I suspect he's okay with that, but it's sad to see.

(I'm -- politely -- pointing the authors of any such that I run across at this piece, but that's about all I can do to help.)

I've never heard of a professional in any capacity refusing to respond to multiple emails from a client over a many month period. That is truly bizarre.

Sorry this is something that dumped all over you for trying to do the right thing. )-:

Glad to see things are being resolved, and I can continue to buy both Tor and Girl Genius books without feeling weird. :)

(Disclaimer: I am an author. I do business with Patrick from time to time. To say he's busy would be an understatement. It seems to me that you -- and Phil -- are ascribing to malice that which can be explained much more parsimoniously by running-around-with-beard-on-fire over-work. And that this is not helpful to anyone.)

Conventions are great for networking, but not great for passing on important information and detail. Because people don't hear all of what you said when they just saw a Dalek-cosplayer in a Bikini walk past.

Phil has not been ignored by Patrick for over a year. Phil does not claim in his post to have been ignored by Patrick for over a year: he explicitly states that the over-a-year of being ignored happened before Patrick got involved.

Corgi

I don't think that's what they're insinuating.

Putting Nielsen Hayden and only Nielsen Hayden on blast, a guy who said he would help out after a busy schedule, was doing it as a favor and wasn't directly involved is a real bad look.

(I've got a couple Girl Genius issues in my collection, so I don't want to disrespect the Foglios. I understand why they're angry.)

Pictures or it didn't happen.

What the titles indicate are the kinds of things we are able to do, through training and experience, and may be called upon to do. Nothing more.

As a professional computer software developer of uncomfortable-number-of-years, with about a decade where I was running a start-up ISP, I can say there have been countless reasonable email requests and plaints which I have failed to reply to at all - let alone in a reasonable time - simply because I had so much to do and so much email to deal with that I couldn't possibly do it all. I don't feel good about that, but it's true and it still happens. Stuff falls through the cracks.

For Patrick to acknowledge forthrightly that he had wished to help, that he did fail to reply, and that he regrets causing Phil pain is simply to acknowledge that he's human, and doing the best job of it he can.

Hell, not even "enlightenment" helps with this - I can assure you from my own experience as a student that even Zen masters sometimes forget stuff they're supposed to do and don't get around to sending emails they intended to. That's modern life.

*That's the plural of Foglio, right?

**I'm not about to pass judgment on the other editor involved, when the sum total of what I know about the whole affair is what I've read in Phil's post and this one.

Rest of the world doesn't know how TOR organises it's editors. Do not assume that people outside of your organisation chart understand your organisation chart. (Or even those inside your organisation chart.)

If there's no clear understanding for the Agent to a current client of who is in charge of what at TOR, that suggests a problem.

No comment on where the Problem occurred. Even after someone tried to explain it at a short meeting at a convention, it obviously wasn't sufficiently passed on to Phil who he needed to talk to. Maybe the Agent is at fault, maybe other people give Phil befuddling information. Who knows, other than Phil and Phil's Agent. But I can't entirely place blame on Phil for not understanding TOR's organisation chart.

Particularly when the stress he faces is being unable to publish print collections, or possibly even any print versions, of Girl Genius for five years due to a non-compete clause with a publisher who to him are rights-squating.

Also, I'm just going to note I would certainly be loath to sign on with any publisher who had a 'non-competing product' clause. It's the kind of phrase I would certainly want to erase from any contract, or at the very least make it specify options of first refusal to specific titles or series.

Strangely enough, that's exactly what I said in my original post: "I don’t completely blame Phil for failing to keep track of the details of who’s in charge of what inside Tor."

Perhaps I failed to say this in precisely the right words to suit you? Exactly what hill are you defending, anyway?

It's my understanding that editorial titles and organisational structure are different in the Comics publishing industry than the traditional Publishing industry. And languages that are similar can be more confusing than languages that are entirely different.

Mr Foglio's just invited the entire internet to involve themselves in his professional dealings. I can't think that will work out well in the long run. Dave Kruku @23: unless you work for or with Girl Genius, the questions you are asking are impertinent. And if you do work for/with GG, note that Patrick has already said he is not the proper contact for this matter.

Since I'm essentially agreeing with you, and was doing so not in reply to you but in reply to others, I hope you can assume I'm not picking an argument with you.

"Oh that's just a standard boilerplate" shouldn't include something that could put someone out of work for five years.

"...having discovered that the winner of three 'Best Graphic Story' Hugos..."

Fixed that for you.

Phil and Kaja Foglio brought in nearly $400K on a Kickstarter whose initial goal was $55K. Why? To publish their 12th volume of Girl Genius. With the money they raised, they were able to print Volume 12, reprint all 11 previous volumes, and hire a part time office manager. Some of the previous volumes were hard to find because their stock had run so low. I think that success shows they are highly marketable.

