It appears that sf_drama is hitting the high points of the post alluded to here. (I usually don’t connect to these things directly).

I’m disappointed that Elizabeth Moon and this guy now have more in common than just the genre they work in.

Things I give odds on:

• 1:1 odds this shows up on unfunny_business.
• 3:1 odds this shows up on fandom_wank.
• 10:1 odds that Andrew Sullivan discovers this and the Daily Dish linkorama starts and embarrasses us all.
• 25:1 odds that Wiscon uninvites her. ((I don’t blame them if they don’t; it’s a big thing to uninvite a guest of honor. At the same time, it is Wiscon.))

I hate this, so very much. Unlike with this guy ((Screw you, Google blog search…. Never leave me. :’()), I take zero pleasure in any of this.

Oh well. We’re all human. And hell, I’m actually evil, so. ((More on that later, I guess, in the next entry in Dancing with Psychologists.))

I suppose, though, that even evil has standards.

Update: Okay, now I have lost all respect for her, utterly and entirely. Perhaps I should have started with that. See below ETAs.

ETA: BAH-LEETION has now occurred to all the comments on Moon’s post. Hmmm.

ETA2: So apparently Moon also edited her post at the end. What the hell, Elizabeth Moon?

ETA3: bloodparade has screencaps. And apparently Wiscon will become aware of this. Bahleetion: it does not make things better 24 hours into the wank.

This is now elevated from FUCKUP to TRAINWRECK.

Everyone is human. Authors no less. If they were wanky all the time, that’d be a different thing, but this is just one issue on which they wanked, and truth to tell, most of us have our own issues on which we would wank; we just haven’t been featured on fandom_wank yet.

(For an example, look at bookshop; Aja has been featured on fandom_wank numerous times, but she definitely isn’t a wanker here.)

So yeah; on this issue, GRRM ((And others, it has to be said.)) hasn’t been thoughtful. Everywhere else, though, he’s a nice guy. That doesn’t excuse his mouthing off on something he’s not done research on, or his particularly weak response to being called on it, or his condescension.

I’m not calling for people to be absolutely forgiving; sometimes an author will wank on something we care very deeply about, and people have every right to stop wanting to read said author.

At the same time, it’s important to remember: authors are human. They are no better and no worse than the rest of humanity, even though they’re published. This wank (and previous ones) are especially illustrative of that.

One more thing I’d like to add:

Over the years, I’ve learned that people are people everywhere you go. People are good or bad or human on their own merits, not because they’ve gotten published, not because they went to college—and not because they haven’t gotten published or haven’t gone to college, either. This bites people on both sides of the coin; on the one hand, it becomes easy to put someone on a pedestal and be horribly disappointed later, and on the other hand, it is this very attitude of “I am better than the rabble” that enables so much author wank.

In the end, it’s just best to assume in general that they are no better than you.

Hm, I forgot what I was going to write briefly. Oh yes.

Thank you, John Scalzi, for briefly alleviating the madness via pointing out new Fandom Wank when I’d forgotten for the week.

ETA: Other good reading: Kate Nepveu’s Open Letter.

I’m blanking a bit now on everything except for tea and the idea of Obin slashfic. You see, the Obin are a sentient race without consciousness (self-awareness). They did get some adaptive tech to give them consciousness, but they can get emotionally overloaded easily. (I find it interesting that they have individual personalities when conscious, even though most of them have lived their lives without any.)

So. You know. I’m pretty sure that sex as a sentient but non-self-aware being is pretty different from having it for the first time with the consciousness switched on. Although I’m sure for many of them, the idea of sex might overload their consciousness tech a little bit, and the actual act might blow a fuse.

Unlike other sentient races, the Obin can also switch their consciousness off without resorting to alcohol. There are definitely possibilities.

Sadly, I do not write slashfic very well. So Hickory/Dickory will not be written by me. Woe.

On the other hand, I feel a lot better about the fiction I am working on. Perhaps I will work on it some more when my current SAN-draining adventure is abated, or SAN reaches negative levels and I’m insane.

Dear Fans of the new Sherlock Holmes movie:

Let me apologize on the behalf of older Sherlock Holmes fandom for the bits of it that have been generating get-off-my-lawn reboot wank, not five days after the release of the movie. The Sherlock Holmes fandom has thrived for over a hundred years and multiple generations, and every generation has its… special snowflakes.

