I’ve stalled on that damned book. The author is acting like an ass over on Goodreads, harassing, stealing identities, creating socks as fast as GRs bans them. His bad behavior got me to thinking and here we are.
I never considered the writing of a book to be performance art but lately with all the Badly Behaving Authors multiplying like rabbits you have to wonder how they define being an author. And then there are the bloggers out for truth, justice and, let’s face it, the fame of bagging the biggest BBA. It’s sort of like Swamp People, they bait their hooks and wait for the big gator/BBA to come along and bite. Then they grab them by the tail and let them thrash around.
Creates quite a show. Lots of splashing around, lots of screaming and shouting, the outcome of each encounter is up for grabs. If the gator BBA wins they cruise off to write a triumphant blog about their righteous actions and how the supposed good guys are really the bad guys. If the blogger wins there is a lot of posturing and preening and screencaps of their victory. Just like hanging that dead gator up and getting a picture.
Everybody involved makes noise and they all retreat and there’s a new episode next week. Or a repeat. Lots of those.
And it can be fun to watch the occasional episode but really, just how many ways are there to trap a gator BBA? Especially one that’s wriggled away before. After a while your audience can predict the next move, then the countermove, then they conclude that both sides aren’t too swift or are just playing with each other for the 15 minutes of fame factor and they lose interest and go read a good or a bad book.
And deal with all the small shit that is happening to them. Like now. Like Victor Bertolaccini, he’s the author of the book I’m trying to read, he’s the author currently running amok on Goodreads. He’s not worth the time or energy of any of these bloggers of truth, justice, and 15 minutes of fame. He isn’t that big of an internet presence. He won’t get your name on the first page of a Google search.
But don’t you worry, the rest of us can handle Victor and the many more just like him. We’ve been doing it all along. We might bitch a little, okay, a lot. We might complain, rant rave, froth. But we do it. We have each other’s backs. You just have that big ol’ gator BBA. When he/she’s gone so is the show.
So is your “fame”.
38 Caliber Reviews 
I admit that I have a cursory understanding this but the whole STGRB has been inundating my inbox and facebook for a while now. From what I understand, the author in question started to misbehave on public forums because of a bad review (as have many others, people I don’t even know and couldn’t name if you held a gun to my head–please don’t do that by the way). Was that wrong? Hell yes.
On the flip side, I’ve seen how berating some reviewers can be. They go beyond saying what they didn’t like…way beyond. Some can cross the line into being crass and even getting personal. ‘This book is a pile of shit, this person should give it up’, etc, etc. That’s not right either and I can see how some authors would just get sick of it and lash out, only to most likely regret it later. Speaking as a long time reviewer (and I’ll be honest, I write good reviews. It’s one thing I AM confident about), I never EVER get personal. I never get nasty. Hell, most times when I write a bad review I put in a line saying something along the lines of ‘this isn’t by any means an attempt to bash the writer, blah blah blah’. A few have commented on my negative reviews and thanked me for the honest opinion. I’m sure it happens to lots of others too. I’m hardly unique.
But this thing has spiraled out of control. Nobody took the high road and just let it die. Now it’s escalated to the point where people on both sides are making it their missions in life to one up the other, to raise their hands and say ‘I win, you lose!’. (If I’m not mistaken, didn’t the reviewer side accuse a certain badly behaving author of being a pedophile on the message boards? Is it any wonder it’s gotten to a fever pitch?) Nobody’s winning this thing. If people would have let it die, the likelihood of all the bogus bogs, mudslinging and ‘drop dox’ type of thing would most likely be nil. It’s become a mobius strip, a snake eating its own tail. Each side keeps feeding the other’s anger and the result is a vicious cycle.
I’ve been in so many flamewars on so many message boards, from guitar gear to comic books and I’d finally learned that the best way to end this sort of thing is to just walk away.
I may have a different view because I’m not involved in this anyway whatsoever, but hey, this is just my opinion. It’s by no means (does this sound familiar) to be misconstrued as bashing of people on either side.
That’s the fun thing about free speech. Writers want our money. If they want that, they get our opinion, however we wish to express it. You’re kind of soft peddling the stalking and doxxing the STGRB committed and have repeatedly threatened to take up again. Oh, wait, they’ve already done that again. Shitty reviews equal stalking now?
Pretty much everything equals stalking or bullying. It’s so easy to point and shriek. For anyone who has had to endure really being stalked or bullied watching someone online having a hissy fit over a little cross and jostle must be an insult.
I have been thinking though about what happens now. Where do we go from here? The damage that has been done isn’t easily ignored and shouldn’t be but we have to find a way to make our environment less toxic.
That’s why I was hoping to be able to scale things down a little, but Douthit, etc, don’t seem interested in that. It’s all about lashing out and getting back at people for them.
Soon she’s going to find herself sitting on a big pile of nothing with her “friends’, most of which are in her head. They won’t support each other but will all scuttle off trying to resurrect their writing careers and finding out that the internet has a long memory and for some very little forgiveness.
But we are fast approaching a point where we all have to sit down and decide where to go from here because this isn’t working.