ZELDA WASSER AND ADVENTURES IN CENTRAL BROOKLYN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

   

First two images on this blog post © Zelda Wasser, 2014. Used by kind persimmons. Here, Zelda is pictured confronting her stalker on the Central Brooklyn Monorail.

This blog post was fantastic. I think, on Monday. Yes. Monday. The idea came to me. That theme was set in stone. A brilliant treatise on the burning topic of the hour.
   By Tuesday, I'd forgotten it. Blog while the iron is hot. On the other hand, if you can't remember the damned thing...
   Maybe it wasn't worth blogging about.

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Enter Zelda Wasser.
   Steady, audience. You are making up your own punchlines, now.
   So I probably first encountered the legend that is Zelda...a few months ago, when she posted a picture of snow on the Twitter. I typed in response...
   Serial killer territory.

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Yes, there are bodies buried in the snow. I'm thinking blunt instrument. Shovel. Too much blood in snow, with knives. Definitely shovel. Or baseball bat.

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Twitter. Is it any use to authors? I think so. Though I don't use it to constantly Tweet links to my books. What's the point? I've yet to buy a book based on a Twitter link.
   My Twitter profile lists me as an author, and there's a link to my blog from there. People really want to check out my work, they can do that from this blog.
   There's the carousel. (I scrapped that. It's now a slideshow - Eclectic Ed.) And look at all that free stuff in the dedicated pages. From here, it's easy to head on over to Amazon and find me in the Kindle Store.
   I don't constantly Tweet my book links. But I will, on occasion, Tweet about other authors. Do I need to say this again? #YESIDO.
   Ah #hashtaggery, the bane and saviour of the Twitter. Written as one word, the phrase yes I do resembles some sort of ancient Israeli fort.
  (That's Masada you are thinking of, or possibly Megiddo - Eclectic Ed.)
   I'll say it again. Authors are writers, not rivals. Colleagues all. I find it easier to drop a plug in, here, there, for other scribblers.

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Which brings me to author Zelda Wasser. Over the past few days, she's been blogging about cyberstalking. It's a serious subject. Somehow, Zelda managed to deflate the pomposity of your usual cyberstalker, the default troll, and...
   Damn it, she made me laugh out loud.
   I'll place links at the end, so you can judge for yourself. The bare bones of the story?
   Zelda, Jewish lesbian, was approached by a creep, stalker, slasher, cannibalistic murderer, serial cheat, serial killer, cereal box intellect, credit card fraudster, lounge-lizard, masher, wolf, hustler, pick-up artist, sexist pig, fun-loving guy just out for a good time.
   That's for legal reasons. The word pig will feature shortly.
   Despite explaining that she was gay, AND a lesbian, and had a wife, and was Jewish...
   The alleged Christian guy kept hitting on her. Zelda was just his type - woman with a pulse. He was such a good listener. (I'm lying.) When he heard that Jewish people tended to marry Jewish people, basically, his chat-up line was...
   Be Gentile with me.
   Zelda wasn't swinging that way. She was swinging - a baseball bat. They are known to play baseball, down there in her native Central Brooklyn.
   I am no serial killer. Though I could be, for all you know.

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Research. For writers, this is an excuse to watch TV or stare out of the window. When you put dead teabags out to the teabag graveyard on a cold, wet, windy night, that is research.
   You went looking for atmosphere. Tell yourself that.
   I had a frothing desire to research pipelines. This seemed relevant at the time. Pipe maintenance. How is that handled? The science of fixology has a solution: the pig.
   In the interests of research, I stared at a mechanical pig.

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Central Brooklyn? In Olden Times, you could scoot around on the monorail or take the Zeppelin Ferry to Roosevelt Island.
   Pictured, the former BrookZepFerry™ terminal. Now, you must make do with hover-taxis.

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You can just make out the Flatbush Avenue Extension in this photo. That is not lesbian code...
   Though, now I've drawn your attention to this, I suspect that it may be in the future.
   What the non-hell am I talking about? Adherents of Judaism don't believe in hell.
   They do believe in deflating stalkers. That's not lesbian code, either.
   Ah, Central Brooklyn in the rain. I remember it well. Sadly, I missed out on the last dirigible ride.