But fortunately, every generation has also produced creative fandom work (though they may not see it that way), from the solidly analytical to the wondrously fanciful. I may not agree with all of them, or even remotely like some of them, but they all occupy a place in my heart, because there wouldn’t be a Sherlock Holmes fandom without constant re-interpretation of the works. Yes, even the fic pastiche where Moriarty is a vampire who falls madly in love with Holmes.¹

I present to you the more amusing pieces of Holmesiana I’ve gathered throughout the years. I’ve strived for a varied collection here that is at the very least sometimes accessible, even if it knocks out some of my absolute favorites. Too much of the fandom is out of print; I hope that changes one day, so that reading all the ’ship wank doesn’t cost 500£.

[Love and adaptation: that's how legends survive.]

So apparently Helix Magazine, of late racism, wank, and lols, has decided to pull all of its archives after all, claiming that they were scared of Janis Ian after she requested Helix remove a story of hers because

And she is, after all, a well-off popular entertainer, with legal and financial resources we could not hope to match; and none of us had the time nor the energy for a courtroom fight.

Yes, Janis Ian, who had to resort to the resources of the SFWA grievance committee, obviously had deep pockets of cash to drop on this.

And of course the right response is to pull down all the archives, even though this was not requested.

Deathless comment by Nick Mamatas: “I’d call even remarking on this beating a dead horse, except that in this case the dead horse has actually managed to get a bat in its teeth and with a posthumous twitch, smack itself!”

And because this is William Sanders, the baby train wreck doesn’t stop there.

Oh Sanders, never change.

For those of you who don’t know, here’s a 15-second summary of EntreCard:

• It’s free social network advertising for blogs.
• You can pay other participants in “credits” (ec) to display your 125×125 ad on their site, in a little yellow widget.
• Ad costs are on a sliding scale, with very popular blogs costing the most (1012ec per day), and newcomers the least.
• You earn credits by visiting other participating sites and “dropping” your card on their widget.
• You can also trade services for credits (example: someone offered to create 125×125 ads in exchange for 50ec. Or someone offers their recipe for molasses cookies in exchange for 10ec).

In other words, EntreCard was social networking with its own economic system that wasn’t based on real money.

Ah yes. Economy. A lot of EntreCard’s current problems go back to that aspect, which is, of course, tied into EntreCard’s very workings.

Note: Not a real EntreCard widget.

EntreCard’s economy never “cratered”, like our current economy is threatening to, but nevertheless some interesting stimulus and other regulation plans were implemented. I have no problems with such things, especially since the little economic system was having growing pains, but people get grumbly. This is expected, because while there are EntreCard benefits beyond ads, people ultimately, at some point, want to put their ads on other blogs. And that means ec.

Since EntreCard was also a social network, complete with forums and everything, a community formed—it was interesting, because interactions were based on both the forum and from blog to blog, since everyone visits everyone else in large part. ((I’m leaving out folks who run spam blogs, since they usually just want the advertising and nothing of the social networking. Which is what was so interesting about EntreCard: the blend of social networking and advertising.)) Some community members stand out—and among them happens to be a guy named Turnip, who runs TurnipOfPower.com, a social marketing blog.

Now, there are some inflammatory folks, as there always are, but Turnip isn’t one of them. He both praises and criticizes everything, and EntreCard is no exception. For instance, he discussed EntreCard’s changes on September 29th, later hashed out possible solutions, and analyzed EntreCard’s state on its 1st anniversary.

Turnip talked a lot about EntreCard, and in the end, he supported the system. He’s a guy you probably want around: honest, thinking, investigates all those strange rumors with an open mind, doesn’t actually want your system to die, and in fact, wants to warn you of danger ahead.

That all changed, however, with one tweet.

Turnip has the full tale here, but it can pretty much be summed up as:

Graham, EntreCard CEO ((Never mind that I have enough experience to know that he shouldn’t tout that title around as if it makes him equivalent to all the rest. For instance, the CEOs of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, even eBay.)): We’re autoposting all Twitter posts that mention EntreCard on our blog!

