Words as therapy, words as dreams

One lovely Sunday morning in August of 1963, I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled to the little drug store near my home.  I purchased an ordinary spiral notebook there and pedaled home.  With pencil in hand, I sat down on the front porch of our house, opened the notebook, and began to write:

Sunday, August 11, 1963 (Morning entry)

I won't bore you with the teen-aged drivel-and-angst the followed.  After all, I was two months shy of fifteen so there was a lot of teen-aged drivel-and-angst to be written.

This was not, of course, my first foray into writing.  At a considerably younger age -- perhaps 9 or 10 -- I had started a number of the almost obligatory horse-and-girl fantasy stories, but by the time I reached junior high, my range of reading material had changed.  I was only in sixth grade, so not yet 12, when I began writing a pirate story in the style of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood, with a bit of treasure from The Count of Monte Cristo thrown in for good measure.  The summer before the diary was born, I had started what would today probably be called a dark ages historical romance, set during the barbarian invasions that collapsed the Roman Empire.  Though none of that manuscript remains in existence, I remember enough details of the story to know that my historical research for that period was pretty much non-existent!  Can you spell "anachronism"?

Sometime between the summer of 1962 and the summer of 1963, however, I began work on yet another novel, a contemporary mystery romance titled A Party of Ghosts.  The plot is kind of not really there and the main character is very Mary Sue-ish.  But there are themes of murder and sexual violence and non-marital sex and there may even be an illegal abortion.  This was pretty strong stuff for a 14 year old.  I'm not sure how far along I was on this novel by August of 1963, but I had definitely made a healthy start on it.  Writing the diary was not a new adventure for me.

Interestingly, though, I kept at it.  And I kept at the other writing, too.  Eventually, perhaps in the summer of 1964, I finished A Party of Ghosts.  The first draft -- chapterless and single-spaced on an ancient Remington manual typewriter -- is about 100,000 words, and I still have most of it.  There are a few pages missing, and I'm not sure why, but most of it resides in the file cabinet next to my desk as I write this.  Like the diary, it's filled with a lot of teen-aged drivel-and-angst.

I continued to write through high school, through my first stab at college at the University of Illinois, through my wanderings to New York and France and Spain and back again, but none of my fiction reached the completed manuscript stage.  And again, I still have a lot of it, tucked neatly in file folders or three-ring-binders.  Most of it is, um, not very good.

With my marriage in June of 1969, I vowed not to write fiction any more and instead to put my energy into being a wife and eventually a mother.  That vow lasted a few months.  But I had never promised to give up the diary, and it went on.  Yes, by that time, the diary was almost six years old.  It had gone beyond that spiral notebook and now filled several.

As the years went on and I continued to write fiction, I continued to keep the diary as well.  It now, almost 50 years later, comprises 23 spiral notebooks of various sizes and has recently entered the 24th.  I spent a great deal of spare time over a  period of about eight years actually transcribing it all, often horribly embarrassed in the process.  Was I really that angst-ridden at that age?  And "that age" wasn't necessarily as a teen-ager!

Would I ever want the diary published.  Good goddess, no!  I'd be mortified.  As Susan Douglas writes in the "Introduction" to Where the Girls Are: Growing up female with the mass media:  "Reading the diary I kept as a teenager is now excruciating, so mortifying that, if someone were to find it, I think I would blind myself with hot coals or simply commit hara-kiri.  I look back at my former self . . . the words she wrote in her spiral notebooks obsessed with two topics -- boys and sex -- and I wonder:  Who are you?  How could you have been so insipid?  Are you related to me?  How did you become me?"

When I read the first page of Douglas's marvelous, witty, and yet devastatingly honest book, I knew exactly what she was talking about.  But I also felt she had missed one point:  The importance of being able to look back at that former self.  Douglas's book, however, is not about the value of keeping a diary.  And keeping a diary is not a luxury everyone has or wants to have.

But as recent events have unfolded regarding the publication of unedited, authentic personal accounts, lost in the legal ramifications is, I believe, the true empowerment value of being able to express, without reservation and without qualification, one's feelings, all the drivel-and-angst that assails all of us at any age.

