(Thank you to a mouse on wank_report for the following post which I am plagiarizing)

Self-published author Michael Robb Matthias make a self-promotional post in the forums of Fantasy Faction. Fantasy Faction is perfectly okay with authors promoting their work, provided they do it in the proper place, but moves said post into the "self-published and small presses" category where it belongs.

Robb duly takes this for the TERRIBLE INSULT that it is.

I am not a small press. I am an author with 18 titles for sale. That is more titles that some big publishing houses. I have advertising currently running in Locus, Publishers Weekly, Fantasy and Sci Fi, and Revolver magazines. I have blog advertising across the entire blog-o-sphere. I am not a small press or even self published. M. R. Mathias' books are PUBLISHED by Michael Robb Mathias Jr. and should be treated no differently that any big named publishers title. WHY? Because I do my job as a publisher too. Please quit sending my posts into the self published/small press thread. My titles are neither. I have 92k twitter followers @DahgMahn and 10 titles in their genre bestselling list. There is nothing self pubbed, or small, about books written by M. R. Mathias.
Thank you,
M.R.Mathias' publisher, Michael Robb Mathias Jr.

Commenters point out that this is... not really the best way to go about things and are accused of e-bullying, being sick, petty, and "jelous".

The mods close things despite the protests of a crowd of gleeful spectators on Twitter who aren't ready for the drama to end yet. Fantasy Faction posts a follow-up the next day, including a summary of the events on the forum, some mildly worrisome self-glorifying tweets, a few reviews indicating these glorious works of fiction are less than glorious, and Mr. Robb's claims of how we're all just jealous.

The fun continues on Twitter, where among other things, Mr. Robb calls Fantasy Faction Nazis and complains of censorship. He has at least four aliases on Twitter: @Michael_Robb @BookReTweeter @MrStubbs @NocturnMP3. But don't worry, they are, he informs people, all "licensed". Are your twitter handles "licensed," peons? I THINK NOT!

https://twitter.com/#!/dahgmahn seems to be where most of the action is -- but at one point, NocturnMP3 (admitted as being another sock) steps into defend...himself:

@fantasyfaction You suck, but only for banning M.R. He did NOTHING WRONG!

This entire conversation is comedy gold, of course.

@Gollancz I wanted to market my books to faction readers not indie authors. Its basic buisness. I dont want to now. Faction is all BULLIES!

Further highlights include this, to author M.D Lachlan:

@mdlachlan Ah you have publishers? 5th draft? You must suck as a writer. My #bestseller was wriiten with a pen in a prison cell. Two drafts.

WITH A PEN IN A PRISON CELL.

For your pleasure, you may also marvel at the spinning skulls and note the name of the main character of his latest book on his website.

Courtesy of @has_bookpushers:

On first glance, this looks very similar to the YA author anti-reviewer meltdowns of last week. However, if you keep scrolling down, it becomes so much more. ( Cleo from ALABAMA writes )

Many thanks to the anon on wank_report for this one.

Julie Halpern is an author of YA books. She discovers the following review of her book, Don’t Stop Now:

I had high hopes for Don’t Stop Now by Julie Halpern. Y’all, it is a road trip book. Enough said. I love road trip books. Several of my favorite YA contemporary roads involve them. Needless to say, I was hoping to add Don’t Stop Now to that list. Unfortunately – it let me down in a big way.

The plot of Don’t Stop Now is totally weird. Lillian finds out that her friend Penny has faked her own kidnapping. She decides to track Penny down because the police and FBI are all over the situation. Lillian is freaked out. Can I just say – uhhh. The entire Penny debacle was kinda ridiculous. A plot line made up so that a road trip could come into play is what I got out of it. Lillian recruits her best friend Josh (and Josh’s car and credit card) to take her to Oregon – and Penny. Totally throwaway.

Anyway, putting all that aside. Lillian isn’t the smartest gal I’ve come across. For reasons other than heading out to find Penny herself instead of just telling the FBI where she is. She is wondering whether or not she and Josh should be more than friends. Well, I can take that one: NO.