When I or any other senior exec got some version of "your company is broken, here's why I think so" it was an OPPORTUNITY to find out what was wrong and GET IT FIXED, even if the problem was just a misunderstanding. Even if the complaint was just wrong, still there was action to be taken, to either make the relationship going forward better or to severe the relationship.

What it was not was an option to assign blame to someone else and walk away from the problem. That's why senior people in a company have their roles -- they understand how to assume responsibility and fix problems, or keep them from arising in the first place. That's just part of their jobs.

Even if they personally aren't the cause of the problem in the first place, they are responsible for helping their company get it fixed.

End of story.

No-competes in general are a pretty substantial problem in the publishing world these days, though. They're often used as a bludgeon to keep writers with a single trad-pub book from self-, indie-, or other-trad-pubbing some other book, even if having more than one title available could lead to sales boosts for all the authors' books, including the trad-pubbed one. Given that many pro publishers only have space for one book a year by most authors, it's a sure way to slow the start of an author's career before it even happens. Small wonder more and more aspiring authors are skipping trad-pub altogether and opting to self-publish instead.

@43: They might be highly marketable, but since when has a traditional publisher ever bothered to do that much marketing for any books that aren't best-sellers already? (Plenty of experienced, decent-selling midlist authors have run afoul of this conundrum.) Niche markets like the graphic novel market can be really hard for newcomers to break into, especially when the bulk of their expertise lies elsewhere.

The fact that Tor showed no interest in getting to work on a paperback edition right away suggests to me that sales were already not happening in the volume they had expected, and they'd pretty much decided not to throw good money after bad at that point. (Of course, I'm just a guy at his computer making guesses, so I could be totally off the mark.)

JayBlanc, you have an unfavorable ratio of adversarial attitude to knowledge about the publishing industry. There are no out-and-out villains here, and it's in no one's interest to manufacture them.

Two general observations:

1. Patrick manages the science fiction and fantasy line at Tor. If you check out Tor's online catalog, you'll find the company also publishes other kinds of books. Not everyone in Tor Editorial reports to him.

2. Non-competition clauses are not a big deal in trade fiction publishing, and the issue seldom comes up. All of the really scary examples I know of come from the film and recorded music industries.

Chris Meadows @48:

No-competes in general are a pretty substantial problem in the publishing world these days, though. They're often used as a bludgeon to keep writers with a single trad-pub book from self-, indie-, or other-trad-pubbing some other book, even if having more than one title available could lead to sales boosts for all the authors' books, including the trad-pubbed one. Given that many pro publishers only have space for one book a year by most authors, it's a sure way to slow the start of an author's career before it even happens. Small wonder more and more aspiring authors are skipping trad-pub altogether and opting to self-publish instead.

I am confused as to how you have taken a comment explicitly saying it was impossible to place the weight of blame on anyone as my trying to cast anyone as a bad guy.

Just want to lay this complete non-sequitur out for examination. What the actual fucking FUCK?

Leah, #50: Worldcon and other science-fiction conventions are social events. Intoxicating substances are served. People party and don't get enough sleep and don't hear or remember things very clearly. Then people are blamed for things that may or may not have happened the way one side or another recalls.

That's a much more realistic way of saying what I think #14 was trying to say.

1. Patrick manages the science fiction and fantasy line at Tor."

So Girl Genius would be under his umbrella?

(a) You or your agent ringfences them to the minimum possible scope -- works in a specific genre or series written by the author and published under a specific name. (The name is a brand. A series written under a pseudonym belongs to a different brand: it's not competing like-with-like. Ditto a differen genre.) (b) You rely on the publisher not wanting to totally screw their working relationship with an author by bending them over a barrel: it helps to talk to your editor and solicit their input on how to keep them happy, but it can be done. (This worked for me when my agent and I agreed with Tor to publish my Merchant Princes series under my own name: we spoke to my editor at Ace and came to a satisfactory agreement that kept everybody happy.) Only if both these steps fail do you need to (c) break out of the no-compete and/or option clause. Which you do by fulfilling the option: you submit a manuscript for first refusal which you know the publisher can't or won't publish, at which point your obligation is fulfilled. (Hint: any author worth bothering with has a trunk full of book-shaped objects -- learning exercises -- which can be dusted off. Or you could try handing in a cold war technothriller you have lying about to get out of a romance contract, or vice versa.) Note that method (c) probably burns your working relationship with your editor, if not the publishing house itself, for a long time to come.

Final important point: an author/editor contract is a codification of an agreement that the author and editor are going to work together to make money. Nobody really wants to be tied to a reluctant co-worker, and the residual rights in trade fiction publishing aren't suddenly going to shoot up to the top of the charts. So unless the publisher is going down the tubes (cough, N*ght Sh*d* last year, Meisha Merlin in years past -- genre examples, I know) it's not worth the loss of goodwill (and bad rep throughout the industry) to force an author who wants out to stay against their will.

(Teresa: from an editor's point of view, am I on course here? Or have I tied my shoelaces together without noticing?)

And with my fan hat on, let me just mention how distressing it is to see our heros quarrelling.