I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to  write.  It was never a matter of wanting to; I simply did it.  And I can understand that there are people for whom writing isn't the joy it is for me.  But as I've read some of the personal accounts of people who have endured traumatic personal events, more and more often I've read that they found some comfort, some relief, some healing in the venting of their feelings through writing. 

This kind of personal satisfaction doesn't rely on good grammar or perfect spelling.  The writer doesn't need to know or care about the difference between affect and effect, accept and except, writing and writting and written and wrote.  None of that matters, and it shouldn't.  That's the kind of writing that is for the writer.  She and only she is going to read it, and she knows what she means and what she wants to mean.  Eyes off and hands off her words.  They don't belong to anyone else.

That's how I feel about my diary.  When someone once read a part of it, I felt absolutely and totally violated, as though he had drilled a hole in my head and not only entered my thoughts and feelings but took them away from me, claimed them for himself, deprived me of my most personal possession.  For that reason, I never ever ever violated my children's privacy.  I never listened in on their phone calls.  I never looked through their dresser drawers.  When I found  a little "diary" that my daughter had written at the age of about 13 or 14, I returned it to her unopened and unread -- and it didn't matter that she was by then in her 30s!  The privacy of thoughts was sacrosanct.

When a writer decides to share her words, whether it's with one other person or with "the public," all those things that didn't matter before suddenly do matter.  Grammar and spelling and punctuation and using the right words.  All that stuff.  Why?  Because now she wants someone else to read her thoughts, and she has to use the tools of language to make those thoughts as clear as she can.  And the more people she wants to share it with, the more important her skill with those tools become.

As angst-ridden as my diaries from those teen-age years are, they are at least competently written.  As shallow and plotless and Mary Sue-ish as A Party of Ghosts is, at least a reader would understand what I was trying to say.  The verbs are right, the pronouns have proper antecedents, words are spelled correctly, commas are used where they're needed and not used where they aren't.

But that's because I always wrote.  I took the lessons learned in "language arts" class, as it was called at South Junior High in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and I used them to hone my storytelling skills.  These were the absolutely essential tools of the writing craft.  In all the years since then, I have often wondered if they might not also be the absolutely essential tools of living.

Maybe not.  Maybe now, in the days of Twitter and texting, when speed and brevity are more important, when feelings deeper than a :-) or a :grr: have no emoticons, when "IKR" is a whole sentence, what difference does writing make?

Writing makes a difference because we can't dream in emoticons and acronyms.  We still say "I know, right?!" in a way that means so much more than "IKR."  Maybe that will change with some future technology.  Maybe someday there will be tablets that you touch an icon and a whole emotional paragraph will appear on the screen or be broadcast through the speakers.  Who knows?  But for now, words are all we have to take what's in our hearts, our souls, our dreams, and make it real enough to share with someone else.

Sorrow shared is sorrow cut in half; joy shared is joy doubled. 

Sometimes it helps to share our sorrow, our grief, our fear, our anger, even if the only one you can share it with yourself.  Write it out, put it on paper or on the computer screen, and even if you don't share it with anyone else, even if you don't send that angry email or post that vicious comment or publish that scathing blog, just getting the words out can help.  Maybe it's just a vent for pressure and steam, or maybe it puts ideas into context, or maybe it helps understand.  If it's for yourself, that's enough.

But when the time comes to share the dreams and fears and joy and pain, then it matters how you write it.  It matters if you want someone else to be able to understand and feel what you felt. 

We do that, we who write, by following conventions so everyone is on the same page (pun intended).  Some of those conventions are so obvious they don't seem to need much explanation.  We all use the same alphabet, for example.  We all know what most of the common words mean: a, the, and, book, story, large, small, running, walking, eating.  We know, as both readers and writers, that something that doesn't follow those conventions won't make a whole lot of sense.

For example:

Deer Sirr:

I seed yoo wokkin outer the pos offiss yessaday an is hoppin yoo fown mi wollet gotz sum munny init.