To be frank (and slightly mean), Josh is a sorry excuse for a male MC. He is a total jerk. (Take my word for it. I’ve already given my copy of Don’t Stop Now away so I can include specific examples.) Lillian was funny, mostly intelligent (other than in her choice of friends) and incredibly nice. Girl: you can do better. I promise.

So, I don’t really much to say about this one other than the negative. The plot and characters completely let me down. Even if you’re normally a fan of road trip books – I don’t recommend Don’t Stop Now. If you have read and enjoyed it – make sure and let me know what I missed! I love talking to people with different opinions.

Enjoy the author's mature and professional response under the cut!


( Google Trash )

BigAl posts book reviews to his book blog "Books and Pals." Recently he posted an honest but critical review of Jacqueline Howett's "The Greek Seaman," giving it a two star rating because of its "numerous proofing, typo, and grammar issues."

( Jacqueline Howett is not amused. )

Query Shark is a blog where aspiring writers can send their query letters to be looked over by professional agent Janet Reid, and then promptly chewed up, spit out, and glared at it by an angry lamniformes*. Oh, and there's something about insightful critique or some nonsense about helping authors or something silly like that. Anyway...

Query 189 (scroll down for the original version) is a Gilligan's Island/Hawaii 5-0 crossover fanfic in which the Gilligan's Island cast is all suspected of murder and also there is something about magical bat guano and I don't know what this guy was smoking, but I want some. Cue about...ohh, 60 comments of "well, it's an okay idea, I guess, but you should really just post it on FF.Net". A few enterprising web sleuths dig up the author's website, but don't post it for the sake of anonymity.

Cut to a few days later. The comment count has gone up to 73, and the author submits his revised query (which you already noticed in my above link). Now...well, let's let the author explain it, shall we?

"IF NOT FOR THE COURAGE adheres strictly to the legal definition of parody, and thus uses derivative characters under the fair use doctrine. Nevertheless, parodying our beloved seven stranded castaways might very possibly cause a stir. Are you afraid of a bit of controversy? If not, then read on…"

Apparently, a handful of people telling you that you can't publish fanfic and you fail at parody is "controversy" now.

"But where is the wank?" you ask. "This is just a dogpile on a clueless author. It's not like he came back to argue!"

Meet Jason Bloomberg. Jason has C/P'ed selected lines from all his detractors and turned them into praise for his fanfic. It's okay because he admits that they've been edited at the top of his sidebar. Also, bad press is still good press, I know what I'm talking about because I didn't just read Wikipedia, no one has ever written a fanfic where none of the characters were unrecognizable, this book isn't for fans of the show except when it is, and it's an irrefutable parody because Gilligan is gay.

Back at the query, everyone just boggles at the author's giant balls, but it seems to be winding down. I don't expect any future revisions to get much attention, so let me conclude with this delightful quote:

"But questions still remain: will agents and/or publishers steer clear? Would the copyright owner still sue? Will this book create a stir because it uses characters without permission?

My response: bring it on."

*probably used this incorrectly, but thinks it made the sentence sound nice anyway
**It occurs to me in retrospect that this could totally have gone in FW. Somehow, my brain just saw "Query Shark wank!" and ignored the whole "fanfic about Gilligan's Island" part.

Some of you may remember this wank from last year, revolving around a certain individual who decided to claim he'd 'won' NaNoWriMo by copying and pasting pages from Wikipedia and so on into Word and then using find and replace until it was a 'completely new and unique literary work'.

Well, he's back. With his profile page proudly boasting of last year's 'achievement' thusly:

My debut with NaNoWriMo was in 2008, when I completed a 2.5-million-word draft titled "The President Who Exploded." This work is what I call a “non-linear literary collage.” It consists of materials I mined from various blogs, chat rooms and fan fiction sites. I'm a word rustler. I prowl the talk pages of Wikipedia, the reader comments on io9.com and various venues frequented by anonymous bloggers. I shamelessly plagiarize their words -- even their misspellings and gramatical errors -- then transform the stolen content into a new and unique literary product through a series of computer-assisted modifications (cut-up engines, Markov generators, search and replace functions, etc.) and combinations with recycled content from my own writings. These are techniques I first explored in “Marienbad My Love,” the world's longest novel. Released in 2008, this 17-million-word creation also sets records for the world's longest word, sentence and book title.