The six months that Foglio went nuts over is nothing to Tor. He should be more patient, or choose not to do business with a big publisher at all.

However I have to say "But if some of you would write to let the folks at TOR know that we'd like to take our book and go home now, we'd appreciate it." doesn't equal "he directs his fans to shower me—not his actual editor, but me—with angry tweets and emails about it."

Admittedly, that shouldn't be the unexpected result of pointing a fanbase at someone. But still.

I did come away from Phil's post with the understanding that you had not been aware of or involved in the affair prior to shortly before WorldCon. However, I accept that he's got the internal structure over at Tor wrong, and I'm personally sorry that this has put some stress on you that it shouldn't have.*

You have also reminded me of a very important point: "people, even intelligent people of good will, can come away from a conversation with such drastically different understandings of what was said." I've certainly been in those conversations myself (and received letters memorializing agreements as things that I would never have agreed to). Of course, I feel compelled to apply that to your version of events as well; I'm not sure you can guarantee that this perfectly natural, human error is one that only he commits, even if your wording and narrative imply otherwise.

*I'm one of the people that tweeted at you. This perpetuated by implication the error that you could do something about the Foglio's problems. Sorry.

Yes, but the full paragraph reads:

Personally, I think that the problem is that we're this little studio alllll the way out on the west coast, and thus, easy to ignore. If you have stayed with me all through this screed, then I would like your help. Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden has a Facebook page. So does TOR Books. Here is his old e-mail address; pnh@panix.com (I say old, because as far as I can tell, it's been deactivated). We very rarely ask our readership to do anything other than enjoy the strip and purchase the occasional book (Hey, TOR, your first lesson in marketing. And it's Free!) But if some of you would write to let the folks at TOR know that we'd like to take our book and go home now, we'd appreciate it.

In which it sounds an awful lot like he's telling fans to direct angry comments at Patrick's Facebook page and email address. That is, in fact, exactly what I read him as saying: "Find as many places as possible to harass this specific person on my behalf, especially in their personal social media presences!"

This may be a misreading on my part! But if I knew nothing about this side of things, that is exactly how I would have interpreted that paragraph. "Fans: go say angry things to this specific person on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else you can find him."

I've spent many months of my professional life embarrassingly behind on email. It's unpleasant for everyone. In the past I have systematically underestimated how much attention it takes to do business correspondence at a level of quality and timeliness that affords my correspondents the respect they deserve. And I've run into serious contretemps when it turns out my expectations of acceptable turnaround time conflicted with others', badly. I think Patrick and I have been in similar boats. (Or shoes. Or boatshoes.) I am trying to do better, as he is.

That and offer my support, FWIW, in the face of the misguided social-media bombing that may or may not occur.

To pick just one of them, there's her assertion that she was dealing with a Big Six (now Five) publisher. She said her editor phoned and shouted at her that "she was 'blatantly betraying them with Amazon, their biggest and most intimidating competitor," by self-publishing a couple of short story collections.

The only publishers for whom Amazon is the chief competitor are e-book and POD publishing outfits that don't get brick-and-mortar bookstore distribution. That's not Big Six (now Five).

She also said the vice-president and publisher phoned her agent and offered various incentives in an attempt to get her to take the deal. I cannot resist quoting this section:

The vice president and publisher of that house called my agent, offering extra little sweetmeats if I would just capitulate and 'adopt the right spirit going forward.' This somewhat sinister and semi-benevolent attempt at mind-control fascinated me. It became crystal-clear to me that the issue wasn't a supposed 'breach of contract,' on my part, but the publisher's fear and loathing of the profoundly threatening Goliath, Amazon. Since CANNIBAL NIGHTS in no way 'resembles' or would 'injure' sales of the book I had sold them (an entirely different subject matter) I was not in breach of my contract. I stood firm, and refused to capitulate.

Big Six (now Five) publisher personally phoned the agent to beg and wheedle over a $20,000 contract? Really not seeing that.

I'm not going to discuss all the strange elements in Ms. Davenport's story, but -- seriously, that's your idea of hard factual data?

SECOND: It is entirely understandable that a reasonable person would believe that you had the authority that the Foglios thought you had. Your Wiki page says you are Manager of Science Fiction at Tor Books. Your Tor profile says you are senior editor at Tor Books and the fiction editorial director of Tor.com. You are the only senior editor listed on the Tor About Us page. I politely suggest that to avoid similar misunderstandings in future, you take whatever steps seem appropriate to clarify the situation.

THIRD: Thank you very much for being as gracious as you have and helping to ensure that the situation moves forward.

Yes, I agree that the paragraph is a social media army call to arms. I didn't read it as "Be nasty! Be naughty!" (esp. given the "Use Only For Good" tagline from the Heterodyne brothers) but more as "Let them not hide behind their computers ignoring my lone voice any longer". This where _I_ may be reading more into the response than was intended. Accursed lack of internet body language and social cues.