Can you figure that one out?  Would it have been easier to read if I had written

Dear sir:

I seen you walkin outta the post office yestiday and I is hopin' you found the money what I lost.

In creating fiction, the writer has lots of options for re-creating the differences between what we consider standard English and non-standard.  Does the exact same feeling come across?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the compromise gives the same impression -- the person who wrote the note is not well educated and probably doesn't speak any more literate than he or she writes -- while still leaving the text intelligible for the reader without forcing her to back out of the reading experience to understand it.

This is part of the "invisible manuscript" technique that's so important for every writer.  You want the reader to forget she's just looking at letters and words on a page.   You want her to enter into the experience you're describing.

Some of us are lucky enough by fortune and experience to have acquired the language skills necessary to do that, and to have acquired them before we embarked on anything resembling a writing career.  For those who didn't, however, there are options.  Not everyone, of course, plans to become a writer.  Many who never wanted to write or who even actively disliked writing when they were in school find themselves years later wanting or needing those skills. Some never had the opportunity to learn.  But no matter what the reason, failure to write in a manner that allows the reader to enter the story rather than struggle to discern the meaning pretty much guarantees that the work will not find an audience.  If you want your story read, if you want people to get your message -- whatever that message may be -- you must make sure your writing conforms to the conventions established.

Does this mean you need an editor?  Yes, it does.

The necessity for a good, competent editor is never more apparent than when a good story that's been badly written is published, and all the world gets to see how terrible the writer is.  No matter how wonderful, how powerful, how emotional the story is, if the reader can't read it, all that wonder and power and emotion are lost.

Again:  If you are writing for yourself, if you are writing to get out the pain and fear and joy and frustration and excitement, none of it matters.  When you want to share that pain and fear and joy and excitement, it matters a lot.  And only a fool thinks it doesn't.

How to start taking ownership of your stolen words

 

DISCLAIMER:  I am not a lawyer and the following should not be taken as nor substituted for professional legal advice.  This is only a compilation of information that is readily available online.
 
If you think someone is publishing your work without your permission, there are steps you can take to protect yourself before -- but not instead of -- going to a lawyer. 

If the infringing work has been published on Amazon by the Kindle Direct Publishing program (KDP), you can notify Amazon directly. 

On the book's Kindle listing page, all the way down at the bottom, past the reviews and everything else, is a box with four Feedback options.

The fourth option is "Do you believe this item violates a copyright?"  If you believe YOUR work has been infringed, click here for additional information.  Remember:  You cannot report a violation of anyone else's copyright, only your own.  And no one else can report a violation of your copyright;  you must do it yourself.

Clicking on the link will take you to the page on Amazon's Terms of Service with the information on reporting a copyright violation. 

In addition to the physical address for mailing notification, there is an email address:

copyright@Amazon.com

The sooner you initiate the reporting, the sooner the infringing work can be removed from the Amazon site.

Be prepared to provide evidence of your ownership of your words.  Did you write someone an email and they published it without your knowledge?  That's infringement; you may need to provide a copy of the email.  Did someone copy a page from your blog and publish it on KDP without your permission?  That's infringement; provide Amazon with a link to your blogpost.

If you gave someone verbal permission to use your work but there is no written evidence of that consent, then there is no valid contract and they have no legal right to publish your work.  That is infringement.

If you have any evidence of written permission, even if it is just an email to the person saying "Yes, feel free to use my story in your collection," that may not be sufficient legal standing for the person to continue to publish your work.  If the infringer is offering the work for sale, there should (and in some cases must )  be a written contract that spells out all the specific details of how the work is going to be used, where it is going to be published, how the copyright holder will be compensated, and what derivative rights are involved.

One of the downsides of instant digital publishing is that many people are using this marvelous technology without understanding the fine legal points of what it means to put something into the public marketplace.  Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's free for the taking and publishing.  Just because there's an informal agreement doesn't mean that agreement will hold up in a court of law.