Turnip: But what happens if a spamming or, nay, dissident tweet shows up? Do you have extra filtering?
*posts dissident tweet joking, “Is that asshat from Entrecard still wearing his asshat?”*

Graham: *zaps tweet*
All you EntreCarders on Twitter, I expect you to have only civilized Twitter conversations, without profanity or attacks, about EntreCard.

Turnip: Wait. How can you tell everyone on Twitter to only Tweet nice EntreCard tweets? Twitter is an entirely separate social networking system! How are you going to enforce this?

Graham: *deletes Turnip’s blog comments*
*deletes Turnip’s EntreCard account*

EntreCard audience: ….

At this point, if you know anything of the Internet at all, you can guess what happened.

Photography: Focal intent

This entire incident brings about other questions, such as that on Twitter it’s really easy to spoof somebody else (it’s happened to Seth Godin) and, well, apparently get your victim’s EntreCard account deleted.

The really strange thing is that Turnip has been a pretty civil guy on the forums, from what I recall. As someone who used to be a moderator, I have some over-sensitive alarms in my head, but Turnip didn’t ring any of them, up until this tweet, which—in context and with hindsight—is obviously a joke meant to pointedly point something out. This is a guy whose first reaction to a popular, long-time member getting suspended wasn’t “EntreCard YOU’RE EVIL CENSORING PEOPLE” but “are the allegations of stealing content against our member true? *searches on Google for a while* Yeah, they’re true. Oh well.”

Thing is, though, Graham is a bit detached from the social equation of Twitter. He’s rarely on the forums. He gets too much email to read/reply to. He doesn’t really know the EntreCarders from each other, not even Turnip, so it was easy for him to mistake Turnip for just another idiot. And making jokes online sometimes just doesn’t go well.

And out of either his or Turnip’s control, EntreCard haters immediately jumped down EntreCard’s throat, on Twitter and elsewhere. Social media: it is not a beast under rein and harness, yo.

Oh Internets, don’t you ever change.

[print_link]

Just to save in my album of Late Summer 2008.

Take:

Yields:

It was like Christmas in August.

Back to your regular bloggery tomorrow.

Is it worth it to submit to some place or other in the mere hopes of publication?

As the worms turned up from Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly‘s recent wankery show, sometimes it is decidedly not.

Come with me as we explore a trail of

• racism, bigotry, and rejection letters;
• the acts of nonprofessional spewage from an editor of a Hugo-nominated semi-prozine;
• what happens when your contract with your publisher is not well-examined;
• and how to deal with the blatant wankery.

It All Started With a Rejection Letter

July 7th: a rejection letter from William Sanders, founder and head editor of Helix, was posted to a writer’s LiveJournal:

I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people – at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can – and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities….

… the narrator seems to be saying that it was this incident which caused him to take up the jihad, but he’s being mendacious (like all his kind, he’s incapable of honesty)…

… most of the SF magazines are very leery of publishing anything that might offend the sheet heads…

Sanders responded to the posting with a furious backpedaling claim that really, he was just talking about terrorists, not about everyone of Arab descent or anything:

Of course none of these people have read the story, and so they fail to grasp the context – that I was talking not about Muslims, or Arabs, or Oompa Loompas or any other religious or ethnic group, but about terrorists and violent extremists. (That being, after all, what your story was about.)

But I don’t feel any need to defend myself, or Helix, to these people; indeed I doubt that there’s anybody outside their little Mutual Masturbation Society who gives a damn what they think about anything at all.

Already William Sanders’, ah, classiness is starting to show through.

Note: It has all since then been BAHLEETED! but the juicy bits of Sanders’ rejection letter live on at K. Tempest Bradford’s and Tobias Buckell’s blogs.

Swells of Support for Sanders

July 7th and 8th: Some people, most notably co-editor Lawrence Watt-Evans, tried to support Sanders’ attempts at redaction.

There were even more people who claimed that the looked-down-upon act posting a rejection letter supersedes the content of it, and in Asimov’s forum at that. (For those not in the know, Asimov’s is one of the so-called Big Three of science fiction/fantasy’s genre short fiction magazines.)

