Aahahahahahahahahahah.

good paying teaching position

AAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Sorry for wasting space in your comments section, Mrs. Nielsen-Hayden, but the laughter just came pouring out.

Double-gah!

(glyph of Bill The Cat, cross-eyed and coughing up a hairball)

Teresa, how did you get past the all-caps on this man's website? (Never mind the insane content.)

How do you *find* these people?

Teresa, kudos on this one as well. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that you'd reprinted an editorial from "New Pathways" circa 1989. (Just so long as you don't reprint the movie reviews; one of these days, someone's going to hunt down the rat bastard who wrote those "Smoking Movieola" columns and beat the crap out of him...)

Beth, I skimmed through the all-caps stuff. Further on down he switches to u&lc, which is where I found that screed.

Catie, I heard about him because he's been hanging out on SFF Net, posting copious advice about writing to anyone who'll listen, and a friend who hangs out there forwarded me specimens for my amusement.

Obviously, Adam. Also, he's the most important man in the world.

When you lose your reasoning and judgement, all that's left are character and habits.

Paul, I've always assumed that screenwriting has the same Oort Cloud of pathologies and wanna-bes as prose fiction, only bigger and weirder.

Thank you, Greg. You've finally explained -- as nothing else could -- the manuscripts one sees from writers who begin their cover letters by saying that they teach English at their local community college.

(MCC or somewhere else?)

The point I was getting at was that Bendis related one very, very scary situation, where he was in a waiting room full of other screenplay writers, nervously watching these people as he awaited his meeting. One of the points that LA-residing friends kept telling him was "If you think the price is too high, don't be afraid to leave, because at least you can go back to comics." Not only were the majority of the writers in that waiting room frustrated wannabes who had that one script as their big hope of going somewhere besides back to their jobs at McDonald's, but the studios hire a lot of beginning writers for positions as scriptreaders. Just imagine incredibly bitter wannabe writers with the power to decide whether or not a script gets put on the desk of a Scorcese or a Spielberg. And novelists think they have it tough.

Oh, and this guy was polluting SFF.net? Why oh why am I not surprised at this? How much do you want to bet that while he screams about the conspiracy to keep his work and that of his fellow dittoheads from getting printed, he's also making plans to attend the next WorldCon and get all close and personal with the very editors he's been insulting? (I mean, _I_ was stupid enough to do that, but I had a death wish.)

Sorry, I forgot: TorCon is in Canada, and Canada is all full of loggers and lesbians, so he won't attend unless he can bring his extensive gun collection with him. You never know when some crazed liberal might try to inject him with a disease that can only be cured with socialized medicine.

But after reading this, I must have a word with her; she's obviously been holding out on me. With luck, I'll be able to finally get on the fast track with that breakthrough novel.

Paul -- I'm reminded suddenly of the lunatic politician up here whose husband has been trying to pass the bar exam for ... seventeen years, I believe it is now. He and his wife are convinced it's a Jewish conspiracy to keep him from practicing law in Alaska, and this (ending the conspiracy) is one of the platforms that she runs on. Alaska apparently has a particularly difficult bar, but you'd think after seventeen tries you'd know all the variants so well that you'd pass by default. (The gentleman in question has apparently passed the bar in Louisiana and possibly one other state, thus making it clear that it's not *his* fault that he can't pass this one!)

Hm. He so desperately wants someone to have been stealing his ideas. Maybe I'll steal that one...

Invasion Of The Essay Snatchers!

I was especially taken by our friend's deep knowledge of the publishing trade, as here:

YES, [LIBRARIES] ARE THE TAX PAYER PARASITES THAT CENSOR AND PROMOTE WRITERS AT THE WHIM OF ENRON STYLE PUBLISHERS MARKETING DEPARTMENTS.

Of course, that's what marketing departments had always reminded me of! The $5000 suits, the serried ranks of shredders...

Tell me, Teresa, why not allow the American public to choose books and authors based on public demand? I had no idea that the only thing keeping Tor in business is taxpayer subsidies funnelling copies of Wheel of Time and Ender's Game into public libraries. How appalling. I shall write my congressperson immediately.

What I want to know is, why isn't my crit group letting me do any parasitic stuff? I think that would be neat, to be the dandelion in their cement. They haven't asked for a single thing that would allow me to get royalties (or even a one-time payoff) on their future bestsellers. I guess I'm in the wrong crit group.

"And when he wears a hat, you can't see it."

Mr. Riddel, you owe nCUBE Inc. for a new keyboard. (Dell Model ATA101W).

No, I take it back. The hot espresso I snorted up seems to have freed up that stuck F3 key.

As a librarian who spent the last (muffle muffle)years assisting geniuses like these to clean up their grammar and find addresses to publishers, I can tell you there are rich pickings here:

1. 12,547 (give or take) Lord of the Rings imitations, complete with elves and magic rings

2. 2,510 rip offs of old Heinlein juveniles

3. 42,750 (almost exact numbers, except that I don't know whether to count multiple-volume sagas) pseudo-Dunes

4. 5,682 God-helped-me-when-I-turned-to-vegetarianism (for those into nonfiction)

4. 72,620 detective stories with heroes who actually used phrases like "make my day".

