On the trail of words connected in twisted circles

There is both blessing and curse in capacious memory, but more blessing I think than curse.

Based on the information I've been able to dig up -- for which I have to thank Google in part -- I must have read the story in the spring or summer of 1959, when I was roughly ten and a half years old.  It appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, one of several large-format, heavily illustrated magazines my parents subscribed to.  I don't think I actually read the story more than twice, and perhaps only once, before that issue of the magazine went into the trash.

I did not, however, forget it.

Why one particular story would stick with me, I don't know.  But it did.  The story did, but not the title or the author.

Science fiction was never my favorite genre, and this was science fiction, so perhaps I didn't remember the peripheral details simply because I never encountered the author again, never had the footnote of that particular story brought to my attention again.  It didn't matter.  The story was there.

I do remember that at the time, when I was hardly even a pre-teen, the cleverness of the ending was eye-wideningly superb.  Nothing else impressed me so much as that ending.

Years later, when I was much more of a budding author, I went in search of the story.  I was in high school then, and had started or perhaps had already finished my first complete novel.  I have no idea what prompted me to go searching for the tale but I did, at the public library.  Again, I did not know the author or the title, and the passage of five or six or seven years since childhood had somewhat dimmed my memory of which magazine and which year, but I began the search anyway.  whatever indexes -- the search engines of the mid-1960s -- were available then, I used them to advantage and finally identified the story.  To my delight, it had been reprinted in an annual collection.  To my further delight, the library had a copy of that collection.  I found it on the shelf and sat down to devour this much-remembered story.

And of that reading I remember almost nothing.

Was I still as impressed with the ending?  I don't know.  Did I glean any other kernels of story-telling skill from the rest of the tale?  I don't know.  Had the story lost its magic with my own maturity, or whatever maturity it is that a teen-ager has?  I don't know.

What I do know is that I remembered the title of the story.

More years passed.  Many more.  I left the community of that public library, married, had a family, wrote and published more books than that horrible adolescent thing I called a novel.  Walked away from writing, went back to college, was suddenly widowed, and life changed.  And that ending did not leave me.

Again, I am not a great reader of science fiction.  I have a nodding acquaintance with it, and I have read some.  I have probably read more about science fiction than I have actually read in the genre itself.  (Fantasy is another matter entirely.)  I watched Star Trek TOS more in syndicated reruns than the original broadcasts, and I've seen a few of the films.  I caught perhaps one or two episodes of TNG, but no more than that.  Star Wars, yes, the first/middle three chapters, and some of the similar films of the '70s.  The three novels I remember most clearly were apocalyptic: Larry Nivens' Lucifer's Hammer; Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon!; and Max Ehrlich's The Big Eye. 

A few short stories -- aside from Rod Serling's Twilight Zone collections -- stuck with me in a fashion similar to this one.  Poul Anderson's "The Light" was one, and again it was because of the ending.  The same with Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "The Star."

As I began the journey back to my own writing, I knew that I had those stories, long and short, in my personal vault of memory, and some were also within easy reach on the bookshelves in my home.  But one was missing.  Title known, ending still astonishing, but I did not have the text.  In 2010, perhaps 40 years after I rediscovered it the first time, I went on another search.  This time it didn't take flipping through paper indexes to find it; Google brought it to me in mere fractions of a second.  I had only to key in the title.

Now I had the rest of the information:  author, publication data, even the reprinted annual collection from Saturday Evening Post.  Within a week, I had a copy of the collection, purchased for one cent (plus shipping, of course) from Amazon.

It was not a short story but a novelette, so there was more on this 40-years-on reading for me to absorb and analyze.  The basic premise was exactly as remembered, and of course that ending, but except for that I might as well have been reading it for the first time.  Nearly everything else had been forgotten:  Details, motivation, circumstances.  Reading with a more mature experience and more critical eye, I found flaws that had not been apparent to my 10-year-old self or even my teen-aged incarnation.  I also found something else, however, that transcended the flaws and brought them into the perspective of that still awesome ending.

This was more than an adventure story, a treasure-hunting story, a character-versus-monster story.  Like all truly well-constructed stories, this contained more than one conflict.  Character versus self, character versus society, character versus fate/the gods, even a bit of character versus technology.

I wondered how it would have been written differently, if some of the flaws had been addressed and revisions integrated to highlight the other aspects of the deeper story.  I began to play editor, but only for a while.  There wasn't time to do more.

But I also wondered what had ever become of the author.  I had never heard of him before, nor had I ever encountered him during my various travels through science fiction and fantasy.  Again, I turned to the Great Google and learned more.  Much more.

"The Tale of the Fourth Stranger" was written by Australian Anthony Coburn and published in the 4 April 1959 edition of The Saturday Evening Post.  On the surface, it is a treasure-hunting tale, sparked by an oft-told legend of a monster guarding the riches.  And that is enough.

Coburn, born in 1927, had left Australia and gone to the UK, where he worked for the BBC as a screenwriter and producer.  Just a few years after writing "The Tale of the Fourth Stranger," he wrote the script for what would become the first serial for the Doctor Who program, "An Unearthly Child."

I have never seen a single episode of Dr. Who.  I know virtually nothing about it.  Coburn's IMDb page does not include a credit for "The Tale of the Fourth Stranger."  Further reading suggests there are other things, including some related to Dr. Who, for which he has not received credit.

Following words and following ideas can take one into unusual territory, sometime enlightening, sometimes frightening.

A Kirkus review of that collection of Saturday Evening Post stories is such territory.  The entire review is but a middling-long paragraph, yet it contains one of those sentences that can have more impact than expected.  Not all the stories included in the anthology are mentioned, but Coburn's is:

.. . . and the adventure of a hero of mythological proportions -- his battle with a sea monster, discovery of buried treasure and his realization of the self-deception of the cynical -- in Anthony Colburn's(sic) The Tale of the Fourth Stranger.

Anthony Coburn died in April 1977, not yet 50 years old.  At the time, he was the producer for the BBC series Poldark.

I do not believe in blessings or curses.  I certainly do not believe in omens.

And yet, and yet. . .

You have my word: As of 15 November 2014, I will not buy, read....

. . . rate, or review or in any other way promote any book published by HarperCollins.  Period.  I refuse to support a publisher that supports a stalker.

