For those waiting on the next exciting antic from the rightwing zone of science fiction, let me present the “Science Fiction and Fantasy Creators Guild”. It has a website https://sffcguild.com and a founding member Richard Paolinelli.
I assume the new guild will be so popular that the SFWA will fade into obscurity or that’s what is being imagined. Good luck to it I suppose.
I am sure that it will enjoy the same droves of members as the ScrappyCon they’re talking about putting on, with KSorbs as one of the headlining guests. 😀
I think it’ll be interesting to see who steps up to do the grunt work — the hard, boring stuff that’s necessary for an organized group to work, but accrues no credit or publicity, only complaints. Probably a woman. Not Richard or Jon. Luckily mailing lists and websites are a snap to maintain nowadays.
And con-running is even worse that way. Have any of these guys ever negotiated a hotel contract, set up a dealer’s room, etc.? Corkage and outside food alone have made strong men weep; facilities managers are insanely picky. I suppose they’ve got a contract lawyer and corporate accountant along. How many gofers can they get for the non-glamorous jobs? How much of their own money are they planning to put out for the organization and con?
Seriously, these people keep operating on the assumption that fandom is a zero-sum game, and their setting up their own guilds/cons/etc will, by their simply existing, siphon support away from SFWA/Worldcon.
It’s stupid. There’s enough room for everybody. They’ll attract their own little alt-right circle jerk, and life will go on. Maybe between this and Dragoncon they’ll leave everyone else alone. More power to ’em, I say.
One thing that came to mind – didn’t some of the more conservative writers try to set up an alternative science fiction writers’ association a few years back? I seem to recall all of the usual suspects resigning their SFWA memberships and proclaiming that the future belonged to some group they were forming.
There was an announcement in January 2014 that Michael A. Burstein was the first permanent president of the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling, Inc, whose other officers included Vice-President Brad Torgersen, and Secretary Lou Antonelli. However, the SASS website hasn’t had another entry since October of that year.
Mike:
Same song, second verse?
Not doing anything in over two years doesn’t bode well for this new group of similar ideology. Who had to make up their own name b/c heaven forfend anyone should re-use a name even for the same purpose.
If they had the smidgen of humor required to call themselves SASSI… they wouldn’t be right wing snow flakes who can’t countenance the possibility of wearing a tiara for a few minutes.
Kip: I knew I was hearing that in a familiar voice and couldn’t place it. Yep, that was it!
Kathodus: last night Colbert did a bit making fun of the “tactical/manly baby gear” that men who are insecure about their masculinity are using (funny, I thought toting around a baby proved your sperm worked and you knocked up a woman, but then I’m not a right-wing snowflake man). He was helped in this by his friend Rob Riggle (US Marine Corps LtCol Ret.)
I was a little sad that my favorite lines were all absent from the linked video. Turns out there were two “SASSY!” sketches, and you can only get the weaker of the two at present. All I could find was a still GIF of my top moment: “If this were Sassyland, and this was Sassy City – the capital of Sassyland – then you would be the mayor of Sassy City, and you would live in the sassiest building in Sassy City, and in your spare time, you would be the captain of this boat: The S.S. SASSY!”
I think it’s great — have an organization to help those writers in their careers and provide them resources, hold a convention from it, have some awards. Way more positive than what they did before and it can bring in more readers. Who will help grow the market and help the authors they hate also sell, which is something that they just cannot seem to get their heads around. It will also help WorldCon and other conventions — more SFFH conventions grows the market for everybody as it makes it seem a more exciting activity to more people. That’s how the multi-media cons ended up helping lots of book cons.
Which then boosts the visibility and interest in all SFF awards given at cons, something that again they just can’t seem to get. “Everyone will watch the Dragon Awards and ignore the Hugos!” Nope, the more known and established the Dragon Awards become, if they do, the more it also helps raise visibility and interest in the Hugos and vice versa.
It will be kind of interesting to see what sort of code of conduct they come up with, though.