Which, notably, is copypasta from his own website. Self-plagiarism must be the literary equivalent of sitting on your hand until it goes numb before masturbating.

Modus operandi announced, he trots into the 'Reaching the MILLION ...... NaNoWriMo 2009' The following exchange ensues:

marienbadmylove: I logged 2.5 million words last year. I'm swinging for 999,999-plus again this time. Let the good times roll!

Kateness: you know I don't think your words count, on the basis of our disagreement last year.
BUT
because the rules explicitly say I can't call you a cheater, I won't, because god knows that rule has helped me in the past, and we'll just leave it at that. If you think it's a win, it's a win (Just kindly keep your hands off any excerpts I may post, and my blog if you're so inclined), and that's all I'm going to say about this.

marienbadmylove: Ah, but how can you stop me? *snip some drivel about William Burroughs*

Dragonchilde (forum moderator extraordinaire: OH NO YOU DIDN'T *cites rules stating why he can't threaten to steal other Wrimos' writing*

marienbadmylove: *more gibberish about Burroughs that is kind of really not applicable in this situation at all*

Rest of responses: *dogpile without explicitly calling him a cheater* The best of which is Angolera's: There's a huge difference between writing 2.5 million words and using 2.5 million words.

marienbadmylove: *disappears from thread*

But where is he now? Oh, here he is, announcing his intention to hit 50,000 words on Day One to give himself a 'little cushion' on his way to the million. Please note he never states he's going to write these words, and is yet to return to the thread to pass comment on whether he is typing these words or using a voice recognition system. Funny about that.

And it's not even November yet...

Edit: Classic response from painkillers regarding the need of someone shooting for a million to sleep: Sleep? SLEEP? sleep is for writers, I'm a conceptual artist I am. ga ga goo goo ga ga, gin gang gooly, see it is the conception of the words that matter, not the words themselves. i don't need to sleep, because i don't use my brain -- for anything.

Son of edit: He reaches 50K!

It's all the fault of literary agents, who are single-handedly destroying literature everywhere!

Excerpt:

The substantial and nearly unassailable wall that separates you from us has been under construction for decades. You can find the names of its architects and gatekeepers on your telephone-callers list, and in your email in-box. They are the literary agents—that league of intellectual-property purveyors who bring you every new manuscript you ever see, those men and women who are so anxious to gain access to the caverns of treasure they believe you sit upon like some great golden goose that they would likely hack one another’s heads off were they not united by one self-serving mission: to ensure that quality fiction never hits your desk.

Just a tiny bit of entitlement, elitism, and self-delusion.

And some responses...

So this one time, in fictionwriters, eggie1978 came in and posted an ad (ETA: all comments deleted, but what's this? Google Cache?) for her Official Author Website. Fictionwriters readers quickly zeroed in on the words 'fanfiction' and 'self-published' on the website, and author quickly started using the delete button on comments.

Luckily, some of the choicer parts have been saved for your amusement.

( Also, it turns out, it's okay to be rude if you're British. It's just part of your culture. And it makes Eggie1978 want to sex you. )

You'd think that'd be the end of it. But oh, you'd be wrong. After the bahleetion and subsequent edit on the fictionwriters post, eggie1978 thinks she just hasn't beat that horse enough yet. ETA: All locked, oh BB!

( Eggie1978 posts what she's learned about being self-published, and somehow still intends it to be sarcastic )

lytrigian tries to reason with her, but eggie1978 is not having it, refusing advice from anyone who will not disclose the title of their own published book.