Will such a boycott harm innocent authors?  Well, if I'm the only one boycotting, then probably not. And as far as I know KH is the only HarperCollins author who has stalked and harassed a reviewer to the extent she did.  All the other HC authors, then, are innocent and by some reasoning don't deserve to be boycotted.

Let's be honest with ourselves.  Brutally honest.  Let's admit that we really just don't want to deprive ourselves of the pleasure of reading those other authors.  We're sympathetic to Blythe Harris's plight and we really think that author was totally 100% wrong, but doing without our favorite HC authors, well, that's more sacrifice than some of us want to make.  And so we're hiding behind the excuse that we don't want to hurt innocent authors.

Blythe Harris was stalked, harassed, and silenced.

The message being sent right now by HarperCollins is that they have no problem with that.  They really don't care about Blythe Harris or about any other reviewer.  The silence from the HC authors also says they have no problem with it.  They don't care that Blythe Harris was silenced for not liking a book.

Right now, HarperCollins is supporting, with their contract and with their silence, an author who proudly admitted stalking a reviewer who didn't like her book.  They are implicitly saying to all their authors, "Hey, if you want to stalk and harass and threaten people who find fault with your books, go right ahead."

How much solidarity are you, as readers and reviewers and maybe even as authors, willing to show with Blythe Harris?  Are you willing to do without a few books over the next few months?  Are you willing to say to your favorite HC authors, in effect, "Sorry, but I can't buy or promote your books.  I can't support a publisher -- who makes more off your books than you do anyway -- who supports stalking.  I just can't."

If you can't do that much, then I guess maybe you really don't have a problem with supporting a stalker either.

A full list of HarperCollins imprints is here and includes Avon, Harper, Harlequin, William Morrow, Thomas Nelson and Zondervan Christian, HarperCollins Children's, and Caedmon audio books.

If the HC authors aren't speaking out because they're constrained by the company, then that is another reason to boycott.  If the authors aren't speaking out because their afraid, then that is another reason.  And if they aren't speaking out because they agree with the stalking, then that is yet another reason.

HarperCollins, which is a part of the Rupert Murdoch News Corporation empire, is not going to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do.  Corporations don't operate that way.   Their sole motive is profit.  If their silence can be shown to harm their bottom line, then and only then will they do the right thing.

The worst word of all

Of course it's a four letter word, at least in English. 

Fear.

We human beings do terrible things out of fear.  Fear begets loathing, fear begets hatred, fear begets violence.

We're afraid of all kinds of things.  Some of our fears are justified, many are not.

We're afraid of flying, of snakes.  We're afraid of caves, of disease.  We're afraid of being poor, we're afraid of being alone.  We're afraid of failure, of rejection.

We're afraid of difference, and we're afraid of the unknown.

We have a difficult time facing up to some of our fears, usually because we're afraid of something else.  We're afraid to admit we've been wrong about something or other, because we're afraid that if we admit to being wrong, other people will laugh at us or shun us or lose respect for us.

When we live surrounded by fears, many of them manufactured by outside interests, we can very easily lose sight of how foolish our fears are, and how destructive -- even self-destructive -- they can become.

Here's an example:

In recent years, in the U.S. at least, there's been a quiet build up of fear about germs on grocery store shopping carts.  For probably a century or so, no one gave this a single thought.  Then suddenly we began to notice people bringing little disposable wipes with them to swab off the handles of the carts before using them.  Next thing you know, there were dispensers of little disposable wipes at the entrance to every supermarket.  For a while a few years ago, one of the supermarkets where I shop had a huge machine sitting outside that was used to disinfect (using ultraviolet light???) the whole fleet of shopping carts every evening.  Of course, the germs came back right away.

Few people ever do more than wipe off the handle.  I've watched customers carefully extract one of the disinfecting wipes from the dispenser, rub it along the handle before they even touch the cart, and then go merrily on their way.  They put their groceries in the main basket of the cart, which hasn't been disinfected.  Women put their purses in the child seat, which hasn't been disinfected.  Just a few days ago, I waited patiently while an elderly woman went through the ritual, taking care not to touch the cart's handle until it had been safely cleansed, and then she settled her cane, which had been in direct contact with the unsanitized parking lot pavement, in the main basket where she was going to put her groceries.

It seems like a harmless fear, and I know there will be plenty of people who think there's nothing wrong with eliminating even a few of those flu germs from the shopping cart handle.  After all, we don't know what kind of illness the previous user had.  Might have been a child with a runny nose, or someone who didn't cover up when they coughed or sneezed.  Many of us are afraid to admit we're afraid of something someone else told us to be afraid of that we weren't afraid of until we were told to be.

You've got to be carefully taught, as Richard Rodgers told us in South Pacific.

So how do we fight the fear?  Any fear? 

The greatest enemy of fear is knowledge. 

How often have we seen this scenario?  The child, cringing in fear, clinging to its mother, terrified of the friendly looking dog.  The mother, smiling and confident, urging the child, "Come on, pet him.  He won't hurt you.  He's a nice dog."  And then the child, taking confidence from the mother, reaches out tentatively until the dog wags its tail and licks the child's hand.  Lifelong friends have been made, because now the child knows the dog is not something to be afraid of.

Caution is not the same as fear.  We are cautious around dogs we don't know, because we know that some are dangerous.  We are cautious when driving in unfamiliar cities because we don't want to get lost.  We are cautious using power tools because we know they can cause serious physical injury.

We justify irrational actions based on irrational fears, and sometimes we take that irrationality to extremely violent ends.  Does one nation become so terrified of running out of a vital natural resource that it invades another nation, killing thousands, to take possession of their natural resources?  Does that kind of national fear blind an entire population to the possibility of finding alternatives?  Does it lead to an irrational fear of anyone who might pose an obstacle to obtaining that resource, including anyone who might look like someone who might post such an obstacle?  How elaborate can we build that chain of fear?  How strong are the bonds that secure us to our fears?  What, if anything, can we do as individuals to break those chains?

And what in the hell does any of this have to do with writing?

Okay, let me bring this all back down to a more personal and manageable focus.


The following is a quote from one of the comments made by Courtney Milan on the July 2012 Dear Author opinion piece on bullying:

The power dynamic explanation cannot explain the entirety of my loathing for the kind of attack the goodreads bullies are using, because I can think of extremely powerful woman(sic) who have been subjected to threats of physical violence precisely because they are powerful. In that case, those threats exist to weaken the women themselves, and also to threaten those who watch. It sends a clear message: Don’t you dare reach for power, because if you do, you too will get this. 