“Well, Richard Paolinelli decided to offer me a shot at being published by his company because he’s determined that I have a sad, unfulfilling life. He probably won’t understand why I rejected his condescending, passive-aggressive offer, even though I think I explained it pretty well…”
Looking through that link (and following through to his “offer” and the background behind it), Paolinelli is so much creepier and sleazier than your summation. And then, after repeatedly insulting Janet, he pats himself on the back for his alleged magnanimity.
Hahaha… Paolinelli describes himself in one of the SFFCGuild tweets as politically “dead center”. Priceless. 😀
No. She asked for examples. I gave her two with a link for her to check out my claim. If you think I'm going thru this for self-promotion you are as wrong in your assumption as you are assuming I'm alt-right. I did not vote for Trump or Clinton. I'm as a dead center as it gets.
yeah…that’s a common delusion and also how Vox Day etc help shift the Overton Window. Richard P can look at Vox and then look at more openly Nazi nazis like the Daily Stormer and see himself at the centre – particulalry when he sees Democrats and actual leftists as indistinguishable. It is like some medieval European world map – what is far away must be very small but the differences you can see must be very big. So close is big and far away is small.
Funny, I was under the impression Hillary was dead-center for a US politician and right-wing by world standards. But then I use a nice level and measuring stick on my Overton Window.
The other question is: who did he vote for, then? I certainly can’t see him going Green or Bernie, and Libertarians are Republicans who don’t care about sex and dope nowadays. There literally wasn’t anyone more dead-center in the last election than Hillary.
Worth remembering that many of the Sad Pups were anti-Trump because they feared he was a closet Democrat or were worried about some of his populist noises implying government economic spending.
I think the claims that Hillary was right-wing were just some of Putin’s propaganda intended to make her lose the election. A comparison of her views with people like Obama or Teddy Kennedy shows how ludicrous that statement was.
As for right-wing by world standards, that’s really off-the-wall, since that would lump her with people like Marine Le Pen and Putin himself.
Some folk work hard and create, others just go on the internet and tear people down. Fortunately for creators like myself, not many people care what the jealous people hanging around the industry and taking pot shots think. I applaud Richard for his hard work and will certainly join and assist his guild in any way possible.
Jon Del Arroz: Some folk work hard and create, others just go on the internet and tear people down.
I am sure that a lot of people look forward to the hypothetical day when you finally decide spend your time working hard and creating, instead of harassing and tearing down other authors and reviewers relentlessly on Twitter, your blog, and by e-mail.
I don’t tear anyone down, JJ. Room in the scene for all of us. Happy to send you some advance copies of my multiple books coming out this year. Drop me a line!
One example out of many: “Trust me, male. You’re a laughing stock in the real publishing world. And that has nothing to do with your politics. It has everything to do with the fact that you’re a liar and a total creep. I love sperg SJW trolls on the blog.”
I’ve been watching you tweet garbage and harassment at authors and reviewers relentlessly for months now, Jon. You saying that you haven’t been doing that isn’t going to magick away what I’ve seen with my own eyes. The things Jim C. Hines has documented barely scratch the surface of your long history of malicious behavior.
In fact, from what I’ve seen, it looks like you spend about 16 hours each day on Twitter. You’ve Tweeted 38 times during the last 14 hours, and 60 times yesterday. I’m convinced that your wife is raising the kids, someone else is ghostwriting your books, and your employer has no idea that they’re paying you to spend most of your work time doing social media.
Be a better person, Jon. Stop telling everyone that you’re a better person than you are, and actually start being one. 🙄
I do love it when Jon turns up and pretends no-one here has ever interacted with him or already knows exactly what he’s like.
Or maybe Jon’s trapped in a personal groundhog day where he starts each day afresh but *we* all remember what crap he threw around the day before.
“suff-cug” isn’t a sneeze. It’s throatier, with coughing and mucus. Like happens when you have a bastard cold and the sneeze/post-nasal drip goes backwards into your head and sinuses and you end up in a coughing fit and the indecorous among us then spit.
Why in the world would they start tweeting when their website is a placeholder and they don’t have their membership process set up yet? It reveals that the founders of SFFCG are total incompetents. 🙄
My actual name is Albert Peabody Blogger* of the Bortsworth Bloggers. It is an old Anglo-Saxon name that dates back to an allocation of land given to my ancestors by Aethelfred the Unwise as recompense for subduing a peasant’s angry goat. Due to a typo the king had been told that my ancestor had subdued a peasant *uprising* (‘angry goat’ and ‘uprising’ look very similar in Anglo-Saxon).