And speaking of courts of law, the laws pertaining to copyright differ from one country to another.  Amazon is a U.S. company, but it operates and sells in many countries and its KDP program likewise crosses many international boundaries.  You absolutely must get professional legal advice regarding any further steps, but contacting Amazon/KDP immediately is one step you can take on your own.

The lessons in the words

Another week-end is almost here, another opportunity to catch up on some reading and writing after the stress and exhaustion of the work week.  Sometimes I don't take the best advantage of those opportunities, and I need to rectify that.

Ironically, I found a little bit of inspiration in one of the words I posted yesterday.  "Patience" was among the labels I applied to that post, and I realized I needed to have more patience with myself.

I spent about an hour yesterday afternoon on the outline for the book I'm working on and made significant progress.  There's no deadline on this outline, and no limits either upper or lower on length.  I can put in as much or as little detail, scribble out what I don't like, change my mind whenever. 

And in fact I did change my mind regarding a particular plot element.  I realized I had resolved one character's internal conflict too quickly and too easily; he needed to remain conflicted much longer.  How could I sustain and, to a certain extent actually intensify that conflict in a believable way?

The answer was both easy and a bit unsettling.  The character's personal history provided the basis for the conflict to begin with, and rather than resolving it, events could be used to increase the emotional tension.  What was unsettling about this was that I realized I had projected my own personal issues onto this character.

In a way, that realization brought a bit of a chuckle.  I had done much the same thing with my other books in the sense that I had deliberately incorporated elements of my own personality and experience into my characters and plots.  This is the "write what you know" technique, and I'm sure all writers do it to some extent.  Carried to an uncomfortable extreme, it turns characters into Mary Sues and plots into autobiographies.  But even when we're writing about characters and events and situations and places that we have no personal experience of, we still reach into our own store of memories to create that which never existed.

The difference this time was that the projection was unintentional.  But it was also natural in keeping with the character I had created.  And it also had enormous resonance in my current personal situation.

I will, of course, now be much more aware of how I write this character, how I take him through his conflicts and how he resolves them.  There may be a temptation to think of this as life imitating art, but always I know where the words come from. They come from me, and my lessons are my own.

The character, of course, will walk away beyond the last page a better person  for having learned those lessons.  Whether I will or not remains to be seen.

Why there were no words

Yes, I've been silent for a while.  In more ways than one.

I'm not sure if I've said it before, but I don't get writer's block.  While I'm no Isaac Asimov, churning out thousands of perfect words every day, something always comes to my fingertips one way or another.  If not on one story/book, then on another.  They may not be the right words or the best words, but they are there.

A couple of months ago I began the task, some of which has been documented here, of bringing my 1985 historical romance Legacy of Honor into digital republication.  I encountered a lot of minor and a few slightly major snags, but the project progressed steadily. 

As I got down to the last few somewhat major edits -- three scenes that had been heavily trimmed without adequately compensating the narrative for those cuts -- I ran into a time crunch.  That was the bad news.  When I needed a couple of free days or at least a few hours at a time to work on it, free time diminished to a few minutes here or there.   The more frustrated I got, the less attention I paid to the project.  Legacy languished.

But there was good news as well.  I acquired a new critique partner, the first one I've had in almost 20 years.  We swapped opening chapters, had a nice long session of going over each other's work and thinking through some of our own weak spots.  I came home invigorated and enthusiastic and jealously guarding any stray moments I could find for writing.  The book I had given her for critique was a new one, with just that single opening chapter completed.  I was eager to get on to Chapter Two.

For several days I struggled to find the right opening for it.  Chapter One had ended on a portentous note that I felt flowed right into the next chapter and the next scene.  Eventually, the right words and sentences came to me and I eagerly added them, but they were few and far between. 

And then they just stopped.  On a day when I had the peace and quiet and privacy to write, no words came to mind.  Fortunately, the incipient panic didn't last long enough to develop into anything serious.  At first, I blamed the lack of words on lack of thinking time.

My day job is unlike any other job I've ever had before.  It requires complete and total mental focus.  There's no giving half my mind to the work while the other half wanders through plot possibilities and character details and potential dialogue.  When I was writing back in the '80s and '90s, I always had that luxury.  Now, even though I work at home and on my own schedule, when I'm working that's all I can do.