My God, what I fool I was! If only I had held on to some of this stuff, I could be sitting at an outdoor cafe in Monaco sipping red wine and arguing marxist dialectics with interesting young men in black berets.

The other thing I find interesting about R. D. Peters, aside from his density of error, is that his rants are the nakedly obvious versions of the same arguments you see over and over again from other unsaleable writers. The others are a little smoother, is all.

Basic form: He can't get his writing published. The fault can't possibly be with his writing. Therefore, it must be the publishing industry that's broken.

If I'd known they would turn out to form such a distinct pattern, I would have been keeping a file of all the belligerent-sounding startup "publishers" out there who are, for the first time, going to let the American Public choose books directly. Or who are, for the first time, going to publish books solely on the basis of their merit. Or who are the wave of the future. Or who are all those things at once, and several more besides.

If you go clicking through their lists of titles, it's surprising how often you'll find one or more books by the company's founder. Sometimes those are their only titles. Others also offer no-hope books by other authors. Trouble is, what they actually need isn't new publishing channels; it's a mechanism that'll force people to read their books.

What they always remind me of is the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group that was active in Seattle when Patrick and I lived there. They were neither Revolutionary nor a Party. We used to refer to them as "the Trekkies of the Revolution," though what they were into was more a Creative Anachronist kind of trip. Their version of political action was to put on those old-fashioned cloth workers' caps plus their uniform red RCP t-shirts, go to some populous public area, and shout slogans at people through megaphones. As far as we could tell, their long-term plan was to sort of hang around while they waited for everyone else to form up in parade order behind their glorious vanguard. Naturally, no one ever did.

It wasn't politics. What R. D. Peters and his ilk do isn't publishing. I can only hope it makes them feel better and keeps them out of trouble.

This is really scary. I was going to say even more scary than the site you're quoting from, but on thinking further, you've just arrived at the logical conclusion of those attitudes.

*shudder*

Thanks for the weblog.

He could even put it on the "New Releases"
or "Staff Picks" shelves.

From there, word of mouth will cause a
grass-roots surge in demand for his work,
and teeming masses of humanity will storm
the gates of TOR books demanding you
publish him, with large print runs, and
many, many interviews with Katie Couric.

#tangent
Hm. I wonder if unpublished Muslim
extremists issue fatwas against the
evil editors and publishers. Almost
an inverse Rushdie.

Of course not: why go to school when you know that the teachers are "slow moving, silent slime"?

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/pmrmystery//MYBOOKSindex.html

MKK

It might be worth it to buy a copy of _Totallyon_ just to get a copy of his police report.

I was astounded to learn that _Totallyon_ was based on Total Lion, or perhaps Totalitarian. Here I'd thought it was based on Totally On, as opposed to Just Sorta On, or perhaps Compeletly Off.

Oh, and Emma, I'm ashamed of you. You forgot "5,888 collections of essays by high school/college/weekly newspaper/science fiction magazine movie critics who honestly think that the world will fundamentally change the moment their brilliant deconstruction of "Total Recall" reaches the public." (Yes, the self-loathing runs deep today, but I also saw a disturbing number of "humor columnists" in the weekly newspaper and magazine business who threw tantrums when editors tried to tell them that there wasn't a market for collections of humor columns or movie reviews from a publication with a total readership of 850.)

Reading the whole ongoing issue about this character, I actually pine for the Old Days, before the Internet. Back then, when a crank wanted to flood the marketplace with half-chewed and half-stolen concepts, he actually had to put down some money. If he couldn't get his short stories published, at least he'd decide to start his own magazine, alternating between bitching about how the "media elite" had no understanding of good writing and beseeching the readership (which consisted of about thirty wannabes who saw his address in "Locus" and figured that they'd have a better chance of selling their stories to him if they bought a subscription first) to give him money and/or sexual favors "to keep going". This would last for about six issues, until Yon Crank either realized that he was wasting his money or he was evicted from his efficiency apartment because he was paying printing bills instead of rent, but at least he was putting some of his money down instead of just bitching about the situation.

Now, though, that money issue is gone. The ease of posting gibberish on the Internet doesn't improve the material: at least before the Web, there was a touch of grudging admiration mixed with the pity because the Crank wasn't going to let little things like a lack of profitability or a nonexistent market get in the way of The Vision. These days, these AOL or GeoCities pages just say one thing: not only are you crazy, but you're cheap, too.

(If that latter link doesn't load, try this Google-cached one.)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1975962275

F

Doctor Bronner, mentioned upthread, might have been reduced to this, had he not come up with the clever strategy of pasting his sheets of gibberish to bottles of soap. (Pretty good soap, friends tell me. For washing hands, at least. None of them has admitted to using it as a contraceptive. All-One! All-One!)

"Manned cruise missile." Didn't Kubrick and Slim Pickens predate this one by a few years?