The fact that you stumbled across their placeholder website doesn’t mean that they need to go live prematurely, before the website and the organization’s structure and membership process are ready. It’s just bizarre that they would do so. That sort of incompetence certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of the organization; now the SFFCG is a laughingstock before they’ve even been launched. 🙄
I’ve been amusing myself by following some twitter threads about them. It looks like they foolishly tried to get N K Jemisin to notice them, and she very politely brushed them off and then tweeted about their existence with some mild critique:
Well, hilarity aside… During the years I’ve been in the business, a number of writer organizations have been founded and thrived. Some examples off the top of my head include Sisters in Crime (founded several years before I started writing), International Thriller Writers (within the past decade, I think), Alliance of Independent Authors (ditto), Broad Universe, and there’s also one for work-for-hire writers. And there is room for more.
The organization founded during the course of my career with which I am most familiar is Novelists, Inc., founded in 1989, right around the time my first book was released, by 5 career novelists (which is who the organization serves–career novelists from multiple genres). They worked on filing the incorporation papers and writing the first draft of the bylas and P&P manual, established the newsletter, and started putting the word out. I am one of about 100 founding members who attended the first NINC conference and Annual General Meeting, at which we spent several days hashing out the basics of the new organization: what it would be called (it didn’t have a name yet), what the membership qualifications would be, how it would function, and so on.
Over the years, I have served as president and president-elect (which is similar to serving as VP for a year) of NINC, conference chair, Outreach Chair, served on several committees, have been a columnist for the newsletter for years, and now work as production manager of the newsletter.
There is a lot of work that goes into founding, building, running, and maintaining a writers organization. Given the amount of work, time, commitment, cooperation, and organizational skill involved in making it work, I think that probably many more orgs have wound up like the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling, Inc, which Mike Glyer mentioned above (i.e. no perceptible activity at all since the year it was founded) than like Novelists, Inc. which is 28 years old, has 900 members, runs thriving annual conference, has a monthly in-house publication of about 10,000 words, etc.
Yeah, but you’re a girl. Men don’t have to do all that.
Seriously, you’re to be commended for doing the work as well as writing your books and having a life.
If this organization is to the SFWA as Gab is to Twitter, it will be very good for the SFWA, and should be a huge boon for people like Jon del Arroz, VD, etc., who need a safe place to perform their quasi-political theater.
Oh ho, looks like Mamatas is having a rare old time with them already. I do have to admire his mastery of the trolling arts, but preferably from a distance.
The salient point is that whether one believes it is actually anti-SJW or not, the notion that the book is “apolitical” seems far-fetched. From the summaries, the book starts with the destruction of Earth by aliens and their attempts to rectify this error, using a couple of human protagonists as their guide. There is a bunch of religious allusion and half of the book is taken up by what many reviewers described as a summary describing the future of the human race.
I see the Pingback from File 770 and Mike’s headline is great. Gailey’s tweets are amazing; I want to hang them on my wall and have them available to ctrl-c ctrl-v to topics about many industries. And Annalee Flower Home wasn’t insulting at all, or political. She just pointed out what SFWA is and does. The “updated” titles in Charlie Jane’s thread are great.
Also, it looks like they’ve shoved the actual grunt work onto this Karen L. Myers. Just as I predicted yesterday, a woman has to do all the dull behind the scenes work, while the man goes out and performs a boorish display in public (I’d like to introduce Myers and Hoyt, who could possibly provide some info on the M.O. of these groups).
I wonder why they didn’t reach out to Brad, Larry, Teddy, and their ilk? Or Baen’s Bar types? People who’d be interested in joining. Why isn’t JDA proudly putting his name forward as a guy who’s helping Richard with this launch?
I wonder why they didn’t reach out to Brad, Larry, Teddy, and their ilk? Or Baen’s Bar types? People who’d be interested in joining. Why isn’t JDA proudly putting his name forward as a guy who’s helping Richard with this launch?