Furthermore, that kind of intense concentration requires recovery time.  I've likened it to holding one's breath for a very very very long time.  Just one big gulp of air isn't enough.  The whole body has to recover, with gasps and exhaustion.  It's impossible to go from that state of oxygen deprivation to singing an aria with a single breath.  And that's how my brain feels during my working hours.  There is no mental breath left for the opera.

But that didn't explain why, when given an entire peaceful afternoon to devote to my writing, there was nothing there.  I knew I had to be doing something wrong, something different from anything I'd done before.

I knew what I wanted to do with this story -- it's planned to be the first in a series of related novellas -- so why couldn't I write Chapter Two?  My characters had backstories and complications, there were internal and external conflicts, and I had the ending set so it led logically into the next story.

But what I didn't have, I quickly realized, was an outline.  I knew where the story was going, but I didn't know how it was going to get there.

I'm a staunch believer in outlines, and the more detailed the better.  If not scene by scene, at least major plot development by major plot development.  What had happened to me during the fifteen or so years since I'd last spent any real time on a novel that I'd forgotten that oh-so-important technique?

I don't know.  But as soon as that little flash of memory hit me, I grabbed a cheap mechanical pencil and a cheap spiral notebook and I began scribbling.  This happens and then this happens and then this happens.  Tim is convinced Melissa wants a divorce.  Melissa believes Tim wants a divorce.  Francesca can't imagine a couple happier than Tim and Melissa.  One event led to another, each conversation laid bare more secrets, and the map of the journey started to take shape.

I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn't want to write.  Be a writer?  No, that wasn't it.  I just wanted to write.  The words were always there, more than I could ever hope to put on paper.  The stories burst into my brain without effort, sometimes complete from beginning to end like Firefly and sometimes a bit at a time with major changes along the way like Legacy of Honor.  But I was never without the words.

Even when I took my more or less voluntary hiatus from writing fiction, I never left the words, and they never left me.  So when they seemed to have disappeared, I did feel some concern.  But I also knew it was just a matter of finding my way back, and that they would be there again.

And they are.

       The key turned soundlessly; with just a slight nudge, the door swung inward. Tim glanced around quickly, then stepped back to usher Melissa into the suite.
       "Oh, my God, Tim, this is unbelievable!" she exclaimed.
        She heard him shut the door, turn a deadbolt, and slide the security chain.
       "It's a hundred and fifty years old. What did you expect?"

Words for you, words for me

A friend inadvertently posed an interesting question to me the other day.  Because I don't talk a whole lot about my writing, she was surprised when I told her that I had written several books.  But when I told her they were historical romances, she wrinkled her nose and said, "Oh, why don't you write mysteries instead?  If you wrote a mystery, I'd buy it, but I don't like romance novels."

It was easy to just laugh it off and tell her I didn't write mysteries because I didn't know enough about them to write a good one.  End of discussion.  Sort of.

But then I stumbled upon a review of a self-published historical romance in which the reviewer gave the book one star and blasted it for containing a particular plot element that she considered grossly offensive.

It was not a plot element *I* would find grossly offensive, but I won't argue anyone's right to be offended by something in a novel.  Nor their right to give a one-star scathing review.

But I did think that review was just another reason why authors should seriously consider not reading the reviews of their books and why they should never respond to them.

Most of the books I've written have contained one or more elements that large portions of the romance-reading demographic might find offensive.  If I were to write solely with the objective of not offending anyone, I wouldn't be able to write anything.  Someone, somewhere, is going to be offended by just about anything.  Swearing.  Explicit descriptions of sex.  Mere implications of sex out of wedlock.  References to homosexuality without condemnation. 

So it's impossible for me to write without the risk of offending someone's sensibilities.  And if they are offended and choose to castigate me for it, well, there's no much I can say.  I mean, I'm really not sorry that they were offended, and I'm not sorry for writing whatever it was that offended them.  I just wrote what I wanted to write.