I don't necessarily know the complete truth around Kiara's situation, since we never heard Penguin's side of things. Ths ws n 2011, rght whn th whl gncy prcng thng gt crzy, nd Pngn ws ltr n f th lt hldts gnst sttlng wth th DJ. t sms plsbl thr cld hv bn sm xc wth lt f ht n fr mzn thr. ftr ll, tht's why thy llglly cnsprd t frc prcs p. :)

My guess is that someone who works for Tor knows better than someone who doesn't how to re-direct inquiries (forward emails) to the person who should handle an author's problem(s).

I wonder what a graphic novel equivalent of Metal Machine Music would be like.

Marc Cabot @73: the way Wikipedia works, you or I or almost anyone here except maybe TNH are better situated to fix errors in PNH's Wikipedia page than he is. If Patrick took the time to do so, somebody would no doubt revert the changes because it's against Wikipedia rules to edit your own page.

Which isn't necessarily the case! Especially with how communication seems to be happening here and all. I am overly pessimistic about internet communications at times.

I do not want to contemplate what would be happening if he'd issued such a call on Teresa rather than Patrick.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a senior editor at Tor Books and the fiction editorial director of Tor.com.

Unless someone knows that Tor.com and Tor Books are not the same entity, it's easy to see how one could be led to think that PNH is the editorial director for all TOR fiction.

Something I've come to realize in my fifties is that determined ignorance can't be argued with. If people are determined to be clueless, they will always succeed, and you can never make an iron-clad case that they could have done better.

Can this please continue?

That said, I am puzzled that he directed his internet minions at Patrick alone, and not his editor as well.

It may be relevant to his outburst that Foglio is apparently trapped on a cyclone-lashed tropical island in the antipodes with limited distractions.

I think word should be spread about this when explaining that Patrick is not the Lord High Executioner Managing Editor of Tor Books, because otherwise people will just decide that we're incorrect, and cite the Tor.com About Us page as evidence.

Lee 83: I agree. Foglio knows, or should know, the probable outcome of such a call.

Again, sorry for you being the focus of this when you were not directly responsible for it.

Tor has always been a favorite publisher of mine, and girl genius one of my favorite web comics. Ultimately i want both the company and the comic to come away from this misunderstanding and miscommunication, if not happy at least not unhappy.

'v jst chckd gn, nd n, y dn't ctlly xplctly sy "Tr.cm s nt th wbst fr Tr th pblshng bdy, Tr.cm s n nln mgzn pblshd by Mcmlln. Fr nfrmtn n th Tr pblshng mprnt nd Tr bks, pls rfr t Tr-Frg.cm." Whch s smthng tht cld d wth bng rght t th tp f th bt pg.

Th FQ lmst gvs nfrmtn clrly, lmst. Th prblm bng tht n cmmn nglsh "Tr Bks" mns "Bks pblshd by Tr". knw t's ctlly trdng nm, nd whn y sy "Tr Bks" y'r rfrrng t tht, nt t bks pblshd by Tr. Bt thr ppl my nt. "W’r r wn spcl crnr f Mcmlln, th pblshng cmpny tht ls ncmpsss Tr Bks. W r th msc mkrs, nd w r th drmrs f th drm." s wndrflly flrd lngg tht xplns xctly nthng, nd my nt ld ppl t ndrstnd th dffrnc.

t wld b pssbl ncrrct ntrprttn f tht t ndrstnd tht Tr-Frg r th bk whlslrs, f Tr th pblshr. Sm ppl my wll gt th mprssn tht Tr-Frg s whr y g t by bks nln frm Tr, th "Lkng fr Tr Bks" bnnr blck lks lk n d fr plc t by bks, nt rdrctn t th pblshng mprnt.

Ppl gt cnfsd whn tw thngs hv th sm nm, nvlv th sm ppl, nd r prt f th sm cmpny. Brndng nyn wh ds nt mmdtly gt th dffrnc btwn Tr.cm nd Tr-Frg n dt s nhlpfl.

(Nt tht Mcmlln xctly sms t b th bst bt pblc trch nywy.)

JayBlanc, disemvowelled for being excessively adversarial while making the same argument over and over again.

Grasshopper, it is not enough to just keep repeating that you don't understand. You must also read the explanations that are offered to you in response. Only this way can you break your chains and escape the eternal cycle of incomprehension.

Chris Meadows, disemvowelled for repeatedly shifting the grounds of argument when his expertise is questioned, and for excessive linkage back to his own site.

Vasparian, unpublished for being a randomly combative drive-by.

Just a thought.

t's n skn ff my ns f y dn't wnt t mk ny chngs t tr.cm, bt pls dn't sht t s nd cll s dts r cllss fr mkng ths sggstns.

http://www.tor.com/page/about-us

The fact that tor.com is not the page for Tor Books is part of the problem, incidentally. I'm sure there is a rational reason for doing it this way. I'm also sure that it is confusing.