Brad and his crew tried this a couple of years ago, and their effort came to naught and seems to have quietly died. I suspect that they have no interest in another venture of this sort, especially if it would require the kind of grunt work that is required to make organizations like SFWA function (which is why I suspect that this organization will flounder and probably also die a quiet death).
JdA has already followed the organization’s twitter account, but doesn’t seem to have done much else. A whole collection of Scrappy Doos have joined in as well. No one seems to be offering much in the way of assistance, at least publically.
Dr. Meadows, why do you continue to insult and attack authors you disagree with for political reasons, and why do you insist in the privilege of anonymity?
Aside from the issue of the false ID, can you seriously not see how ridiculous you look castigating Cam for using an alias while you call yourself “Array”?
Why do you, Array, continue to harass, insult and attack authors with whom you disagree for political reasons? I mean, it’s up to you, but culturally you’re currently an anonymous minion of a surprisingly inept hate movement. Assuming you’re not a bot, that is.
[…] Lou making a Facebook post (since removed by Facebook for violating community guidelines) was this post of mine on the SFFGuild. Specifically there were some comments on the 2014 attempt by Antonelli and others […]
Camestros Felapton 
104 responses to “The Scrappy Dappy Club?”
I think the appropriate response to this news is: Okey dokey.
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Yup – a profound okey dokey to this
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I am sure that it will enjoy the same droves of members as the ScrappyCon they’re talking about putting on, with KSorbs as one of the headlining guests. 😀
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It will blow SFWA out of the water just like… um, what was the name of their ‘replacement’ for Wikipedia?
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Infogalactic Gargle Blaster?
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Countdown to the realisation that running an organisation is bloody difficult, often thankless, work?
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I think it’ll be interesting to see who steps up to do the grunt work — the hard, boring stuff that’s necessary for an organized group to work, but accrues no credit or publicity, only complaints. Probably a woman. Not Richard or Jon. Luckily mailing lists and websites are a snap to maintain nowadays.
And con-running is even worse that way. Have any of these guys ever negotiated a hotel contract, set up a dealer’s room, etc.? Corkage and outside food alone have made strong men weep; facilities managers are insanely picky. I suppose they’ve got a contract lawyer and corporate accountant along. How many gofers can they get for the non-glamorous jobs? How much of their own money are they planning to put out for the organization and con?
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I wonder what the password to get into the treehouse will be.
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I’m betting on “No Cucks”. Or maybe “Scalzi Sucks”. 😀
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lol
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Wait a minute, we have a rhyme there:
No Cucks,
Scalzi Sucks
All we need is a tune….
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Sounds more like a chant…with a last line:
“We’re here to sell our right wing books”
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“We welcome all the milkshake ducks”?
“We’re currently in a state of flux”?
“How long ’til you’re out of fucks”?
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“He Man Woman Haters Club.”
Seriously, these people keep operating on the assumption that fandom is a zero-sum game, and their setting up their own guilds/cons/etc will, by their simply existing, siphon support away from SFWA/Worldcon.
It’s stupid. There’s enough room for everybody. They’ll attract their own little alt-right circle jerk, and life will go on. Maybe between this and Dragoncon they’ll leave everyone else alone. More power to ’em, I say.
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Are we to assume that this is the “big development” we had been told was coming?
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So now they’ve got their own club and a website that’s under construction. Good for them. I hope they have fun and stop bothering the rest of us.
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I agree. Good for them. May they go in peace.
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One thing that came to mind – didn’t some of the more conservative writers try to set up an alternative science fiction writers’ association a few years back? I seem to recall all of the usual suspects resigning their SFWA memberships and proclaiming that the future belonged to some group they were forming.
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I have faint memories of something like that. In the end, it went the same way this venture will probably go.
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There was an announcement in January 2014 that Michael A. Burstein was the first permanent president of the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling, Inc, whose other officers included Vice-President Brad Torgersen, and Secretary Lou Antonelli. However, the SASS website hasn’t had another entry since October of that year.
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Oh that is delightful! I had no idea about that one.
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That’s what I remember. I couldn’t dig it up on a Google search though.
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Mike:
Same song, second verse?
