Writer smashes reviewer with a wine bottle, aka How NOT to handle getting a bad review

Writer smashes reviewer with a wine bottle, aka How NOT to handle getting a bad review

I've touched on authors having meltdowns when criticized a few times before (like this guy or this woman's now deleted Amazon war), but this one takes the cake. A year or so ago, British author self-published a novel inspired by the woman he was stalking. Seriously. He blogged extensively about stalking her, law enforcement got involved, and he eventually wrote a fairy tale in which she was the main character. Given that he blogs extensively about mental illness, I have to guess that he's a wee bit unstable. Anyway, he posted an excerpt of this work to Wattpad, where an…
LAKEHURST: The Facebook Page

LAKEHURST: The Facebook Page

Hey, not fer nuthin', but my favorite little Pine Barrens town happens to have a Facebook page, and it happens to have been started by yours truly, and it happens to have all sorts of awesome pictures and facts from this great book about Lakehurst. In fact, the page has been going for some time now, and it's full of AWESOME memories and pictures and general stuff from in and around Lakehurst, like airships, the Hindenburg disaster, life in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, places to drink great New Jersey beer, and loads more. So hey, be cool and click…
Why journalists hate their life, redux

Why journalists hate their life, redux

A few days ago I shared why journalists hate life, namely, the sheer ineptitude of management that seems hellbent on driving papers to extinction, kicking employee morale in the face while doing it. This is an industry-wide problem that is killing newsroom after newsroom and making reporters, frankly, not really give a damn about their job anymore. Well, here's another story, courtesy of KC Confidential: The Kansas City Star has told reporters Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann that one of them has to leave the paper, and they — not management — have to decide who goes. “Dillon has seniority,…
Why journalists hate their life

Why journalists hate their life

It's no secret that the world of journalism is in flux. I spent over a decade in the world of newspapers, those fussy, papery things created by ink-stained wretches, and while I can't say I don't have an extreme fondness for those old relics -- I think they're wonderful, actually -- I can say that I don't have an extreme fondness for the visionless people who so often run news organizations. My friends still in the news business don't disagree. A good friend who is an investigative journalist with a fairly large regional daily has seen his office withering under…

Videos from Hurricane Sandy

In the days to come I'll be blogging on another site about this, but for now enjoy these visuals of what I enjoyed when waking up the morning after Hurricane Sandy struck. "Waking up" is a simple explanation, of course, but I'll tell the full story later. For now, here is what I saw when I opened my bedroom window in the morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-OHXf3nQzM Looks worrisome, but by this time the water had come down by between a foot to two feet, so we were pretty calm by this point. Really! Still, this is how the backyard looked (you may…