The publisher's name is Tor. I go to Tor.com. I see lotsa Tor-related stuff and lotsa Tor-related people. Yes, there's a little thing that says "Looking For Tor Books? Go to someotherpage.com" For all I know that's a shopping link. Why would I assume anything other than that having typed in the publisher's name and arrived at a page covered with things and people related to them, that I was on their page?

Warren Terra @100: Thank you.

It may be relevant to his outburst that Foglio is apparently trapped on a cyclone-lashed tropical island in the antipodes with limited distractions.

I am now repressing the urge to go tinker with the coffee maker.

Tor is the brand. We have Tor Books, Tor.com, and heck, even Tor UK. We assume that people who can read books will be observant enough to notice that the Tor.com site says it is not Tor Books. Perhaps the fact that Tor.com does extensive promotion of things like The Game of Thrones and Doctor Who might be clue that Tor.com is not devoted to the products of Tor Books.

JayBlanc, disemvowelled for making no progress at all.

Marc Cabot, consider reading the responses to JayBlanc.

But not Tor Johnson? :-)

BTW I am only joking, feel free to delete if it is unhelpful...

Also neither Thor nor Loki (yes, I consistenly read "Tor" as the name of the God of Thunder, as that is the modern spelling in Scandawegia, it makes the image of Tor editors so much more amusing).

PNH, TNH, throughout:

I feel your pain. It seems, from an innocent bystander's perspective to be one of those cases where comms slipped through cracks and it was perceived as intentional rather than unintentional. Then someone acted on that perception and the wires ran hot with emails and tweets. :(

Narmitaj, no worries.

Patrick as Edithor?

Give me a minute and I'll fix that.

So does Phil's behavior, actually... my basic response here is "well, he's a spark, sometimes they get a little... mad.

("How dare he neglect my important project! Go, my netbats, roust him from his torpor!")

Who owns/manages the wiki you refer to? Because it's entirely possible that the person in charge of that Wiki is not Patrick. Which means that he can't update the information.

Also? I view wikis with great suspicion. IME, most of them are edited by self-appointed ad-hock committees that change members without notification and the members may or may not know what they're talking about. It's hard enough keeping errors out of a permanent, member-vetted committee-of-actual-experts document. A document with no central oversight and accountablity? *shudder*

The Warrior Women Editors of Quality Skiffy, if you please.

Just a thought."

abi: I just had to repeat that as a quote, because it's a marvel of quiet, devastatingly accurate, truth.

Ths. dn't knw ny f th flks n cntntn hr, s hv n dg n ths hnt. Bt tht s jst clsslss, lw bhvr.

Isn't it an agent's job to know about the (sometimes byzantine) publishing industry and then use that knowledge on the author's behalf? Experience, advocacy, and mediation--that's the whole point of agents, I've always thought.

"The miscommunication between Studio Foglio and Patrick Neilsen Hayden was unfortunate, and we do think he was trying to help."

I'm not altogether sure of the efficacy of cricket bats as hammers. They're not designed effectively for that.

I'll be over here...

Anderson, #137: I appreciate the implicit sympathy, but I think "clsslss, lw bhvr" is a bit extreme. (I think Dave Harmon's #126 -- "he's a spark, sometimes they get a little...mad" -- nails it, actually.)

My second form sports teacher was a member of the Welsh rugby team back in the days rugby was a theoretically amateur sport - which given the status of rugby in Wales was unutterably cool. (First day of the Six Nations tournament tomorrow sees Wales v Italy - who we should comfortably defeat, but no match is ever a foregone conclusion as England have learned oh so many times. Heh.)

...

So the mad spark summoned a storm he could not control, and is now trapped on an island by another? Hark, Prospero?

...

Wishing you well, Patrick, and Phil likewise. I like both your work.

Hey, Steve Fahnestalk @135, long time no see!

I invented disemvowelling as a moderation technique on Making Light some years back. You got the point of it at near-lightspeed: it deprecates the text, makes it clear which portions were objectionable, and makes it difficult but not laborious to read. It has some less obvious properties as well.

In a better world I could just refer you to the Wikipedia entry, but as part of one of those never-ending Wikipedia wrangles, unnamed parties there keep rewriting the entry to downplay or possibly erase my role in it. Which is stupid; you can still read the Making Light thread in which I invented it and Arthur Hlavaty named it.

Disemvowelling software exists, and when I was moderating Boing Boing I had an instant disemvowelling button, but on Making Light I just drag the text off into MSWord and bash it with search-and-replace.

Fine point: don't remove "y" even when it's acting as a vowel, because some commenters' writing becomes unreadable without it. I have yet to figure out why, but the phenomenon is most strongly associated with individual commenters, not the subject under discussion.

Fragano @140: My desire for a cricket bat was largely inspired by Shaun of the Dead, where it's used as an anti-zombie device.

Xopher @141: Possibly you got confused because "Managing Editor, Tor Books" used to be my title?

Moderation:

Apologetically disemvowelled one line of Anderson @136, because things seem to be calming down, nd bcs nyn wh's ntrstd cn stll pzzl t t.