There is something particularly loathsome about the people who posted Sandra Day O’Connor’s address in DC and suggested that she should get raped, or people who talk about lynching Barack Obama, or people who threaten to hang out outside Oprah’s studio and shoot her. Regardless of what you think about those people, I hope everyone agrees that this is wrong. Those people are very powerful–no doubt about it. There’s no doubt in my mind that they have more power than their attackers. But those attacks are designed not just to attack, but to disenfranchise. 

You do have power, Jane [Litte, of Dear Author]. So do many other reviewers. I’m not saying that the power is equal. I am saying that your stalker targeted you–and the STGB targeted the reviewers they did–because you have power. It’s intended as an object lesson to others who are less powerful: that if readers stick their necks out, they will be chopped off. Sending the message that powerful women need to be cut down to size by any means necessary is, to me, the more despicable aspect of this issue than the the power dynamic.

Since the publication of that opinion piece and the subsequent discussion, Jane Litte herself has come under recent personal attack in the form of a lawsuit.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book has been stalked to her home, with the stalking publicized by the author.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book has been harassed on the telephone by an author who admitted to tracking down the reviewer's personal information, and who then bragged about it online and dismissed her actions as not harmful, not stalking, not threatening, even though they were.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book was stalked to her workplace and physically attacked by the author.

These are the cases we know about.  How many more are unknown?  How many more reviewers and bloggers have just quietly stopped reviewing because they're afraid?    How many readers have taken reasonable caution to a fearful extreme and allowed themselves to be more or less voluntarily silenced?

When I came back to the writing game a few years ago, the game had changed.  There was now instantaneous digital publishing available to just about anyone with a computer.  There were countless blogs and websites offering readers a wide variety of reviews and opinions.  There were discussion groups and paid reviewers and circle jerk review swaps.  As both a reader and a writer, I had to learn the new rules, familiarize myself with the playing fields, and even buy a program to identify the players.  And like any rookie, I made some mistakes.  Some of them were rather embarrassing.

In my early explorations of the Amazon/Kindle universe sometime in  2010, before I knew how to sort the offerings for the low-cost and free books that fit my budget, I stumbled across a free book that looked interesting.  I downloaded it, read the first couple of pages, and was astonished at how terrible the writing was.  In all my years of judging RWA contest material, in all my years in various critique groups, I had rarely come across something so bad.  And yet, as I had noticed on the Amazon listing, this book had several five-star reviews.

I couldn't believe what the reviewers had said about this book.  That the descriptions were vivid and made the reader feel as if she were "right there."  That the characters were well drawn, and that the writing was grammatically flawless.  That the book was wonderful, they couldn't put it down, they couldn't wait for the author's next book, that they couldn't wait for this book to be made into a movie.

Had they read the same book I did?  If they had and they couldn't see the errors I had seen, was there something wrong with them?  Or was there something wrong with me that these things mattered?

When Amazon sent me a little email some time later asking "How many stars would you give to __________?" and provided a handy link to the book's page, I took them at their word.  I left a very brief "review" in which I wrote that I had purchased the book but was unable to read more than the first chapter or so because it was so badly written.  I gave it one star. 

Within a day or so, I received notice in my email that people were commenting on my review.  In my naiveté, I anticipated notes from grateful readers thanking me for pointing out how terrible the book was, or even from the author thanking me for giving her tips on how to improve her writing.  Therefore the anger in the responses shocked me.  How dare I, they fairly spat, criticize this wonderful book if I hadn't read the whole thing.  If I remember correctly -- this was in the days before I knew how to take screen shots or had any clue they'd be necessary -- there were three such responses, all in the same vein, and two of them were from other reviewers of the same book.

My first reaction was simple shock.  I had never expected such venom toward a simple review that simply stated facts.

My second reaction was anger.  I had not been rude in my assessment, and I had not attacked the author in any way.  I only wrote that I had found numerous errors of spelling, punctuation, and syntax and that I quit reading after the first chapter or so.  Yet these people whom I didn't know had turned on me with obvious anger.

My third reaction was fear.  How many more people like this were there out there?  Had I in fact done something wrong in posting that I couldn't read the rest of the book?  Had I broken some rules?  (Actually I had, sort of, but I didn't know it at the time.)  Because I didn't know the rules of the game and therefore didn't know how to defend myself in that situation, I immediately figured out a way to delete the review.

I silenced myself.  Out of fear.  I'd been bullied into silence.  I'd been bullied into questioning my own judgment.

As a result, I did some research.  I learned the rules of the game.  I learned who the players were and which side they played for.  I vowed not to be bullied into silence again.

Since then, I've been the target of other intimidation tactics in efforts to silence me.  I've been called names.  I've been cyberstalked by more than one author with a bruised ego.  (If any of them have tried calling me at home, I don't know about it.  I do not answer calls from people I don't know, and I often don't even listen to voice mails that come from unfamiliar numbers.)  My books have been revenge rated, poor things, and I've been featured prominently on a website that shall remain nameless.  Most recently, I've been banned from another website, without explanation but probably for the cardinal sin of not being nice enough (although there may be other reasons).

I will not give in to fear.  Being banned from that site didn't shock me or even really surprise me.  It certainly hasn't silenced me, and it won't stop me from reviewing books, including books I think are badly written.

By the same token, writers should not be afraid of negative reviews.  Again, knowledge is the greatest enemy of fear, and the more you as a writer know about negative reviews, the less you'll have to fear from them.  If your book is good, a bad review can't hurt it.  Not just won't hurt it, but can't.  If your book is bad, you can either learn from the reviews or not and either improve that book or the next, but you should also learn that if your book is bad, no quantity of good reviews will save it. 

If we have to be carefully taught to hate and fear, then we can also learn not to.

If you let your fear of a negative review blind you to the opportunities presented, then you probably have no business being a writer in the first place.  Writing for publication requires both a certain amount of rational caution and a certain amount of fearlessness.  What it doesn't have room for is the worst word of all:  Fear.

Secret Places, Secret Words

This one is gonna ramble.  Sit back and relax.  ;-)

After a particularly stressful week, I finally got a good night's sleep and feel almost human again.  Last week-end was our local Artists' Studio Tour, which I participated in, and while it's a lot of fun and I actually make some money at it, it's also exhausting.  Monday was back to the day job and all the other routine, so I'm just now really recovering.