The Backlash of Sanity

July 9th: Nick Mamatas, formerly one of the editors of Clarkesworld and soon to be an editor for Viz Media, LLC, tears Sanders’ claims of “only talkin’ ’bout terrorists, rilly” to shreds:

Well, just swap out “those people” and put in terrorists. Does the paragraph make sense? Of course not. For one, it transforms Sanders ’s claim of familiarity into a claim of being familiar with terrorists from his time in the Middle East. What was he doing chillin’ with terrorists in Turkey? (And which terrorists.)

Further, the idea of the “civilized world” falls apart — there are plenty of terrorsist in the US (abortion clinic bombers), Spain and the UK (separatist groups), in Greece (N17 and related Marxist-terrorists), etc. Where is the actual “civilized world” geographically if Sanders meant terrorists? Nowhere at all, clearly. Heck, had he said “no civilized person” could understand them, he might even have a centimeter of wiggle room.

July 9th and onwards: Even more professional editors and writers chime in, including:

• K. Tempest Bradford, writer (contributer to Interfictions, and Thou Shalt Not…), editor for Fantasy;
• Tobias Buckell, writer (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin);
• Elizabeth Bear, writer (Dust, Ink and Steel, Undertow);
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Making Light fame, senior editor of Tor Books;
• Jason Sanford, writer (contributor to Analog and Interzone);
• David Moles, writer (contributor to Asimov’s and Strange Horizons);
• John Scalzi, writer (Old Man’s War, The Android’s Dream);

and many, many more.

As a nice foreshadowing of future wankery to come, writer N. K. Jemisin (forthcoming book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms from Orbit, and contributor to Strange Horizons) criticizes Sanders and gets banned from Helix.

Writers Start to Pull Stories from Helix

It’s no surprise that people should want to start disassociating themselves from Sanders and his lunacy, and as soon as possible.

An editor with a professional attitude would have allowed the writers to do so quietly, particularly since he isn’t particularly a friend of tolerance and all that and the way to react to stink is sometimes to let it fade away from memory.

But then again, this is William Sanders.

July 14th: The first three takedown requests (Yoon Ha Lee, N. K. Jemison, and Margaret Ronald) go through, but the stories are replaced with this wonderful bit:

As K. Tempest Bradford notes, very classy.

Two of these placeholders have now been BAHLEETED (but not the third one), but Nick Mamatas has screencaps for posterity.

Oh, but the train wreck doesn’t stop there.

Blood Money

July 15th: To ward off even more content fleeing from his site, William Sanders starts to demand $40 for the privilege of pulling a story from the Helix archives:

I am hereby making a change to the aforestated offer. Effective as of now, any Helix contributor who wants his/her work deleted from the archives will have to pay for the privilege. Specifically, it’ll cost you forty bucks, payable to Melanie.

This and more delicious morsels preserved over at Tobias Buckell’s.

For those who think that this is sane (after all, most professional web developers charge over $100 per hour for their services), note that she only bills at $40 an hour in the first place, she wasn’t sending out bills to Helix before, and a “professional” web designer who does not know how to delete links in a second when they use DreamWeaver as their modus operandi is an absolute idiot.

Question: does Helix use DreamWeaver 6?

Answer: Oh yes it does:

<html><!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/HelixJul08.dwt"
codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->
<head>
<!-- DW6 -->
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="doctitle" -->
<title>Helix :: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly</title>
<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

Don’t worry, the train wreck doesn’t stop here either.

Why Good Contracts Are Important

July 16th: William Sanders declares that now no one can pull their stories from Helix whatsoever:

All right, that’s it. It’s been long enough; there’s been ample opportunity
for anyone else who felt soiled by the contact with Helix to step up and speak
up and pay up.

I don’t believe there are going to be any others (the imposition of cash charges
seems to have had a distinctly damping effect) but if there are, tough shit.
You had your chance and you didn’t take it.

Nasgi fucking nusdi.

If he wasn’t running scared that most of Helix would soon evaporate, why suddenly block anyone from removing their stories from the archives?

This seem unfair to you? Well, yes, it is unfair. Unfortunately, the Helix contract gives Helix a non-exclusive right to host the story in perpetuity.

You ever wonder why so many online magazines explicitly give you the right to pull your story from their archives, and make it seem so important?

Helixgate is just one reason why.