1. My high school english teachers could've plucked some wheat from the chaff-- of course, my school produced people like Ted Chiang, among other talented folks. Ted was one of the few to stick with writing, though. (And this, BTW, was a public school.)

2. When I ran a belligerent-sounding startup publisher, I don't think I ever brought merit into it, only the changing economics. And ironically, I was undercut by people like GeoCities. But you do have to admit that the Net's changed the publishing equation dramatically.

Teresa: would it be cruelty to dumb animals to hook him up with some of those scam "publishers" you reminded us of a few weeks back? Or would sending them a customer be encouragement of noxious weeds? (I followed a number of the "Writer Beware" links. If I had a way to tap all that brass I could open a scrap-metal business and retire on the proceeds....)

"This intellectual whitesheet way of thinking has a name, POV or point of view. Oh, that's right, it's a perfect work but it doesn't promote an agenda of leftist, liberal, centrist thinking. Usually this POV must be that dictated by some Femi-Nazi that seeks to castrate the minds of men while whoring and sleeping with every young female that comes her way."

Ah, so now I understand why I didn't get groupies when I was editing SciFiNow.com. I wasn't enough of a Femi-Nazi. Or maybe I was too much of a Femi-Nazi, because my POV insisted that the world didn't need any more "Battlestar Galactica" fanfiction. And I really want to find the young lady who's been castrating my mind of man again, because now all I want to do is sit in the window and purr.

"It's as easy as the teacher assigning thirty students to write ten pages about any subject or famous person, and then handing it over to an editor, teacher partner across the country"

Or rather, no one commented on the fact that even if all those pages were worth publishing, it would basicly be the same 10 pages. 30*10 pages about a subject does NOT equal 300 pages, but rather it equals perhaps 15 pages.
Of course if this is how Mr Peters belive that one should write then it might explain why he hasn't been published.

Seriously, has anyone pointed out to this guy that without the teaching profession he'd be rather short of potential readers?

(Thanks for cheering me up, Theresa: I needed it -- the bad news is mounting up right now.)

Write a 500-word essay about your summer vacation as a transgendered atheist Pakistani role-playing critic. Cite at least three sources.

But you see, I know from whence I came. I certainly haven't written anything publishable yet. And probably will never write any publishable fiction. Almost no student has. Any 16 year old writing publishable fiction? Well. That's MARKETABLE.

One of the things I've wound up saying to them when I've run into them online is "No, no, you're taking this all wrong -- you have to understand that it's completely personal."

Okay, that was a visual I REALLY didn't need.

I've got to quit reading this thing at work. My cubemates are gophering to see what all the giggling is about.

If you want a real giggle, he's currently offering a free FirstBooks deal for the person who can buy his "Totallyon" and best edit it for his third printing.

Tempting, isn't it?

I am not the least bit tempted to edit his awful book. I have plenty of good manuscripts that need editing. Besides, finding problems that need fixing in R. J. Peters' writing would be like kicking a three-legged dog: no great achievement in its own right, unpleasant for all concerned, and he wouldn't get any better in consequence of your doing it.

But I'm sure I'm leaving out some of the REALLY crazy stuff.

Believe it or not, the posted sample may be one of RD's more lucid commentaries. Maybe someday you'll learn how the Department of Defense and Boeing Corporation got their idea for a major weapons system directly from his book, "TotallyOn," at least ten years before it was vanity-published. Or how NASA didn't know rockets would operate in the vacuum of space until Johnny Carson explained it to the engineers. Or that for a number of years RD was charging >>>$125

I'm sure I'm leaving out some of the seriously crazy stuff.

-j

My own interactions with MES were all civil.

You want a net.kook, you try Archimedes Plutonium. Now THERE was a kook!

Quoting: "Only Meitner had both the ability and the necessity of making such a momentous discovery. The penis-bearing morons were all great men and their careers were assured. But Jews, women, and other subhumans were destined only for the gas ovens of Auschwitz, to be used for slave labor, and turned into soap."

Not kooky enough for you?

My example of a bush-league net.kook would be the day Daniel Bernstein appeared in comp.std.c, relentlessly arguing that the new C standard was completely useless because the sum of two pointers was undefined. Everyone up to and including Dennis Ritchie bent over backwards to explain in incredible detail how this would be not only pointless but harmful, and it didn't even slow him down:

At the USENIX contest for "name your favorite proposed window manager feature", whose results were announced at 2pm yesterday, one of the entries of note was `dbwm', the Dan Bernstein window manager: it argues with you for 10 weeks whenever you want to move a window.

-j

And, you know, back when they were the problem of the Internet? That was the glory days. I'd gladly take 100 Usenet Kooks rahter then the crap we deal with nowadays.

Much as I loath email spammers, I don't find them to clog up my inbox quite so much as the times I underwent serious mailbombing by one specimen.

Subject: Spam Count

Date: 10/18/03 11:55 pm

From: "Erik V. Olson" (address elided)

To: eriko@mvp.net

10818

What more do I have to fear? I'm mailbombed on a daily basis anymore. (That's a month-to-date count )