One of the first chores on my List of Things to Do Today is calculate my annual budget.  As I contemplate the very real possibility of quitting the day job and trying -- trying -- to enjoy a productive retirement, I need to know if the finances will permit it.  I can tell you right now, I won't be surviving on the strength of my book sales! 

Well, at least not based on past performance.  But when I came back to the writing something over three years ago, I had no illusions about that anyway.  I came back to it because I had always loved it . . . and because I needed the creative respite from the stultifying boredom of the day job.  Though I've not been as productive directly on the writing in that time, it has given me the creative balance I'd been lacking.  And that's a good thing.

Quoting Martha Stewart is also a good thing for reasons somewhat connected to yesterday's post about the cultural silencing of women, especially women perceived to be uppity or just more successful than men. 

Martha Stewart doesn't have to worry about a budget; most of the rest of us do.  Many of us are so caught up in the daily grind, plus a constant cascade of mini-crises, that we don't have the luxury of even thinking about how to find a way off the vicious carousel.  Even if we did think of a way, we don't have the time or the energy to implement it, let alone the financial means.  In our frustration and desperation, we blame everyone and everything else for why we can't have nice things, because we just don't seem to be able to do anything else.

Many of us also have responsibilities to others that can't be shrugged off.  Sometimes it's very difficult to maintain any kind of balance when there are contrary demands that simply cannot be ignored.

So today I am grabbing for myself the luxury -- and it shouldn't be luxury but it is -- of sitting down and examining exactly where I stand financially and what I need to do going forward.

I know that I have certain assets that have lain idle because the day job has prevented me from putting them to work.  Though I have no way of even beginning to calculate how much income these assets might generate, I do know that they are not generating any at all right now.  One of those assets is, quite literally, a box of rocks.  And that's not as dumb as it sounds.

Something over twenty years ago, my husband and I sort of stumbled upon a rock hunting location that apparently hadn't seen very much activity.  We had actually gone looking for a different location and ended up more or less lost, in the sense that we knew where we were but it wasn't at all where we had set out to go.   Having neither cell phone nor GPS nor even a good topographical map to figure out if we had made a mistake or the information that had been given to us was wrong, we decided to explore the area we were in rather than get more lost, then retrace our route home.  The particular type of material that we'd gone in search of was nowhere around, but we found a few pieces of something else that looked promising. 

As it turned out, those few pieces produced some very nice cabochons that I made into jewelry and ended up selling.  Life being what it is, several years passed before we had the opportunity to try to find this place again and perhaps acquire more of the material we'd found there.  I felt confident that I remembered the roads we'd taken.  It was just a matter of whether or not the roads had changed!  For once, my confidence was well founded; I navigated us right back to the spot without a single wrong turn.  We turned off the road exactly where both of us remembered having turned the first time.

What we found, however, was not what we expected.  We didn't find any of the material we'd gone in search of, which we'd only found a few pieces of before anyway.  Instead, we were amazed at the abundance of another type of rock, not only in quantity but quality.  Why hadn't we seen them on the earlier visit?  They were literally just lying on the ground!  Everywhere!  Despite the temptation to pick up every piece in sight, we took only those that looked most likely to yield jewelry-quality cut stones. 

Over the next several years, we cut and polished a lot of those rocks.  I made them into jewelry and sold them.  And we went back for more. 

We never told anyone precisely where they came from.  "Somewhere in Arizona" was the extent of the information we gave out. 

As far as I've been able to determine, the site is not listed in any rock hunting guidebook nor has it been written up in any magazine articles or on any websites. 

I still have a box of those rocks.

Last week-end, during the Studio Tour, one of the visitors to my studio wanted to buy one of the rocks.  I have certain pieces that I use for display to illustrate the original material from which the jewelry is made, and those pieces are not for sale.  The lady tried very hard to get me to sell it, but I wouldn't.  In a way, it's one of those "nice things" that I do have and don't want to part with.

But it's also more than just a "nice thing."  It's a part of me, a part of my personal experience, my memories, my knowledge.  The secret of its source is my secret, even if someone else has by now been to that particular place and found those particular rocks.

I could drive out there now, today, and probably find more of them.  Google Earth tells me the roads are still where I remember them.  No Panoramio photos have been posted, which suggests few people have gone out there even to take pictures.  I see no new dirt bike, four-wheeler, or hiking trails so indelibly etched in the desert that they are visible from satellites.  Perhaps, my husband being gone almost ten years now, it's still my secret.

Does that secret have a value that can be part of the budget calculation?  Can I use that secret, that knowledge, that experience, to break free of the daily grind and crises?  At what point does the secret lose its value simply because it's a secret?

At last week's Studio Tour, I sold two pieces of jewelry that had been especially dear to me.  I'm not sure why, except maybe it's that "nice things" syndrome.  I hated to part with them, but I also knew that I myself was not personally ever going to wear them.  They might as well provide me with a little bit of income and provide someone else with some enjoyment.  So I let them go.

One of the issues I've railed on frequently throughout this blog is the failure -- at times I'm tempted to call it the refusal -- of the writing community to set and then enforce some kind of quality control standards regarding digital publication.  I know that it's difficult for some people, maybe even most people, to stick their necks out and be critical, even when they know the criticism is warranted.  Their reasons are many, and often valid.  My own experience this past week may have reinforced some of their caution.

Back in the days when writers were scrambling for the limited number of spots on publishers' lists, there was a sense on one hand that those of us who had made it owed it to our fellows to help them up the ladder, and yet on the other sense that we were foolish if we trained our own competition.  As I've said before, I served my time as an RWA contest judge; I saw the horrible writing, the flat characters, the transparent plots.  I bit my tongue at critique group meetings where other members just plain didn't get that they had to learn proper grammar and basic writing skills.  In the end, though, it didn't matter.  Those writers were never going to be published.  They were never going to be my competition.

Today they are both.

Today, as I work on my budget to find out if I can even begin to survive without the day job's income, I understand that certain secrets will lose all value if shared, but certain others have no value unless they are shared.   Last night I completed a book review that I had started over a year ago.  I have no illusions that my review is going to make this particular novella any better.  Even though I pointed out very specific problems with it, others have done so, too, and the book remains in digital print.  It also remains an example of some of the worst writing imaginable.  I read three pages and that was more than enough.  The review is not kind.  It is honest.  It is brutally honest, because the book is brutally bad.