Even More Links

The Helix Speculative Fiction Magazine scandal did escape from the smaller SF community and into the wilds of teh Internets in general:

• Bloggasm: The Ethics of Hate Mail
• Technooccult: Racist Rejection Letter Stirs Controversy in SF Community
• Christian Leftist: 2008.07.10 – This Week in Racism 4 – William Sanders & Helix Magazine, Obama as O.J.? and Sheriff with a Racist Email
• Firefox News: Editorial — Do Not Tease Nor Feed the Fans
• MOAR from Google

Oh, SF. Sometimes you make my head hurt.

Got to Be More Careful

There are a few morals to this tale. One obvious one is to stay professional in your business correspondence. The other is to stay professional through scads of scandal, whether really caused by your actions or not.

For writers: beware of contracts you haven’t read all the way through.

As Nick Mamatas has pointed out elsewhere, the proper thing to do is to point and laugh. Sometimes that’s the best thing you can do against wank in general, as people who visit Fandom Wank well know.

http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fabagginundert-20%2F8014%2F0a607353-b271-467e-84e2-fa4bda325023&Operation=GetDisplayTemplate
Amazon.com Widgets

Is it worth it to submit to some place or other in the mere hopes of publication?

As the worms turned up from Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly‘s recent wankery show, sometimes it is decidedly not.

Come with me as we explore a trail of

• racism, bigotry, and rejection letters;
• the acts of nonprofessional spewage from an editor of a Hugo-nominated semi-prozine;
• what happens when your contract with your publisher is not well-examined;
• and how to deal with the blatant wankery.

It All Started With a Rejection Letter

July 7th: a rejection letter from William Sanders, founder and head editor of Helix, was posted to a writer’s LiveJournal:

I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people – at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can – and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities….

… the narrator seems to be saying that it was this incident which caused him to take up the jihad, but he’s being mendacious (like all his kind, he’s incapable of honesty)…

… most of the SF magazines are very leery of publishing anything that might offend the sheet heads…

Sanders responded to the posting with a furious backpedaling claim that really, he was just talking about terrorists, not about everyone of Arab descent or anything:

Of course none of these people have read the story, and so they fail to grasp the context – that I was talking not about Muslims, or Arabs, or Oompa Loompas or any other religious or ethnic group, but about terrorists and violent extremists. (That being, after all, what your story was about.)

But I don’t feel any need to defend myself, or Helix, to these people; indeed I doubt that there’s anybody outside their little Mutual Masturbation Society who gives a damn what they think about anything at all.

Already William Sanders’, ah, classiness is starting to show through.

Note: It has all since then been BAHLEETED! but the juicy bits of Sanders’ rejection letter live on at K. Tempest Bradford’s and Tobias Buckell’s blogs.

Swells of Support for Sanders

July 7th and 8th: Some people, most notably co-editor Lawrence Watt-Evans, tried to support Sanders’ attempts at redaction.

There were even more people who claimed that the looked-down-upon act posting a rejection letter supersedes the content of it, and in Asimov’s forum at that. (For those not in the know, Asimov’s is one of the so-called Big Three of science fiction/fantasy’s genre short fiction magazines.)

The Backlash of Sanity

July 9th: Nick Mamatas, formerly one of the editors of Clarkesworld and soon to be an editor for Viz Media, LLC, tears Sanders’ claims of “only talkin’ ’bout terrorists, rilly” to shreds:

Well, just swap out “those people” and put in terrorists. Does the paragraph make sense? Of course not. For one, it transforms Sanders ’s claim of familiarity into a claim of being familiar with terrorists from his time in the Middle East. What was he doing chillin’ with terrorists in Turkey? (And which terrorists.)

Further, the idea of the “civilized world” falls apart — there are plenty of terrorsist in the US (abortion clinic bombers), Spain and the UK (separatist groups), in Greece (N17 and related Marxist-terrorists), etc. Where is the actual “civilized world” geographically if Sanders meant terrorists? Nowhere at all, clearly. Heck, had he said “no civilized person” could understand them, he might even have a centimeter of wiggle room.

July 9th and onwards: Even more professional editors and writers chime in, including:

• K. Tempest Bradford, writer (contributer to Interfictions, and Thou Shalt Not…), editor for Fantasy;
• Tobias Buckell, writer (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin);
• Elizabeth Bear, writer (Dust, Ink and Steel, Undertow);
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Making Light fame, senior editor of Tor Books;
• Jason Sanford, writer (contributor to Analog and Interzone);
• David Moles, writer (contributor to Asimov’s and Strange Horizons);
• John Scalzi, writer (Old Man’s War, The Android’s Dream);

and many, many more.