I should send you the little Javascript disemvoweller I wrote. I can't look at it right now, but IIRC it has an option for whether to include 'y'.

"Glastonbury Tor"

Now I'm starting to think of the correspondence between James Thurber and publisher H.F. Cluffman and associates from The Thurber Chronicle, and how someone living at the house where Thurber had been born, received 20 copies of "Grandma was a Nudist".

I'll be really surprised if you aren't one.

Exquisitely stated.

Problem with that is that it lets the imagination of the paranoid run free as to what was written in the removed posts, and forum users are paranoid souls, I often find; convinced there are unwritten rules lurking there as landmines for the unlucky, and that the deleted posts were deleted for reasons much more interesting than the actuality.

Even worse than that, there's a forum I help moderate which has a "bozo" flag; you can tag a sign-in as a bozo and their posts will show to them (and to moderators) but to everyone else, their message shows as a deleted message. (the flag is used to see if problem children will calm down...) We've had people get very upset at all the "deleted messages" on the board....

I had a brief go as moderator of an email list for my RL neighborhood. It's much harder than these folks make it look. (And what the heck do you do with people who start launching verbal abuse at you from behind the scenes, and tell you with great authority to "knock it off"?)

So you can then go out and behave like a professional person instead of an emotionsmonster at them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t44eGxGBrNE

However, I wonder if Teresa has ever actually handled one? If she is attending WorldCon in London, I would urge her to try it. I understand there may be another Fanashes!

Take Phil's early XXXenophile comics. Add a few extra pages depicting stuff that would be illegal in the UK under sections 62 to 68 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 (I'm not sure what equivalent statutes apply in the US, but I'm pretty sure the first amendment won't protect you, if you push the child porn button hard enough). Submit to publisher. Watch publisher demand editorial changes. Watch author fail to make such changes to the satisfaction of the publisher's lawyers, citing artistic integrity. Watch publisher sigh and reject MS. Watch author smugly point out that the option clause has now been terminated -- by the publisher.

As a random note for the peanut gallery: Tor Books and Tor UK[*] are completely separate publishing companies. They're both subsidiaries of the same multinational, but the people, policies, and publication lists are different. Source: I'm published by both Tor and Tor UK. And when I try to understand how it works, my head hurts.

[*] The UK in Tor UK is silent

kimiko@148 - "Don't summon an Eater of Heads" bigger than your head?

TNH@113 - 'Tinker with the coffee maker'? Run Away! Run Away!

There's an entry on his Livejournal:
http://philfoglio.livejournal.com/45833.html
I'm assuming it's the same as his Facebook entry.

BTW, I read that first book and loathed it. Racist (let's hate whites) and violent (let's bomb tourist hotels; that will show those haoles).

My first exposure to a cricket bat as weapon was, I am pretty certain, in Wolf of Kabul. I hadn't realised the character had been invented as far back as he had (1922), and the stories would likely feel horribly dated today.

Not slayed, merely bound into captivity until the end is near.

Serge @ #155:

Gosh! I do believe, in fact, that I have seen that film, back in the dark mists of time. I don't recall that title attached to it, though. But, then, Swedish translations of original movie titles are often bordering on confusing.

My dear sir, that is not "a" cricket bat, that is the one, the only, clicky ba.

One of the many things I learned from this decade-long string of events is that Phil's memory is simply not to be trusted regarding details. This isn't a diss -- it's just functional reality. Memory is a process of reconstruction, and pretty much everyone remembers things the way they want to. But Phil had a particularly intense version of the phenomenon.

At one point during the comic work one of the other people on the team described the problem to Phil as follows: "It's like your memory is this vast many-roomed mansion, and your consciousness is a single candle moving from room to room. You remember only whatever information is stored in the room the candle is currently lighting up, and nothing else in the mansion. Then the light moves on to another room and you remember what's in that new one and completely forget everything stored in the room you just left."

Phil ruefully agreed with the assessment.

He is a very talented person. But whatever story he tells anyone about anything, it's pretty much guaranteed he's inadvertently leaving something critical out. NOT intentionally -- there's no malice in this phenomenon -- it's just that until forcefully reminded about some things he really doesn't remember them.

Seems pretty likely that this is what happened to his conversation with Patrick. When he decided to encourage people to go after Patrick in order to get the response from Tor he wanted, the candle of his consciousness just wasn't in the mental room where the details of their Worldcon talk had been stored.

To anyone on this forum who is reflexively defending Phil for taking action against the Big, Bad People at Tor -- don't automatically assume that Phil's representation of events is accurate or complete. We're talking about someone I once saw spend half an hour searching through his room and luggage for the roll of cash he'd brought to a convention, only to find it inside one of the socks he was wearing...whereupon he announced to the friends who had been helping with the search, "Oops. I always put it there for safekeeping, and then I always forget that I did it."

I have a memory palace: it's just that every time I visit seems to be on a moonless night in the middle of a power cut, and I'm carrying a smoky oil lamp.

