’m certain this will make him very happy) threw that meth picture at me in response to my comment “transgressive is no excuse for bad writing,” I felt like I had been hit in the solar plexus.
As of last Friday, i’m between books. It takes me about a week to gear up for the next one. i read through two different roughs, and tried to gear up fast enough, faster than usual, in order to put the flashback energy (if you can call it that) into fiction. However, I was not fast enough. So it’s going into blogging instead.
It’s what I call ‘binge writing,’ and usually the binge is fiction.
So i guess this could be called ‘binge bloggin.” 
In January of 1984, we moved from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Los Angeles. I had gained a minor reputation for my short stories, but a larger reputation for my literary criticism. One morning, I noticed the Cinefantastique market report in Science Fiction Chronicle, and I got in touch with them. My first assignment involved student films based upon Stephen King shorts. My articles for Cinefantastique gave me an in with Judith Sims at Movieline. i was the first journalist to say that Frank Darabont was a genius. Back then he was working as a set dresser. But when I saw Woman in the Room, I knew he was going places.
I both loved and hated Hollywood.
If you wanted to network, you went to parties.
The parties were pretty much as you might imagine them. Drugs, alcohol, and sex.
But the literary side of Hollywood was just as bad. The best way to get invited to parties was to bring the drugs. After the first year there, the person bringing them was often me. Especially to the literary ones.
The one thing that I will not do in this blog is to name names when I talk about how I flushed my life down the toilet. You don’t need to know who was at those parties.
Suffice it to say, “it was part of the scene.”
There is rarely a single cause to anything, but a collection of causes. You can come to your own conclusions about what the percentages were.