Not doing anything in over two years doesn’t bode well for this new group of similar ideology. Who had to make up their own name b/c heaven forfend anyone should re-use a name even for the same purpose.
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Did they realize their initials spelled SASSI and decided “Sassy!” had too much of teh gheys and teh gurlz?
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http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/sassys-sassiest-boys/2868138?snl=1
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If they had the smidgen of humor required to call themselves SASSI… they wouldn’t be right wing snow flakes who can’t countenance the possibility of wearing a tiara for a few minutes.
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Kip: I knew I was hearing that in a familiar voice and couldn’t place it. Yep, that was it!
Kathodus: last night Colbert did a bit making fun of the “tactical/manly baby gear” that men who are insecure about their masculinity are using (funny, I thought toting around a baby proved your sperm worked and you knocked up a woman, but then I’m not a right-wing snowflake man). He was helped in this by his friend Rob Riggle (US Marine Corps LtCol Ret.)
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Lurkertype, please check the LurkerPhone. 😀
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I was a little sad that my favorite lines were all absent from the linked video. Turns out there were two “SASSY!” sketches, and you can only get the weaker of the two at present. All I could find was a still GIF of my top moment: “If this were Sassyland, and this was Sassy City – the capital of Sassyland – then you would be the mayor of Sassy City, and you would live in the sassiest building in Sassy City, and in your spare time, you would be the captain of this boat: The S.S. SASSY!”
https://imgur.com/o36aRv5
(Also not shown: “I just stepped in a big pile of SASSY!”)
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Personally, given their track record, I expect a schism and two or more clubs in a handful of months.
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At least he’s actually trying to build something rather than trying to tear down what someone else built. That’s a step in the right direction.
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I think it’s great — have an organization to help those writers in their careers and provide them resources, hold a convention from it, have some awards. Way more positive than what they did before and it can bring in more readers. Who will help grow the market and help the authors they hate also sell, which is something that they just cannot seem to get their heads around. It will also help WorldCon and other conventions — more SFFH conventions grows the market for everybody as it makes it seem a more exciting activity to more people. That’s how the multi-media cons ended up helping lots of book cons.
Which then boosts the visibility and interest in all SFF awards given at cons, something that again they just can’t seem to get. “Everyone will watch the Dragon Awards and ignore the Hugos!” Nope, the more known and established the Dragon Awards become, if they do, the more it also helps raise visibility and interest in the Hugos and vice versa.
It will be kind of interesting to see what sort of code of conduct they come up with, though.
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Your buddy Richard can’t even give his literary services away — Poor Richard’s Attitude.
“Well, Richard Paolinelli decided to offer me a shot at being published by his company because he’s determined that I have a sad, unfulfilling life. He probably won’t understand why I rejected his condescending, passive-aggressive offer, even though I think I explained it pretty well…”
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He has a thing about Goodreads it seems.
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Looking through that link (and following through to his “offer” and the background behind it), Paolinelli is so much creepier and sleazier than your summation. And then, after repeatedly insulting Janet, he pats himself on the back for his alleged magnanimity.
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Hahaha… Paolinelli describes himself in one of the SFFCGuild tweets as politically “dead center”. Priceless. 😀
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yeah…that’s a common delusion and also how Vox Day etc help shift the Overton Window. Richard P can look at Vox and then look at more openly Nazi nazis like the Daily Stormer and see himself at the centre – particulalry when he sees Democrats and actual leftists as indistinguishable. It is like some medieval European world map – what is far away must be very small but the differences you can see must be very big. So close is big and far away is small.
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Funny, I was under the impression Hillary was dead-center for a US politician and right-wing by world standards. But then I use a nice level and measuring stick on my Overton Window.
The other question is: who did he vote for, then? I certainly can’t see him going Green or Bernie, and Libertarians are Republicans who don’t care about sex and dope nowadays. There literally wasn’t anyone more dead-center in the last election than Hillary.
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Worth remembering that many of the Sad Pups were anti-Trump because they feared he was a closet Democrat or were worried about some of his populist noises implying government economic spending.
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I think the claims that Hillary was right-wing were just some of Putin’s propaganda intended to make her lose the election. A comparison of her views with people like Obama or Teddy Kennedy shows how ludicrous that statement was.