I do think it's possible to write for a specific sales market, but I also think the author who wants to be successful should first and foremost write for herself.  I write the kind of books I like to read, and I since I like to read the same kind of books other people do, it stands to reason that maybe they'd like to read the books I write.  But am I writing for the reader?  No, I'm not.

I'm really writing for me.

Understanding that concept takes a great deal of the sting out of the negative review that conveys the reader's personal dislike of elements of the story.  That's not to say the review or the reviewer is wrong.  But as the author, I have no control over that reaction.  Will that one-star rating hurt my sales?  Well, yeah, maybe it will.  But I can't do anything about it. 

And why should I do anything about it?  The reader is free to like or dislike the book just as I'm free to write or not write it.

Criticisms based on writing competence or research accuracy or plot consistency are another matter entirely, and most writers (especially ones with little experience) should probably pay some attention to review comments about the writing quality. 

But if you write the book you want to read, there's no reason to argue with anyone who didn't, unless they're you.

A fool and her words. . . .

. . . .are too soon published.

I'm trying very hard not to be that kind of fool.

As I blogged last month I'm in the process of preparing my first published novel, Legacy of Honor, for digital republication.  I knew it was going to be a rather difficult task, for a variety of reason, so I'm not really surprised that a month later, I'm still working on it.  I have a day job, after all, and other real-life obligations that take some of my time, too, and I still need to eat and sleep.

It's been a multi-step process, not always easy.  Although I'm changing nothing of the storyline, there are areas that cried out for better editing than the book got when Leisure published it.  If all I had to do were re-insert lines or paragraphs or even pages from the original manuscript, hey, no problem.  But there were two different edits involved, both of which did more than just remove text.  The intent of those edits was to improve the book, and for the most part, they did.  So my task is not only to fix errors that were made but also to avoid adding back any more. 

As I began work on one particularly delicate scene, I thought maybe it really didn't make any difference.  The changes I wanted to make were extremely fine-tuning in terms of clarity.  Would the reader notice the difference?  Would she care?  How many people, after all, had read the print version and never questioned anything?

Oh, wait a minute.  There was no Amazon in 1985, no Goodreads.  No forums for readers to complain, "WTF was that on page  XXX?  There are characters speaking who had already left the room!"  If I, as the writer who mentally knew how everything played out in the book, saw it and wondered about it, then I owed it to the reader to make sure those characters were put back on stage so they could speak.  And that the rest of the errors were fixed, too.

The writer is the book's first reader.  I know I would not want to read a book whose author knew about but didn't care about those details because all she really wanted was just to see her work in print -- even if it's only digital print. 

Even though some of these edits involve the careful massaging of three different versions of a scene to make sure all the crucial information is presented in the proper sequence so the reader can "see" exactly what's happening, and even though maybe no one ever would notice the errors if I hadn't fixed them, I  know they're there.

Legacy of Honor will have to wait a bit longer before its digital edition is published.  As impatient as I am to see it in "print" again after almost 30 years, I can wait.  And the readers?  All I can do is hope they're waiting, too.

You win when you walk away

Yeah, no "word" in the title of this post.

But there are more words in that title, because the whole thing is, "You win when you walk away with your head held high and your integrity intact, and they can't follow you where you're going."

You don't win when you hang around the pigpen and play their dirty games with them.

If you've been following this blog at all, you know how I feel about trolls and book review stalkers and authors who pad their records with fake reviews and all that bullshit.  The advice is the same in all situations:  Don't, for the love of all that's good and light and wonderful, don't feed the trolls.

And whatever you do, don't lower yourself to their level.

Oh, I know how tempting it is.  I've spent many a night on the computer, arguing online with someone I knew was wrong, someone I knew I could persuade to see the issue -- whatever it was -- my way.  And you know what?  It never happened.

And sometimes I justified my efforts as being for the lurkers, so they didn't fall prey to the error of the other person's ways.  Every once in a while I'd get rewarded with an email or a posted reply from some sweet little lurker who appreciated my effort.  I'm not putting down those dear souls, because it is indeed gratifying to think that the effort wasn't entirely wasted.