Fabulous movie. Easter Eggs from it float up at the oddest triggers.

Nobody gets out of here wit'out singin' the blues.

I guess what bugs me the most, is that there WAS a time when the power was on, and I could teleport from room to room...now I'm never sure that what I am able to retrieve is correct.

There are a number of alternate universes I'd like to get to so that I could see finished versions of various works.

Foglio doesn’t seem to have grasped that he didn’t just get some business card dressing wrong. He misunderstood the nature of Patrick’s job responsibilities and relationship with Foglio’s own editor, and forgot the details of Patrick’s own promise to him. Then called down an Internet horde on his head.

(Leaving aside that he still hasn’t figured out Patrick’s last name.)

It took me a long time to recognize that sometimes people are effectively non compos mentis for a while, and even if they're screaming at you right now, it doesn't have to mean anything in the long term.

A big part of maintaining peace with those around you is spotting those moments, and not retaliating or escalating. Actually solving the "real problem" may or may not be possible, but you can at least avoid turning a temporary incident into a long-term disaster. (Naturally, this doesn't apply for people who are NCM all the time, or so often as to make them unsafe in general.)

This is a particular case of something that goes way down... even in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma¹ contests, it turns out that "forgiveness" is important for success. TIT-FOR-TWO-TATS beats TIT-FOR-TAT against the field, precisely because it can take an occasional hit without getting stuck in permanent non-cooperation.

¹ A simple mathematical "game" that turns out to be a surprisingly insightful model of the tension between cooperation and aggression.

The breach is between the two of them, so the resolution must be the same.

As a fan of Girl Genius, a mod on Making Light, and someone who is friends with Patrick, I do have a variety of interests in the matter. But given that I didn't enjoy having a bunch of Foglio's partisans put their energy into amplifying his side of things, I'm not sure I want to lean in the direction of amplifying Patrick's. Even if, as I said above, there is a "side" to amplify, which there may very well not be.

And any other person who might one day (or already) be in a position to have to decide whether to enter into a business relationship with Foglio, Patrick, Tor, or all three, can make up their own mind, and come to a different decision, right?

For myself, I’m making a note that if I’m ever in this kind of situation, write shit down.

On the other, the idea that any company can ignore continued efforts to communicate (on a legitimate business matter even) for over a year is profoundly disturbing.

Surely there are better ways to set up your systems so these kinds of fraught communications do not fall through the cracks?

Because otherwise the lesson here is that communication was only re-established *after* the fans were unleashed and that would suggest that other people might also view this as a way of resolving their communication problems.

Or, alternatively, you've picked the wrong bit of the school playground to play cricket on, and you need to find the spot where the guys who bitumened the whole thing left the little gap for stumps to be hammered in. Clearly you have the wrong patch of grass sprouting up through all the bitumen.

(context: Australian).

For extra confusion points, the Tor UK website is to be found at torbooks.co.uk.

This assumes that Mr Foglio's version of events is true and complete. We already know that it is not; Patrick is only peripherally involved and yet he is the one dealing with the fallout. In other portions of Mr Foglio's rant he ascribes reprehensible motivations to various unnamed people and casts his interpretations of their actions in the worst possible light.

He rightly describes his post as a screed. It's about how he feels, and is only accurate insofar as it expresses his feelings.

It's amazing how many circumstances that applies to. Or, better yet, talk the other guy into writing it down, so you can sign off on it. Then you have it in their words. One less step in The Telephone Game.

See also: what Serge said. (No, I am not either a packrat! :->)

@205: I was in my Army Surplus Store last week buying mittens, and noticed they're carrying that line of "animal face" t-shirts. I teasted them about now having the guinea pig one in stock. But the one that made me LOL was the bat: face oriented with the eyes at the bottom, of course.

Actually, I'm not assuming that at all, however there is nothing in the account above that discounts or even throws doubt on the idea that TOR ( or its representatives anyway) could have gone an entire year without replying to someone with whom they have a business relationship.

I'm not saying that it has definitely happened in this particular case but the idea that it *could* happen, that there aren't safeguards in place to prevent it happening (or at least make it unlikely) is profoundly disturbing.

I work for a used machinery company; I'm the company spam-filter and quotation generator. After one too many cases of an email inquiry being "dropped on the floor", I put in place a system where, at noon the calendar day after an inquiry comes in, if a salesman hasn't specifically informed me that the inquiry hasn't been dealt with, I print out the email in question and hand it, in hard copy, to the company president. After another 24 hours, I reprint it and, again, hand it to the company president, with EMPHASIS. This system has massively reduced the "dropped on the floor" problem (of course, a salesman could lie to me and tell me something's been handled, but I have no control over that. And since I'm the one who sends out the machinery quotes, I usually know if something is dealt with or not by whether it's passed through my hands again.)

However, this is a system that I came up with, and I implemented; it's not standard (so far as I know) anywhere. And it only works because the webpage generated inquiries (which is 90% of them) come to a central point; me. It doesn't do a thing about the faxed inquiries or the telephone inquiries...