As for right-wing by world standards, that’s really off-the-wall, since that would lump her with people like Marine Le Pen and Putin himself.
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Some folk work hard and create, others just go on the internet and tear people down. Fortunately for creators like myself, not many people care what the jealous people hanging around the industry and taking pot shots think. I applaud Richard for his hard work and will certainly join and assist his guild in any way possible.
Haters gonna hate.
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If Richard works hard at building this guild up it could be a good thing or least not a bad thing. It will be interesting to see how things go.
I certainly don’t have a problem with you working hard on creating stuff nor Richard for that matter. Have fun, make things.
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Thank you Cam. I agree, which is why I like and respect you. Your commenters seem to have a different sense for the most part.
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Jon Del Arroz: Some folk work hard and create, others just go on the internet and tear people down.
I am sure that a lot of people look forward to the hypothetical day when you finally decide spend your time working hard and creating, instead of harassing and tearing down other authors and reviewers relentlessly on Twitter, your blog, and by e-mail.
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The irony was pretty effin’ biting, yes.
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I don’t tear anyone down, JJ. Room in the scene for all of us. Happy to send you some advance copies of my multiple books coming out this year. Drop me a line!
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@Jon —
“I don’t tear anyone down, JJ.”
ROFLMAO.
One example out of many: “Trust me, male. You’re a laughing stock in the real publishing world. And that has nothing to do with your politics. It has everything to do with the fact that you’re a liar and a total creep. I love sperg SJW trolls on the blog.”
Yeah, you’re just SO supportive. Really.
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Jon Del Arroz: I don’t tear anyone down
I’ve been watching you tweet garbage and harassment at authors and reviewers relentlessly for months now, Jon. You saying that you haven’t been doing that isn’t going to magick away what I’ve seen with my own eyes. The things Jim C. Hines has documented barely scratch the surface of your long history of malicious behavior.
In fact, from what I’ve seen, it looks like you spend about 16 hours each day on Twitter. You’ve Tweeted 38 times during the last 14 hours, and 60 times yesterday. I’m convinced that your wife is raising the kids, someone else is ghostwriting your books, and your employer has no idea that they’re paying you to spend most of your work time doing social media.
Be a better person, Jon. Stop telling everyone that you’re a better person than you are, and actually start being one. 🙄
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Lying won’t help your case Jon.
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Plenty of the people commenting here work hard and create. And somehow, we manage to do it without harrassing other authors on social media.
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I assume you’re going to sign up to be one of the officers in the organization then.
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I do love it when Jon turns up and pretends no-one here has ever interacted with him or already knows exactly what he’s like.
Or maybe Jon’s trapped in a personal groundhog day where he starts each day afresh but *we* all remember what crap he threw around the day before.
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Theory #3: One of the respondents referring to themselves as “Jon Del Arroz” is actually from Star Trek: Discovery’s mirror universe.
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What, that well-known villain Zorra Led Noj?
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Hey, it could happen!
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How do you pronounce that? I can say “sif-waa” but not this. Throw me a vowel, boys!
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I’m gonna assume no vowels, just the sound of a hippopotamus swallowing a slowly deflating balloon.
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I’m going with “suff-cug”, to which everyone will say “bless you”
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“suff-cug” isn’t a sneeze. It’s throatier, with coughing and mucus. Like happens when you have a bastard cold and the sneeze/post-nasal drip goes backwards into your head and sinuses and you end up in a coughing fit and the indecorous among us then spit.
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I’d just say the letters, which is also how I say SFWA. I didn’t even know it was called sif-wa until I heard that song.
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It looks like the SFFCGuild twitter account is up and running – and spamming authors like N.K. Jemisin with their early tweets.
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Why in the world would they start tweeting when their website is a placeholder and they don’t have their membership process set up yet? It reveals that the founders of SFFCG are total incompetents. 🙄
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(Um…looks around sheepishly) My fault I assume
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Oh, I saw their twitter mention that the cat has been let out of the bag early by “a blogger”, but I didn’t realise that was literally you!
I’ll just be over there, chortling to myself.