Is it possible that the author will read that review and be hurt?  Yes.

Is it possible that the author, her friends and family and fans, will be angry with me and seek revenge?  Yes.

Is it possible that some other writer will read that review and learn something?  Yes.

Is it possible that some reader will read that review and learn something?  Yes.

I'm willing to risk the first two for the sake of the second two.

I'm never going to be the kind, gentle, nurturing soul who pats the author of a badly written book on the head and says, "But you tried and that's what counts,"  and then slaps a big gold star on it.  (Yes, "it" may refer to the book, the author, or just the author's head.  Take your pick.)

Nor am I going to give hours and hours and hours of my time to angry, self-entitled authors who think I owe them free editorial services to ameliorate the effects of my scathing reviews on their tender egos.

But I will share my secrets, my knowledge, my experience, with those who are willing to learn and then willing to work with what they've learned, because now they are in my marketplace and they are competing with me.  I owe it to myself to contribute to the professionalism of my profession.

Just don't ask me to tell you where the rocks come from.

The only two words that matter, really matter . . .

. . . at least to certain people.

Two adjectives, each of four letters.  One is a "good" word, the other is a "bad" word in terms of how an individual, any individual, is perceived and treated.

The first is something you should be, the second is something you should not be if you are going to be accepted and respected.  Both apply much more to women than to men, in that gender almost always serves to mitigate the impact of both words when the subject is male, but there are other factors that can actually serve to aggravate the effects.

The words are "nice" and "poor."

As Leo Durocher famously stated, "Nice guys finish last," implying that a bit of ruthlessness perhaps is not necessarily an unwanted trait in someone who wants to succeed.  It's okay for guys to be a little less than "nice" if they want to win; in fact, it's almost imperative.

For women, however, niceness is the standard.  You must be nice, you must be nice . . . or else.

What you must not be, regardless of gender, is poor, but even so, the effect of poverty on perception is different for men than for women.  A poor man can use his poverty as both a motivator and an excuse.  Poverty can serve as an opportunity and a challenge, and the man who defeats poverty is generally acclaimed for his ability to rise above his beginnings, often regardless how he does it.  That ruthlessness referred to above can excuse some less-than-ethical means he might employ and even bring him praise for using them.

Women, on the other hand, are often not only defined by their poverty but limited by it in ways that men are not.  And of course these are sweeping generalizations, but bear with me.

If a woman dares to try to rise above her station, she can only do so at the sacrifice of her niceness.

In other words, there is no way for a poor woman to win.  She is condemned to poverty if she doesn't fight it, or she is condemned for fighting it and not being nice.

We see this played out in two of the 20th century's most popular historical novels, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber.  Neither heroine "wins" by the cultural standard:  Both Scarlett O'Hara and Amber St. Clare end up abandoned by the men they love the most.  Whatever other successes they achieved, and both of them achieved much through their determination and ruthlessness, they failed at being properly "nice" women.  Therefore they are -- they must be -- denied the ultimate prize of marriage to the man they love the most.

Some of this changed in the 1970s with the publication of the sexy paperback historicals of Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers, authors who were of the generation to have been most influenced by the two previously mentioned books.  Written in a different part of the century when feminism was evolving a different, more militant aspect, their novels took characters very similar to Scarlett and Amber, put them through the same types of adventures, vicissitudes, trials and tribulations, allowed them to be (slightly) more assertive and ruthless, and in the end granted them the prize of True Love, Marriage, and Happily Ever After.

Certain underlying concepts, however, did not change.  The female character still had to prove herself worthy of that happy ending; the reader took for granted that the male character, by virtue of his being desired by the female, was already worthy.  If he had to slay any dragons or villains, it was only because they were obstacles; defeating them was not necessary to earning his stripes as a worthy hero, since that was predetermined.  Many heroes, in fact, were far from "nice," but were deemed heroes simply because the heroine loved them.

Much more important, however, was that the real life counterparts to these fictional attitudes did not change.

In the U.S., white women entered the paid work force in unprecedented numbers in the middle decades of the 20th century, first out of personal necessity during the Great Depression, second out of political necessity during the Second World War, third out of personal choice during the social changes from the mid-1960s on.  Women of color had worked outside their own homes for generations, often in menial domestic capacities, and often because wage work for men of color was unobtainable.  The shift of white women working for wages had a huge impact on both the economy and the American cultural scene.

But cultural norms still treated women differently, and the basis for that different treatment lay in those two words:  nice, and poor.  Women were still expected to be nice:  If they chose to work as teachers or nurses, those were acceptably "nice" occupations suited to their gender.  They were expected to follow the norm and seek marriage and family as their first choice of "occupation," therefore they didn't need to make as much money as men who would be supporting families.  Even if they did the same work, women could be paid less.  And if they were poor, then they could be paid less as well, because they were expected to be nice and take what was so generously given to them . . . until their niceness won out and they landed a suitable husband to support them.  Working their own way out of poverty was not an acceptable trajectory.

It would be encouraging to think, as we are well into the second decade of the 21st century, that attitudes have changed.  They have not.

One has only to look at the way Hillary Clinton is demonized for her political aspirations, and Sarah Palin is not.  Palin is criticized, to be sure, but she is not demonized; and the criticisms she gets are not based on her ambition.  Her looks and blatant sexuality are conflated with "niceness," behavior suitable for a woman.  Clinton is demonized for having ambition and not being appropriately "nice," meaning sexy, about it.

As Janet, a reviewer and contributor to the Dear Author website, noted in July 2012, women who review books are still expected to be "nice" about it.  Those who aren't nice enough, who dare to be honestly critical, will be excoriated.  Because women read more than men and often have more opportunity in the digital age to "natter on the net," as Dale Spender put it, more women write more reviews online than men.  And women who write critical book reviews come under more fire for it than men.  Way more.

Those reviewers dubbed as "bullies" by a certain website are almost all women; they dared to write and post critical reviews.  Nearly all the reviews purged by Goodreads in September 2013 were written and posted by women.  The most notorious of those reviewers whose accounts have been terminated by Goodreads since September 2013 are women.

Women are not allowed to not be nice.

Especially if they are poor.