It looks like the only reason he named you is he thought you were top of the chain, which is why he apologized for getting that wrong. I do think he should have apologized for the personal email posting as well. Tor's twitter would have been more appropriate.

Back in the dark mists of time, I wrote a small system for a Swedish union to do for emails what they already did for paper-based mail.

All incoming comms, without a previous diary number, is assigned a diary number. Anything taht happens to become duplicatly diaried has references from latter diary numbers to earlier diary numbers.

Since unions are not governmental institutions (even in Sweden), they're not required to keep comms diaries, but any Swedish governmental institution does and a lot of non-profits (including most unions) do that, so they can go "nuhu, look, you're asking about correspondence DNr 2013-08-15:07, and we replied to that on 2013-08-17, and you have seen it, because you contacted us, quoting that correspondence, on 2013-09-05".

Why I remember this, some 16 years after the fact, I don't, in all honesty, know.

I also don't know if there was any explicit "has there been a follow-up to this mail", but if it was a query they had an existing process for, it should have had a human start a new workflow for it (and I do believe anything incoming ended up in a "please manually categorize this" workflow, but, it was in a previous century).

Oh... I wasn't advocating that they use one (or try to use one, or do use one) ... just naming the problem space.

After all, it's hard to dispel things you can't name ;D

That said, CRM and trouble ticketing systems tend to assume or impose a certain structure on the company using them, and collisions with existing structures can be…messy.

...I used to work at a place where they were designed by Hieronymus Bosch.

In a transportation chamber accident (think "The Fly") conjoined with Escher?

This kind of unfortunate reinforcement can cause a creative puppy's ego to prematurely inflate and can seriously interfere with their ability to continue grow and mature as an artist and a person. It leads them towards self-importance and a short sighted view of the world.

The same can also be said about the effects of modest success in a niche market. That success can leave them convinced that their work is far more significant than it may actually be. The enthusiasm and loyalty of their niche fan base exacerbates those delusions of grandeur and leaves them with expectations that turn out to be out of synch with reality, as others experience it.

They mistakenly believe that the years of back slapping and laudatory remarks are a universal confirmation of their position and status and it leaves them incapable of comprehending the idea that they are not the center of the universe.

Sadly, when that happens, these folks find themselves at a loss for what to do, so they strike out at whoever is convenient or available. If it hadn't been you it would have been somebody else.

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but who knew the same applied to old inflated puppies, too?

Know what? Personalities aren't all about ego and success. People are way more complicated than that. Sometimes people screw up not because their egos are inflated but because they're sincerely having trouble processing information in one realm, even if they're perfectly functional in other realms. As evidenced upstream, Patrick has managed to be more charitable than your comments, even under these taxing circumstances; surely then you or others might also find it worthwhile to try to think charitably of those involved?

And, not that it bears directly on this point, I also want to highlight a second spectacularly wise and cogent observation from abi on this thread:

Sometimes people use apologies for one thing as proxies for apologies for others that they cannot articulate. Sometimes you have to go to peace with the apology you have.

We're pleased and grateful that this thread has stayed as civil as it has. Thank you all.

Moderation:

This kerfluffle is no longer a current event, as the internet reckons such things. From this point forward, anyone who turns up wanting to re-start the argument will be judged by a stricter standard than has hitherto been used.

That goes double if they've duplicated any argument already made in the thread.

Thanks again, and good night.

There's an implicit assumption here that people *within* the organization have access to or understanding of the organization chart :)

As the case of Adria Richards should have made perfectly clear, it's a *terrible* idea to rabble-rouse on the Internet, even gently. I won't say that it should *never* be done, but outside of somebody's life being in immediate danger, I can't imagine what would justify it. It's lighting a fuse on an unknown amount of explosives, where "unknown" could be anywhere from 0.5 grams to a megagram, and even where the detonation(s) will occur (and who it might end up maiming) is unknown. It's phenomenally irresponsible. Even if everything Phil had said were actually true, asking n's of thousands of non-involved individuals to *harass* Patrick is completely out of line.

(I confess to being more than a little worried that nobody else made this point . . . am I entirely wrong? But I find the reasoning quite sound . . . )

Item two is that the follow-up response was from Carol, the Studio Foglio business manager. Carol is a *very* sensible and thoughtful person, and knowing that she's gotten her hands on the issue makes me fairly sure that its all being handled in an adequately calm and mature manner. Whew.

The point is implicit in much of the conversation in the thread. However, making it explicit would have been very close to making it an accusation, which could have been (or been seen as) another step along the road to a mutual blog war. And I know from past experience that that is a very short road indeed.

My contributions to this thread were all aimed at preventing said blog war, and I would have discouraged anyone who went in that particular direction while this was still an active issue. I am grateful for the tact of the commentariat in taking their tone from Patrick on this matter.

(Shorter, less stuffy me: I agree, but the best way to act on that agreement was not to say so. Kind of a neat paradox, in the abstract.)