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My actual name is Albert Peabody Blogger* of the Bortsworth Bloggers. It is an old Anglo-Saxon name that dates back to an allocation of land given to my ancestors by Aethelfred the Unwise as recompense for subduing a peasant’s angry goat. Due to a typo the king had been told that my ancestor had subdued a peasant *uprising* (‘angry goat’ and ‘uprising’ look very similar in Anglo-Saxon).
*[that’s my best guess, anyway]
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The secret is revealed!
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The fact that you stumbled across their placeholder website doesn’t mean that they need to go live prematurely, before the website and the organization’s structure and membership process are ready. It’s just bizarre that they would do so. That sort of incompetence certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of the organization; now the SFFCG is a laughingstock before they’ve even been launched. 🙄
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JJ, yes indeed 🙂
I’ve been amusing myself by following some twitter threads about them. It looks like they foolishly tried to get N K Jemisin to notice them, and she very politely brushed them off and then tweeted about their existence with some mild critique:
https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/953499292349730816
And because everyone knows Jemisin that then got everyone pointing and laughing…
So yes, quite why they would pull that before they were ready is baffling*.
(*Note: bafflement only true if you assume competence)
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I was tipped off by an anonymous cat.
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They went right after Jemisin right off the bat. That’s really disgusting. Why can’t they just form their group and leave these authors alone?
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Mike lyer, thank you for those links! That gave me a good laugh on this cold, dark, snowy night. I never heard of this.
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Well, hilarity aside… During the years I’ve been in the business, a number of writer organizations have been founded and thrived. Some examples off the top of my head include Sisters in Crime (founded several years before I started writing), International Thriller Writers (within the past decade, I think), Alliance of Independent Authors (ditto), Broad Universe, and there’s also one for work-for-hire writers. And there is room for more.
The organization founded during the course of my career with which I am most familiar is Novelists, Inc., founded in 1989, right around the time my first book was released, by 5 career novelists (which is who the organization serves–career novelists from multiple genres). They worked on filing the incorporation papers and writing the first draft of the bylas and P&P manual, established the newsletter, and started putting the word out. I am one of about 100 founding members who attended the first NINC conference and Annual General Meeting, at which we spent several days hashing out the basics of the new organization: what it would be called (it didn’t have a name yet), what the membership qualifications would be, how it would function, and so on.
Over the years, I have served as president and president-elect (which is similar to serving as VP for a year) of NINC, conference chair, Outreach Chair, served on several committees, have been a columnist for the newsletter for years, and now work as production manager of the newsletter.
There is a lot of work that goes into founding, building, running, and maintaining a writers organization. Given the amount of work, time, commitment, cooperation, and organizational skill involved in making it work, I think that probably many more orgs have wound up like the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling, Inc, which Mike Glyer mentioned above (i.e. no perceptible activity at all since the year it was founded) than like Novelists, Inc. which is 28 years old, has 900 members, runs thriving annual conference, has a monthly in-house publication of about 10,000 words, etc.
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Yeah, but you’re a girl. Men don’t have to do all that.
Seriously, you’re to be commended for doing the work as well as writing your books and having a life.
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There is very little chance that this “guild” will be anything more than a trolling Twitter account.
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If this organization is to the SFWA as Gab is to Twitter, it will be very good for the SFWA, and should be a huge boon for people like Jon del Arroz, VD, etc., who need a safe place to perform their quasi-political theater.
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I’d agree with you, except there’s no “quasi” about it.
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Uh-oh:
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Ouch
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Oh ho, looks like Mamatas is having a rare old time with them already. I do have to admire his mastery of the trolling arts, but preferably from a distance.
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And now Sarah Gailey serves up an absolute peach (thread)
https://twitter.com/gaileyfrey/status/953692859617570816
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And now I RELLY need to read Gailey’s books. That was a thing of beauty.
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Sarah Gailey is also a good writer. I put her up pretty high on my Campbell list, I know.
Nick Mamatas is best enjoyed from afar. Be vewy vewy quiet and give him golf claps.
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Sarah Gailey’s rant was a thing of beauty.
“Tiny wailing porcelain dolls.”
Snort.
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I particularly like how she never repeated a description. Awesome vocabulary.