As we've seen in the recent unfolding of events involving a well-connected (meaning, connected to wealth) debut author and her harassment of a female reviewer, failure (or refusal) to be appropriately nice is permissible if the woman in question is rich.  Lacking similar economic resources, the reviewer is effectively silenced; her stalker is defended, commended, praised, and exonerated.  "She wasn't nice enough," is the judgment often passed on the reviewer.  "She got what she deserved."

Some other authors even went so far as to imply they approved of what the stalker did and wished they had had the gumption to do it themselves to their own critics.  They, of course, were too nice to do so.

The same is said of far too many victims of domestic violence:  If only she'd been nicer to him, he wouldn't have had to hit, smack, beat, bludgeon, or kill her.

All women must be nice, but poor women must be especially nice, or they run extra risks.

I am poor, and I am not nice.  I know the risks.  I have taken them with eyes wide open, sometimes even with the eyes in the back of my head that many women are expected to have.

I am a reader and a writer and a passionate lover of books, of all forms of the written word.  (I can be as critical of the lines a bad actor is forced to speak as of his bad acting.)  Because I am not nice, I do not hesitate to voice my criticism of bad writing, and I do not always couch my criticism in nice terms.  If the book is crap, I do not hesitate to say it is crap.

Sadly, because I am poor, I do not have the disposable income to buy well-written books.  Is it impossible to find free or inexpensive well-written books?  Actually, no, it is not.  But personal economics is a matter of time as well as cash.  I am poor, and so I must work, and the nature of my paid work is such that I do not have hours of leisure time for relaxing with a book or an electronic reading device.  (In my case, that device is primarily the Kindle for PC app on the computer from which I do my paid work.)  I read, when I have a few minutes, and I must be careful not to become too immersed in my reading lest I devote too much time to it and not enough to the paid work.  This means I frequently sample the free offerings on Amazon during breaks from my paid work.

Do you see where this leads?  It leads to my reading a lot of bad writing.  But am I supposed to read it and not comment on the poor quality, because it is all I can afford and beggars cannot be choosers?  Or am I supposed to read it and -- instead of complaining -- offer free proofreading and editorial services because I am a woman and I'm supposed to be nice?  Or am I supposed to say nothing at all?

When readers, individually or collectively, voice their complaints about the poor quality of free or very low priced digital books published by independent or self-publishing authors, they are often told they should not complain about free merchandise.  There is an implication that the self-publishing author has no obligation to present a quality product, under the rubric "you get what you pay for."  Since it's free, the consumer has no right to complain.

Since it's free, the producer has no obligation to provide a quality product.

Even when the book is not always free, if the reader obtained it free, the above conditions apply.  Obtaining the book without paying for it -- offered free on Amazon, borrowed from a library, advanced review copy from author/publisher -- is an admission of poverty; poor people, and especially poor women, are not allowed to complain.


I made the mistake of complaining, apparently too much, and for that I am no longer allowed on Goodreads.  Yes, I'm banned.  Yes, shitgrubbers (you know who you are), you may dance now, for a while. 

But this does not mean I am silenced.  I may not reach the same audience here with this little blog, but I will not be silent.  And because my blog will no longer feed directly to Goodreads, I am no longer prohibited from expressing my more direct thoughts.

Perhaps that's what Goodreads is afraid of.  Really, it's just plain silly to think that Goodreads and/or Amazon is afraid of me personally.  I have no power, no authority.  They had the power to erase me and everything I wrote from their sites, which is what they did.  So why should they be afraid of me?  I am no one.  I am, in the grand scheme of the Amazon megalithic empire, less than nothing.

And yet, if I were nothing, they would have no need to erase me.  Why erase nothing?  Why bother?

Let's face the reality of the situation.  I am not selling hundreds of thousands of copies of my books via Kindle Direct Publishing; many of my online writer friends are selling waaaaay more than I.  I do not have a popular book blog.  Thousands of fans are not following me on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and whatever other social media is out there.  What, then, made me so dangerous that Goodreads had to terminate my account?

Was it because my critical reviews had become too painful for some people?  Was I getting too close to some secret information that someone in power didn't want known?  Was I disrupting the sales of commodities that someone was handsomely profiting from?  Or hoped to profit from during the busiest shopping season of the year?

I did not commit any of the sins for which members are traditionally terminated. 

I did not spam.  Indeed, I almost never talk about my books, do not plug them or push them or hardly even mention them.  Even though I have a new little book available on KDP, I didn't advertise it even where I could have.  So it wasn't because of spamming.

I have no sock puppet accounts, and never did. 

I have never taken any money to post a review.  I've never even entered any of the giveaways on Goodreads, so I got no free books that needed to be disclosed.  I won one book on Booklikes, and fully disclosed it.  I don't have an account at fiverr.  I do disclose whether I purchased the book, obtained it free, or based the review only on a sample.

I've never responded to anyone who reviewed my books, not negatively, not positively.  I do not go around posting statuses thanking each and every person who shelved or rated my books; I really do believe that authors should not do that, and so I don't.  I've never flagged a review of any of my books even though I suspect there are some that are worthy of being flagged, only based on what I've been told by others.   I do not look at my reviews or ratings, period.

I've never attacked another reviewer in their review space.  I've participated in some discussions, even heated discussions, that arose in other reviewers' spaces, but even those have only been very rare, and generally I've done so to support the original reviewer.  If I don't agree with the reviewer, I just ignore them.

But I insisted on posting negative reviews, and I insisted on standing up and talking back to The Powers That Be on Goodreads.  I guess, like butthurt authors themselves, they couldn't handle the criticism.

I had plenty of criticism of Goodreads management, primarily for their failure to police the site regarding massive sock puppet account creation, paid reviews and "like" votes, and the various other schemes authors employed to boost visibility of their books and, they hoped, boost sales as well.

I suspect, however, that the real reasons for my banning are three specifics.  I don't expect anyone from Goodreads to confirm or deny; I know that I am essentially a non-person to them now.

First,  I did not mince words when it came to the recently instituted policy of Goodreads to add advertisements, in the form of "editorial content," to users' real-time update feeds.  Despite assurances from "Emily" that the insertions were not advertisements and that the editorial team was entirely separate from the advertising team, it seemed abundantly obvious to me that Goodreads users were being spammed by Goodreads.  Two books were advertised in my feed, and I promptly placed both of those books on a new shelf: Special Treat.  I already had a shelf titled "Treat," which was my code word for spammed books and spamming authors.  ("Treet" being the Armour version of Hormel's Spam.)  Did Goodreads decipher my sooper-seekrit code and decide that shelf was unacceptable?  It certainly didn't violate any rules about shelving based on author behavior since the authors weren't involved.  I had had the "treat" shelf for several months.