As a nice foreshadowing of future wankery to come, writer N. K. Jemisin (forthcoming book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms from Orbit, and contributor to Strange Horizons) criticizes Sanders and gets banned from Helix.

Writers Start to Pull Stories from Helix

It’s no surprise that people should want to start disassociating themselves from Sanders and his lunacy, and as soon as possible.

An editor with a professional attitude would have allowed the writers to do so quietly, particularly since he isn’t particularly a friend of tolerance and all that and the way to react to stink is sometimes to let it fade away from memory.

But then again, this is William Sanders.

July 14th: The first three takedown requests (Yoon Ha Lee, N. K. Jemison, and Margaret Ronald) go through, but the stories are replaced with this wonderful bit:

As K. Tempest Bradford notes, very classy.

Two of these placeholders have now been BAHLEETED (but not the third one), but Nick Mamatas has screencaps for posterity.

Oh, but the train wreck doesn’t stop there.

Blood Money

July 15th: To ward off even more content fleeing from his site, William Sanders starts to demand $40 for the privilege of pulling a story from the Helix archives:

I am hereby making a change to the aforestated offer. Effective as of now, any Helix contributor who wants his/her work deleted from the archives will have to pay for the privilege. Specifically, it’ll cost you forty bucks, payable to Melanie.

This and more delicious morsels preserved over at Tobias Buckell’s.

For those who think that this is sane (after all, most professional web developers charge over $100 per hour for their services), note that she only bills at $40 an hour in the first place, she wasn’t sending out bills to Helix before, and a “professional” web designer who does not know how to delete links in a second when they use DreamWeaver as their modus operandi is an absolute idiot.

Question: does Helix use DreamWeaver 6?

Answer: Oh yes it does:

<html><!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/HelixJul08.dwt"
codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->
<head>
<!-- DW6 -->
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="doctitle" -->
<title>Helix :: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly</title>
<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

Don’t worry, the train wreck doesn’t stop here either.

Why Good Contracts Are Important

July 16th: William Sanders declares that now no one can pull their stories from Helix whatsoever:

All right, that’s it. It’s been long enough; there’s been ample opportunity
for anyone else who felt soiled by the contact with Helix to step up and speak
up and pay up.

I don’t believe there are going to be any others (the imposition of cash charges
seems to have had a distinctly damping effect) but if there are, tough shit.
You had your chance and you didn’t take it.

Nasgi fucking nusdi.

If he wasn’t running scared that most of Helix would soon evaporate, why suddenly block anyone from removing their stories from the archives?

This seem unfair to you? Well, yes, it is unfair. Unfortunately, the Helix contract gives Helix a non-exclusive right to host the story in perpetuity.

You ever wonder why so many online magazines explicitly give you the right to pull your story from their archives, and make it seem so important?

Helixgate is just one reason why.

Even More Links

The Helix Speculative Fiction Magazine scandal did escape from the smaller SF community and into the wilds of teh Internets in general:

• Bloggasm: The Ethics of Hate Mail
• Technooccult: Racist Rejection Letter Stirs Controversy in SF Community
• Christian Leftist: 2008.07.10 – This Week in Racism 4 – William Sanders & Helix Magazine, Obama as O.J.? and Sheriff with a Racist Email
• Firefox News: Editorial — Do Not Tease Nor Feed the Fans
• MOAR from Google

Oh, SF. Sometimes you make my head hurt.

Got to Be More Careful

There are a few morals to this tale. One obvious one is to stay professional in your business correspondence. The other is to stay professional through scads of scandal, whether really caused by your actions or not.

For writers: beware of contracts you haven’t read all the way through.

As Nick Mamatas has pointed out elsewhere, the proper thing to do is to point and laugh. Sometimes that’s the best thing you can do against wank in general, as people who visit Fandom Wank well know.

http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fabagginundert-20%2F8014%2F0a607353-b271-467e-84e2-fa4bda325023&Operation=GetDisplayTemplate
Amazon.com Widgets