There's many more lols to be had when digging through the comment threads, so have at it!
(Credit to winterfox for supplying the caps and anglophile summary)

ETA Random Bonus Lol: eggie1978 gets pissy at someone over Jacob in Twilight ETA: Also locked! and says:
So, the hardcover copy of my book I was sending her is going to someone else.

NOOOOOES!

ETA2: ILU BB XOXOXOXO! Man, I went to a hockey game and missed all this fun :( (ETA again: Getting confused yet? Me too. This was edited from the original (so to speak, anyway. From winterfox, you sexy capper you!) to further vilify me this (thanks cazrolime!), and then locked. Can we make a drinking game out of this yet?)

ETA3: Another cap from winterfox. We are such obsessed haters. Drinking our hater-aid with rude Brits and obsessing like obsessing things.
Another screencap duo (dialup beware!) of the same post, but some extra comments, courtesy of iwanttobeasleep.

Here's a small but tasty writers' wank that has nothing to do with NaNoWriMo!

Editorial Anonymous is a blog written by an anonymous editor at a mystery publisher, who answers questions about published, how to query, etc. All in all, it's generally a good source for aspiring authors.

Of course, every now and then, the blogger receives something completely out of left field. Like this, an email from someone seeking a publicist. The blogger removes the sender's name before posting the email, but leaves the long list of self-published works untouched. Naturally, it's Google fodder, and the sender's identity is easily discovered.

Is it hilarious? Or is it unkind? Depends which commenter you ask, and they're all more than willing to share their thoughts on yaoi the email. Most especially one Will Entrekin, himself a writer published via Lulu, who seems to think he's kind of a big deal. His collection was the very first e-book on Apple's iPhone, you guys, he said so himself!

All in all, this wank report is a quick, fun read. I give myself a five star review! All I need now is a publicist. Know any random bloggers I could email about that?

ETA: The anonymous blogger states that she decided to post the Googleable list of works "not because it was funny but because coming at the end of a letter complaining about her lack of success, titles like "How to Be Wealthy Selling Informational Products on the Internet"; "How to Become Wealthy Selling Ebooks"; and "How To Become Wealthy Selling Products on The Internet" smack strongly of fraud."

Who's in the mood for a good ol' academic tussle?

1. Professor Steve Fuller writes a book called Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism.

2. Professor AC Grayling reviews the book for New Humanist magazine.

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible...are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism.

3. Fuller responds to the review.

I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about.

4. Grayling responds to the response.

Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.

5. Forum fight!

Over on Dear Author, Jane posts about an author overreacting to bad Amazon.com reviews

The author's fans are quick to point out that Jane is just jealous, a meanie, has no life, etc. And the author herself responds. The comments have been deleted, but breecita saved them

( Pro making ass of herself under the cut )

Whiny pros! Whinier fans! Passive-aggressive smilies!

All we need is a flounce, a sobbing vow to Never Write Again, and/or a pseudocide.

ETA: Thanks to carlanime, a prequel of sorts.

ETA2: Crap, wrong link, wrong potential post. If anyone wants to write up about possibly fraudelent conniving, lying, soul-bonding-is-my-religion! roommates from hell, drop a line.

(But it can't make him use the shift key consistently.)

Giles Coren would like you to know that "a" is very srs bsn:

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing. I have been away, you've been subbing joe and hugo and maybe they just file and fuck off and think "hey ho, it's tomorrow's fish and chips" - well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. weird, maybe. but that's how it is.

It's just his letter, but oh, it's so tasty and I love "academic" wank on a Sunday, don't you?

It's already on clairvoyantwank, but with 1000+ BoingBoing comments and half the blogosphere a-titter, this wank has matured.