But I had also been very vocal(sic) about the ongoing problems Goodreads had with sock puppet accounts and other spammers.  Other users were fighting the good fight about the spammers in the Quotes and Quizzes departments of the site, which I never used.  The site's IT "developers" were supposedly working on ways to eliminate and/or block the literally thousands of non-U.S. spam posts, which was certainly a needed administrative function.  But there were other problems that vexed users and which seemed to get no attention at all.  One of those issues was the inability to flag so-called "naked" ratings posted by apparent sock puppet accounts. 

These accounts had come to my attention in late fall of 2013, shortly after the major purge in September.  They were posting 5-star ratings -- without reviews, thus "naked" -- to the books identified as being written by one Jennifer Smith.  The books had been originally published by Noble Romance Publishing, a defunct publisher, under the bylines of Rie McGaha and Reese Johnson.  At times there were more than 100 of these ratings posted to these books, first with bizarre screen names that were just numbers, then with other combinations.  Avatar pictures were lifted from the internet with no regard for copyright.  Eventually, whoever was behind the socks evolved the program to populate the accounts with fashion pictures, hence the moniker "socks in frocks."

The socks in frocks accounts also began posting 5-star ratings to some obscenely over priced ethics books for children with titles like I is for Integrity or some such.  The prices on Amazon were in the neighborhood of $16 for a 7-page "book."  They showed no actual sales rank, but the same socks that were rating the Jennifer Smith books were doing likewise for these books.  Anywhere from one to ten new accounts were added daily.

No matter how often they were reported and removed, more returned, almost like the apprentice's brooms.  At one point, "Emily" bragged in a Feedback thread that they had finally been removed and the problem was solved.  Within minutes, they were back.

I wasn't the only one to complain about them; LobsterGirl did, too, and in fact she was the one who started the entire thread about them.  But LG remained an active reviewer of many books, a top reviewer, a top librarian, and thus an asset to Goodreads.  I didn't have the time to do that; I was not an asset.

Second, I spent a lot of time -- which I really couldn't afford to spend -- on the ferreting out of information to identify Goodreads users who were actually members of fiverr.com who were selling review services.  For $5 per "gig," they would write a five-star review and post it on Goodreads, Amazon, or anywhere else the author wanted it posted.  Some would charge $5 just to post a review that the author herself had written!

Some of these fiverr shills had hundreds of reviews on Goodreads.  Virtually all were 5-star ratings.  Michael Beas, before his removal from Goodreads, had 388 ratings, 351 reviews, with a 4.90 average.  He was ranked #97 Top Reviewer.

Some of the fiverr shills were also Goodreads authors.  Beas was one.  Cheryl Persons was another.  Pat Hatt, author of many, many children's books, is a fiverr seller.   Hatt is also one of the very few fiverr sellers to actually remove his reviews from Amazon.  After much of the evidence documenting Hatt's career as a paid reviewer was posted on my Booklikes blog, he changed his name on his Amazon account, then proceeded to shut it down.

I carefully documented the accounts of the fiverr shills, took screen shots, compared dates and texts, and dutifully reported to Goodreads.  I reported a few to Amazon, too, but when nothing happened there, I quit.  I didn't have enough time.  But Goodreads really did seem to care, at least at the beginning.  Accounts were removed, and I received little email notes from "Emily" and "The Goodreads Team" thanking me for identifying them. 

A chance contact with another Goodreads user led to the development of a master list cross-referencing the buyers of fiverr services with their Goodreads accounts.  To date, that list containes over 500 accounts.  Does this mean all of them have purchased fake reviews for Amazon and Goodreads and other review sites?  No, it doesn't.  They may have purchased other legitimate services also offered by fiverr sellers, such as proofreading, blurb-writing, and so on.  There are, however, fiverr gigs for "likes" and other "votes" that will move a book up or down in the Amazon and Goodreads rating system.  An author can buy Listopia placements, for instance, or votes on Listopias. 

As this other person and I compared and combined notes, we uncovered a sock puppet "ring" that was responsible for over 2,550 5-star ratings on Goodreads, and uncounted "likes" of those ratings.  The leader of the group was a professional book promoter, as well as a Goodreads author.  Her account and all the sock puppet accounts were removed; when they tried to set up new accounts, those, too, were documented, reported to Goodreads, and removed.

Because I couldn't report on this activity publicly on Goodreads -- it would have been considered "calling out" an individual author and that's against the Terms of Use -- I turned to Booklikes, where I pretty much duplicated the evidence I'd presented to Goodreads.  I showed how it began with a chance discovery that a re-issued book by Parris Afton Bonds had some very suspicious reviews.  A Goodreads friend had pointed out that one of the reviewers stated in her Amazon profile that she was a fiverr reviewer . . . and that's how it all started.  But as I began to post this information on Booklikes, I attracted the wrath of some of the reviewers and authors.  Michael Beas showed up to defend himself -- but couldn't.  Author Ralph Smith showed up, too, and tried the same arguments.

No matter how many reviews and accounts were removed from Goodreads, nothing happened on Amazon, and I probably should have taken that as a warning.  I didn't.

I believed I had the support of Goodreads, that they truly cared about the integrity of the reviews and the value of them to readers.  I really should have known better.

Some of the shills tried to set up new accounts at Goodreads.  Many of those accounts were identified and removed, some literally within minutes of reporting.  The master accounts at Amazon, however, remained intact.  Names were changed, often more than once, but Top Reviewer rankings (a draw for selling fiverr reviews) remained.

I made mistakes in some of my research, and the accounts didn't get removed.  Sometimes I got notes from Goodreads about it, sometimes I didn't.  Even though I had documented Pat Hatt's identity as a fiverr seller and even though he removed his account from Amazon, Goodreads gave me an explanation as to why nothing had been done to his account there:  They had "back end admin" information that didn't match.  I thought this was suspicious, but there wasn't anything I could do.