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I’m enjoying the title interpretations in this related Twitter thread today from Charlie Jane Anders:
https://twitter.com/charliejane/status/953693471214153728
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I note PZ Myers didn’t spot the joke initially
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I don’t think he knew who she was. The fun part is the new apolitical titles of classic SF people are coming up with.
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There are some really funny ones. I like the HG Wells ones in particular.
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Paolinelli is trying to claim that Frankenstein isn’t political. And that his own anti-SJW work Escaping Infinity is also not political.
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I haven’t read his book. How anti-SJW is it?
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I’m going by quotes from the reviews. I doubt it is actually worth reading.
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The salient point is that whether one believes it is actually anti-SJW or not, the notion that the book is “apolitical” seems far-fetched. From the summaries, the book starts with the destruction of Earth by aliens and their attempts to rectify this error, using a couple of human protagonists as their guide. There is a bunch of religious allusion and half of the book is taken up by what many reviewers described as a summary describing the future of the human race.
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A rule I didn’t think I’d ever have to put in place for which authors to read: must show basic, secondary school level reading comprehension.
Sweet jumping Jesus, Frankenstein isn’t political? Did we slip into the mirror universe with Discovery?
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[…] Felapton discovered the under-construction website and wrote about it in “The Scrappy Dappy Club?”. (There’s also an SF&FCG Facebook […]
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I see the Pingback from File 770 and Mike’s headline is great. Gailey’s tweets are amazing; I want to hang them on my wall and have them available to ctrl-c ctrl-v to topics about many industries. And Annalee Flower Home wasn’t insulting at all, or political. She just pointed out what SFWA is and does. The “updated” titles in Charlie Jane’s thread are great.
Also, it looks like they’ve shoved the actual grunt work onto this Karen L. Myers. Just as I predicted yesterday, a woman has to do all the dull behind the scenes work, while the man goes out and performs a boorish display in public (I’d like to introduce Myers and Hoyt, who could possibly provide some info on the M.O. of these groups).
I wonder why they didn’t reach out to Brad, Larry, Teddy, and their ilk? Or Baen’s Bar types? People who’d be interested in joining. Why isn’t JDA proudly putting his name forward as a guy who’s helping Richard with this launch?
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I wonder why they didn’t reach out to Brad, Larry, Teddy, and their ilk? Or Baen’s Bar types? People who’d be interested in joining. Why isn’t JDA proudly putting his name forward as a guy who’s helping Richard with this launch?
Brad and his crew tried this a couple of years ago, and their effort came to naught and seems to have quietly died. I suspect that they have no interest in another venture of this sort, especially if it would require the kind of grunt work that is required to make organizations like SFWA function (which is why I suspect that this organization will flounder and probably also die a quiet death).
JdA has already followed the organization’s twitter account, but doesn’t seem to have done much else. A whole collection of Scrappy Doos have joined in as well. No one seems to be offering much in the way of assistance, at least publically.
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Lurkertype: Why isn’t JDA proudly putting his name forward as a guy who’s helping Richard with this launch?
It’s interesting, that, isn’t it?
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FYI: that link to Fuzzypinkslippers (Poor Richard’s Attitude) produces a warning that the site is infected
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Dr. Meadows, why do you continue to insult and attack authors you disagree with for political reasons, and why do you insist in the privilege of anonymity?
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As you’ve continued with this, I’ve let your comment out of spam…
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Aside from the issue of the false ID, can you seriously not see how ridiculous you look castigating Cam for using an alias while you call yourself “Array”?
Seriously?
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So what’s your real name?
You’ll notice I have one. Why should we pay any attention to you when you refuse to provide your own?
Not to mention that your premise, and your reason for being here, is false to begin with.
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Why do you, Array, continue to harass, insult and attack authors with whom you disagree for political reasons? I mean, it’s up to you, but culturally you’re currently an anonymous minion of a surprisingly inept hate movement. Assuming you’re not a bot, that is.
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[…] Lou making a Facebook post (since removed by Facebook for violating community guidelines) was this post of mine on the SFFGuild. Specifically there were some comments on the 2014 attempt by Antonelli and others […]
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