The truth is, however, most of the time it's all mental masturbation, it's self-righteous exhibitionism.  I know I'm right and I really, really, really want everyone else to know it, too.

And they don't give a rat's ass, because they all know they're right, and they're entirely wrapped up in their own monologues.  No matter what you tell them, they aren't going to get it.  They aren't.  No, don't argue with me.  They aren't.

(Yeah, that was supposed to be mildly humorous. Ha ha.)

No matter how great the temptation, no matter how convinced you are that you have a moral obligation to get The Truth out there, your only path to victory is to walk away.  Do not engage them.  Do not feed the trolls.

No matter how well constructed your arguments are, no matter how air-tight your logic, no matter how much evidence you've stacked up, none of it matters.  (And here's where a word or two might come into play:  It's "evidence," not "proof."  You can present evidence that they've lied, evidence that they've taken comments out of context, evidence of anything, but evidence isn't proof.  Just sayin'.)

Now, I don't care which side you're on when you're reading this.  Again, it doesn't matter.  Each side, both sides, all sides are so thoroughly convinced of their own rightness, and so vested in maintaining that stance, that nothing is ever going to change.  It's not.

Yes, you can cite all the instances of writers, readers, bloggers, reviewers, editors, sock puppets, who have written stuff they're later so ashamed of that they take it down and then they have to be reminded that it doesn't matter, because the Internet, like a DeBeers diamond, is forever, and someone somewhere is certain to have a screen shot.  Writers who suddenly are made aware of the awfulness of their prose then clamor for Goodreads to delete their book, only be told nope, sorry, it's there and it's going to stay there.  And sometimes, it's true, they will sort of apologize.  But for the most part, confronting them in public is a waste of time.  They're as eager to save face as you are.  And why wouldn't they be?

If what they've done is so far over the line of civility as to constitute an actionable threat, then for crying out loud, take action.  Screen shot the evidence of threats, record the voice mails, wrap the snail mail letters in plastic and take it to the police.  Do not become a vigilante.

If it's not actionable, if it's not a threat, if it's not unlawful, then walk away from it.  Do not become a vigilante, because they have done nothing wrong.

If what they did was in violation of a website's Terms of Service, report them to the website.  The website has the authority to deal with issue.  If the website says it's okay, who are you to challenge them?  If you don't like it, walk away, hold your head up high, wrap yourself in a mantle of honesty and integrity, and walk away.  Do not become a vigilante on a site you don't own.

If you choose instead to become a vigilante, to take whatever law there is into your own hands, then you cannot cry out for the protection of that same law.  You have, after all, denied that protection to "them," so how can you -- without hypocrisy -- claim its protection for yourself?

You cannot complain that they are goading you and teasing you and bullying you, unless you steadfastly refuse to do the same to them.  Oh, I know, you're going to say you're doing it for the right reasons, you're fighting fire with fire, you're giving them what they deserve.  Where have we heard that before?  Oh, of course, those are all the same justifications "they" used when "they" started it.

I know it's difficult to ignore their lies, their taunts, their jeers.  I know there's a deep seated desire to challenge them, to prove them wrong and yourself right. 

But it isn't going to happen.  Oh, I know you think it will.  I know you think you've got right on your side.

"They" don't care about right or wrong.  They only care about getting attention.  You know that.  You know you know that.  But that little voice inside you is cheering you on every time you get out there in that forum or on that blog and proclaim The Truth.

And you know what?  You're probably 100% correct.  Your truth probably is the correct one.  You probably have far more evidence of their wrongdoing than they have of yours.  But it doesn't matter.  There is no victory in this battle, not until one of you refuses to fight.  Not until one of you says to the other -- and means it -- "You're not worth my time and effort.  I have better things to do."

They win as long as you keep fighting, because that's what they live for -- the fight itself.  They don't care about winning in a traditional sense; they just care about the fight.  As long as the fight goes on, they can't lose.

But if you win by walking away, that's the end of the fight.  And they've lost.