Then came the issue of Kelsey McBride, owner of Book Publicity Services, Inc.  She was reviewing her clients' books, giving them 5-star ratings, on both Goodreads and Amazon.  Even though statements had been made in public forums on Goodreads that publicists' reviews were in violation of the no commercial reviews rule, McBride's reviews stayed.  She even came to Booklikes and posted on my blog there . . . and she did so while having two operating accounts at Goodreads and at least one suspected sock puppet account.

I tried and tried and tried to get a clear statement from Goodreads about the legitimacy of a publicist's account, but couldn't, and in the end McBride's account remained, along with all the 5-star ratings.

Through it all, I thought I was doing what both Goodreads and readers wanted:  To have honest reviews, good and bad, and get rid of the frauds.  I thought wrong.

Third, I wasn't nice enough to the other authors.  The negative reviews were one thing, but it was the comments in the various discussions that weren't nice enough.   I didn't call anyone names -- though I was called names by other Goodreads users often enough.  I didn't tell anyone they were stupid or untalented.  At worst I told them their books were poorly written.

Sometimes they insisted I  was wrong in my assessment, because they had after all paid for professional editing and/or proofreading.  In some cases they had paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars for these professional services.  And yet, eventually, when I and others on the forums pointed out the books' errors, the authors ultimately agreed.

Perhaps I should have been nicer.  Perhaps I should have let them persist in their delusions.  What do you do, though, when someone begs for reviews and the book is just poorly written?  What do you do when the book has a glaring typographical error on the cover?  On the dedication page?  In the first sentence?  And the second, and the third?

I suppose the "nice" thing to do is keep it all private and cozy and polite.  Send them an email or a private message and point out the error.  Don't embarrass them, but don't let anyone else know that there's a problem. 

At what point do reviews then become editorial services?  Are readers required, obligated to provide this for free to the authors?  Are authors more deserving of niceness and politeness than readers?  Do readers not deserve to be notified that a given book is loaded with factual inaccuracies, messed up punctuation, and syntax so shattered it's all but incomprehensible?

I had forgotten, forgotten, completely forgotten.  Oh, not really forgotten as in it was totally out of my mind, but forgotten in the sense of not allowing the concept to govern my actions.  I'd forgotten that Goodreads was an arm of Amazon, and that regardless any protestations to the contrary, Goodreads was intended to function as a selling tool for Amazon products.  Goodreads was no longer for readers; Goodreads was for Amazon.  Reviews were no longer for readers; reviews were for selling Amazon products.  Authors therefore were not to be discouraged from publishing, not to be discouraged from advertising, not to be discouraged from providing review content that would sell books.

All roads must lead to Amazon, and I had forgotten that.  "Nice" really means "nice to Amazon."

It did not make any difference -- to Amazon -- that these badly written books would probably not sell.  As long as the authors were allowed to believe that it only took more and better reviews, as long as authors were willing to pay fiver shills to buy their own books, Amazon came out ahead.  Amazon got free content.  Amazon made a few sales.  Authors were just mindless, soulless producers, and readers were just mindless, soulless consumers.  If a crappy book sold 10 copies, or 20 copies, Amazon made a cut and they were happy.

And it was okay to dumb down the readers, too, because then they wouldn't know the difference between gold and dross.  They'd buy the dross as readily as the gold.  And if the poor people who couldn't afford the gold got instead a steady diet of dross, well, who cares about them anyway?  They aren't buying anything, they aren't contributing to the Amazon coffers, so who cares?

I made the mistake of caring.  And not only of caring but of caring passionately.

Passion isn't one of those acceptable words.  It tends to shove "nice" to the side, especially if one is poor and passionate.

Scarlett O'Hara was a  bitch.  Some might say she was a selfish bitch, but in her selfishness she also sacrificed for those around her, and she lost much.  Amber St. Clare was ambitious, but she was reviled for it because she was poor.  Both of them, however, were victims of circumstances beyond their control and they were never able to escape.  I don't think they understood -- and yes, I'm granting them the autonomy and self-awareness of real human beings even though they are only fictional characters -- how manipulated they were by those circumstances and, by extension, by their creators to fit into the proper expectations.

Kathleen Winsor, author of Forever Amber, years later wrote a semi-autobiographical novel titled Star Money.  I read it long before I read Forever Amber, because my dad's membership in the Doubleday Book Club had put a copy in his collection.  But I read it before I was old enough to understand the implications, the connections to the earlier novel and to my own aspirations as a writer.  I've acquired replacements for most of the books in that collection -- Lord Johnnie and The Hepburn and Wine of Satan and Jubilee Trail and Caravan to Xanadu and The Walls of Jericho -- but I never went looking for Star Money.  It's now on my list of books to find.

One book I didn't have to replace was Edison Marshall's The Infinite Woman.  I took that one right from the shelf before my parents downsized and the books became yard sale merchandise.  (This was years before I stole a copy of Stand By for Mars! from a Phoenix restaurant.)  My copy still has the "From the Library of Don Wheeler" bookplate in the front.  Marshall based the character of his first-person narrator heroine Lola Montero on the life of 19th century dancer, courtesan, and eventually countess in her own right Lola Montez, who dared to be ambitious.  But Lola Montero's story of rebellion and self-awareness and ambition was written by a man, just as Ashton Pelham-Martyn's tale of a lifelong search for justice in a society that hardly knew the meaning of the word was written by a woman.  Ash got his happy ending, or at least the promise of one, in The Far Pavilions without being nice; Juli got to come along with him on that happily ever after because she had had her ambitions but remained nice.

There is much more of Scarlett and Lola Montero and Ashton Pelham-Martyn in me than even I am comfortable with.  But neither can I deny that it is there, that it is me.  Would Scarlett have been the character she is, the cultural icon that she became, if she had recognized at the start how worthless Ashley Wilkes was and how much more worthy Rhett Butler was?  Would Amber have been embraced as a true heroine if Bruce Carlton had respected her as a human being and married her instead of seeking just a fortune?  If Marilyn French had written Forever Amber, would she have had her heroine walk proudly away from the man who had abused her or, like Marshall's heroine, taken matters into her own hands at the end and never looked back?

There remains a part of me, therefore, that would like to be liked, that would like to have the approval an acceptance that others seem to enjoy without much or any effort on their parts.  It's not going to happen.  I am what I am, what you see is what you get, and all the other bullshit.  The Terms of Use are mine to determine now, and "nice" is not among them.