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Zelda met a stalker on the interweb. He lied about his location. Zelda threw in a few fake locations to see if he'd take the bait. He ate those worms with glee.
   Places that aren't places, or places that are places - just not in those places. It was all good. Hell's Kitchen, Brooklyn. Check. Central Brooklyn, Brooklyn. Check. My personal favourite?
   Roosevelt Island, Brooklyn.
   You needn't be as familiar with the geography as I am. Clue's in the title. It's an ISLAND.
   I've been to Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. And I've been to Roosevelt Island, just off Manhattan. How did I feel? Groovy. Whoops, Paul Simon reference.
   Anyway, if you read Zelda's saga...I don't want to spoil the fun. The guy was living right there, in Central Brooklyn. He was a pipe engineer. Zelda dropped a non-kosher reference to pigs. Nothing.
   I knew what she meant, as I'd done the research earlier. The pipe engineer wasn't playing that game.
   Brooklyn doesn't really have a monorail, or a dirigible ferry, or, gasp, hover-taxis. Hell, it doesn't even have Zelda half the time - she's in Upstate New York.
   I've been a long stone's throw from her house.
   No, I am not Zelda's stalker. Anyone could be. She Tweets her shopping locations. No, really. I could stalk Zelda to within an inch of her rabbi. But I choose not to.
   This guy, this prince, chose to. Badly. Very badly. Zelda passed him on, to a friend - that's not what Passover means. Soon, he was copying and pasting the same spiel to her.
   Hilarious, for all the wrong reasons.

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Zelda asked me if I wanted to chat to the stalker/s. There are two of them, or one guy pretending to be two guys. With characters like these, it's hard to tell/care.
   I just couldn't go there. For one thing, my Twitter pic is of a dishevelled cartoon lady from one of my stories. (INSANITY.) So I wouldn't want anyone thinking I am a chick. Not given the stalkerish desire to know people.
   (Changed the pic since this post - Eclectic Ed. I'm still not a chick, and don't have that many legs.)
   And for another thing, I am neck-deep in editing. Haven't the time. I made the time for blogging. But I draw the line at...there must be a term for it, whatever it is.
   Did Zelda really just try to pimp out her stalker/s to me? Oh yeah. And it was funny. Yes, I was tempted.
   But, best and worst of all, I have a black belt in a rare form of sarcasm so powerful it will strip battleship paint at five miles. Yes, I know the secret of the sarc-o-tone bomb.
   And I couldn't unleash it on that/those poor bastard/s. No sympathy for the devil. Or dicks. But there is such a thing as cruel and unusual punishment under the American Constitution.

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Here's an image from Google Maps, © Google 2014, courtesy the Fair Dealing and Fair Use doctrines of copyright law.
   Zelda was here. I know that, because she told me. And the world.
   This didn't cause her stalker problem. Stalkers cause the stalker problem. Not that she has a problem. Her stalker/s is/are inept.

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This was the funny side of it. Inept stalker/s. But there's a fatally serious side. And I am not saying all stalkers are men. But guys. Come on. Really? Lowest common denominator? Path of least resistance? Shit, rolling downhill into the drain?
   Really.
   I wrote MURDER BOX because of all this sort of crap I saw on the internet, and I fucking hated writing that story. The good thing that came out of it was helping Melissa C. Water prise her book free of a nasty publishing deal.
   That's a topic for another blog post. The next blog post. Stay tuned.

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Zelda and I reminisced about our misadventures in fictional Central Brooklyn.
   I invented an invisibility ray there. She robbed a bank with it.
   At least, I think she did. Maybe she just went shopping for food porn when my back was turned.
   Food porn. The Twitter never grows tired of that.

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A tree really grows in Brooklyn. The tour bus guide, quick with New York wit, and slow with advice, took this moment to warn upstairs passengers that we might want to take evasive action.
   In the words of the immortal bard, no shit, Sherlock.
   The giant marshmallow man, from that movie? You know the one. Happened in Central Brooklyn. They switched the story to Manhattan for bagel legal reasons.
   Okay. Brooklyn is a place. It must have a centre. Technically, there is a central Brooklyn. Not if you are a stalker. A stalker will actually come from the real fictional Central Brooklyn. Keep up at the back, there'll be questions at the end.

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How much of a stalker did I feel, compiling this blog post about stalking? I see the name Zelda, and I sense a court order coming on. No, that's not true.

   I was amazed at the amount of data. Zelda's incompetent stalker/s could have gone to town on the raw info pumped out there.

   You can track Zelda based on her food porn alone.

   No stalker was felt during the creation of this blog.



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For Zelda's tale of incompetent stalkery, which must be seen to be disbelieved, DIAL THIS HELPLINE.

Zelda is available for weddings, the occasional Vampire Bat Mitzvah, and SCRIBBLES ON AMAZON.

You could also try here, on Zelda's SECRET SITE. That isn't secret. I lied. Get over it.

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Hmm. Seems that last link there now goes to a very blank, almost secret, site. Ah well.

   Now you've read this piece on stalking, here's a link to the next blog post. THE CREEPY SEXIST DICK AUTHOR TEST.