San Francisco sex blogger Violet Blue used to be chummy with the folks at Boing Boing, and naturally, they linked her a lot. However, she recently discovered that they "unpublished" all posts that mentioned her, effectively excising her from the internet's most popular purveyor of wonderful things. Last week, VB wondered what happened (and note that all links to her blog are NSFW). Valleywag, "Silicon Valley's tech gossip rag" (must be thrilling) picked up the story, and promptly started sensationalizing the shit out of it: Did the Internet's free speech guardian try to hush up a girl-on-girl love affair?, they wondered, and speculated on How [Boing Boing editor] Xeni and Violet's Boing Boing affair went sour." It gets Dugg, of course, and pretty soon we're hearing about censorship, Trotsky and "strangely unethical" goings on. Violet posts a tiny-violin follow-up and people start pestering the Boing Boing editors in comments to unrelated posts.

So finally, Boing Boing responds. They say they did the "unpublishing" a year ago. They say they notified Blue. And then, in (*checks bottom of page*) 1100 comments and counting, the shit hits the fan. People accuse Boing Boing of hypocrisy, 1984 allusions fly all over the place, and the Boing Boing comment moderater completely fails to hold the moral high ground as she dances around explaining what Blue did that was so "evil." It's a huge game of they-said, she-said at this point, and figuring out what the hell is going on is frankly less interesting than tracking the endless comparisons to Stalinism. Nothing is like the gulags, people. Nothing.

Now with highlights!

Metafilter commenter sends BB a note from Winston Smith
Scalzi gets his teal deer on, defending Cory Doctorow from the mean metafilterians
Boing Boing's haters are worse than Donald Rumsfeld!
Whether it is redaction, bowdlerization, expurgation, or censorship I see no place for it here."
Boing Boing hates your freedom, just like the Republicans. :(
The OED doesn't deserve this kind of abuse.
BB Moderator Teresa COULD say something mean about that evil, lying attention-whore ... but she won't.

Once upon a time, a self-published author wrote a book about ANTIGUA: The Land of Fairies Wizards and Heroes! (Alas, the land lacked commas!) She even gave it every tag in existence, of which only about three were appropriate! (Miley Sirus? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? High School Musical? What, no Kitchen Sink tag?) Unfortunately, it got bad reviews by everyone but the author. Even the forums weren't safe. And neither was Barnes & Noble! THE FIVE STAR REVIEWS ARE NOT FROM THE AUTHOR! REALLY!

And we all lived happily ever after!

The End!

Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler's wife (a fellow author) left him for billionaire Ted Turner. Butler decided to send an email to his graduate students about the whole thing mentioning pertinent facts such as she was molested by her grandfather, that she is just one of Ted Turner's girlfriends, and that she had an intestinal blockage. His whole tone in the email is that everything is so amicable and that he thinks she's a wonderful person-it really is the height of passive-aggressiveness.

It might not surprise you to learn one of his friends or students sent the email to gawker. Now Butler has sent a pissed off email to gawker, spoke to Page Six, and did an interview with NPR about it. So far, it's really only a fight between gawker and Butler, but I wish Ted Turner would say something about it.

ETA: Another email to gawker explaining himself. I think the guy just needs to stop now.

Today on b0st0n, Poet Laureate hopeful deleriumschild made an excited post about her first published book. When b0st0n members pointed out her bad spelling and the fact that she published the book herself, however, her squeeing quickly turned into tantrum-throwing. Then she deleted the post (rumor has it after someone commented saying she tried to get through the book but instead burned it, cut herself, and wrote a poem).

Lucky for us, _b0st0n_snark is picking up the slack and filling us in here. There's even a screencap of the original post. Most of the wank is hidden now in collapsed threads, but you can see where people are getting lubed up.

Deleriumschild made a post in her own journal about it, too:

Dear B0st0n community,
thanks for proving my point
-Embarrassed you're from my town

If you're really brave, you can read excerpts from her book, aptly titled Delirium's Child. She's deleted the book and brought it back once, to get rid of a nasty review, so if it goes away it will probably come back. Here's an example of her, uh, writing:

I've been your friend since day one
I've stuck by your side no matter what
I like you because you're a lot of fun
I know sometimes you want to take the knife
Don't do it, because it's not worth your time

ETA: Don't miss her Craigslist ad and this chat log. They're full of wtf. There's also a little more info on the deleted post here.