WHO YOU GONNA CALL?: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

More. What is it good for? Thanks to the internet there’s more of everything, and it is also readily available. Deadly combination. This means there’s more crap readily available, in terms of content out there and way out there.
   That doesn’t mean the crap is evenly distributed. Crap is determined, nay, destined, to go after you. The consumer-seeking missile is piled high with crap, and is knocking on your door, hiding under your bed, and raiding your fucking fridge all in the same electronic breath.
   Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to seek out new forms of entertainment, be entertained by some of it, and filter out the rest. Filter. Burn. Filter out the rest, in a fire. Boldly go where a shit-load of people have gone before, and shit a load of movies and TV shows out of your system. Save time. Sidestep. Swerve. Avoid.
   Once, in the before-times, there was a view: you had to watch something to determine whether or not it was of any use to you as a form of entertainment. Not so much, now. When there’s so much, now. The solid construction of a decent movie trailer is a long-lost art. (Ignoring all the shitty trailers that were made down through movie history. Fuck it, let’s be severely selective here. That is, after all, the point of the exercise. Limit your intake of intake.)
   Movie trailers developed a mutated purpose. They no longer sell movies. Instead, they signal all the shit to avoid. This is how they are built.
   Once upon a film, the trailer sold you on the idea of a fantastic piece of entertainment.
   Twice upon a film, we started to sense the idea that we wanted the people who made the movie trailers to be the same people who’d made the movies. Sadly, the trailer people were not the movie people, after all, and we were sold lies.
   Then, thrice upon a film, we reached NOW. And NOW, the shoddy construction of the movie trailer makes it electronically easy for us to walk away. We don’t need to be in a movie theatre or in front of a television showing adverts to experience the trailer. YouTube saves a lot of effort.
   It’s caustically easy to be dismissive.
   For those wondering about the difficulty of making trailers, there are a few problems.
   One. Showing footage from the movie that never ends up in the finished film. The joke here is that you’ll see a trailer for a comedy and there’ll be five jokes in the trailer but only three jokes in the film. Not one joke a funny jab, either.
   Two. Giving away the plot twist in the trailer. Obviously, I can’t spoil any plots in this text here. Except to say showing the fucking iceberg in that Titanic trailer is poor form. But wait a bit. Why is that guy starting a gunfight on board the ship during these icy shenanigans?
   That addition to the trailer made me realise I wouldn’t be foaming at the mouth to watch a load of old bollocks. Let’s bolt an action movie onto a film about a ship sinking, to, you know, make the story more dramatic. Or something.
   The less said about Avatar the better.
   Hey, Vasquez. Ever been mistaken for a character in another movie?
   Yes. Have you?
   Three. Trying to sell enough of an idea of the movie…without giving away all the jokes in a comedy or twists in the plot of any kind of thriller. Yes, that’s tricky.
   What was my most disappointing experience, after staggering away from a movie trailer? GHOSTBUSTERS. I must add…the 2016 version of the film. The trailer sets up an idea in text. What did we know? New movie. Four women team up to be ghostbusters.
   30 YEARS AGO…FOUR SCIENTISTS SAVED NEW YORK…THIS SUMMER…A NEW TEAM WILL ANSWER THE CALL.
   Stick a knife in the last three words, there. We’ll conduct an autopsy later.
   I instantly thought we were getting the daughters of the original ghostbusters in some kind of continuation sequel. That felt like the set-up, right there in the text.
   It’s a very basic idea for a movie continuation, but it is good enough for government work. If the original actors appear, getting on in years, then they are passing the torch to the next generation of characters. Tired. Worn-out. As plain an idea is it gets. But. Workable.
   Well the text fucking lied to us.
   That expectation was on me, and it’s my fault. No, fuck off. That expectation was mine as I read the text in the trailer. After I’d done so, the rest of the trailer dropped. That text deliberately drove us to the edge of a cliff seconds before an earthquake. And then. The rest of the trailer, sadly. That is what happened, then.
   It’s not as if the trailer gave me an expectation that died when going to the movies. No. The trailer gave me an expectation that died seconds into the trailer. Daughters of the original squad. Cool. We’ll see cameo roles. It’ll be the least-forced cameo run in the history of cinema. Parental ghostbusters. But no. The rest of the trailer dropped off that cliff I mentioned.
   Oh, it’s a…reboot/remake with elements of things we’ve seen before and…frankly, from that trailer, effects that didn’t really come across as all that good. With the passage of 30 years, you’d think the effects would look better and not…
   Smoothed over, to cater to a 3D version of the film no one asked for. Ultimately, contrary to expectation, the 2016 movie’s artificial gloss can’t compete with the charm of earlier effects. I expect a 1980s movie to have effects like a 1980s movie. Some movies come across as better when they age.
   For example: THE THING. Its effects are way better than the reboot/prequel/side-by-side movie that landed later. A crying shame that the practical effects in the reboot didn’t have the backing from those higher up in the movie process…leading to everyone getting fucked over on that gig. Watch John Carpenter’s version instead. Not every effect is great. But almost all of those effects add atmosphere.
   You get that in abundance from the effects in the original GHOSTBUSTERS. Sure, it’s a quirky atmosphere, but it is a ghost comedy. Then we jump to 2016. When a trailer pisses on an already patchy movie franchise and shits on its own release, you go with the vibe of that trailer. The vibe ain’t good. Five jokes in the trailer but only three jokes in the film. That kind of deal. Not that it’s a deal.
   I frowned at the trailer instead of smiling or laughing. This is a comedy, and I am not laughing. Well. Damn. And it’s not the four daughters of…fuck’s sake. It isn’t difficult to write the obvious script.
   Unless it’s for 2016 GHOSTBUSTERS, apparently. For once, in the name of cinema, just go with the fucking obvious, take the unoriginality hit, and plough heavily into a well-worked field. Play to the nostalgia, if there’s any nostalgia left. The daughters of.
   But no. Instead. That mess. It’s not a sequel…hell, it’s nowhere near an equal. While I’m briefly on that non-topic, marketing terms of that stripe need to die in a fucking fire.
   When the director spouts nonsense about showing you a film you haven’t seen before but maybe it is a film you have seen before, you know he’s the wrong director. For anything. A lot of people involved in that film patted each other on the back through gritted contractual teeth at the time, or so it felt to me.
   After the original film came out, the basic idea of more films in a series…filtered itself through its own anus, it’s true. It was very difficult to face the concept of a sequel. And after the second film, it was even harder to wade through the notion of GHOSTBUSTERS 3.
   Often discussed. Never materialised. Hoped for. Then not hoped for. Maybe it is for the best that the spectre of GHOSTBUSTERS 3 was exorcised. And yet, somewhere in a musty tomb, there were plans for a continuation of a retread of a rethink of a ghostly return.
   What do we get from GHOSTBUSTERS (2016) as a movie prospect? Cameos from original cast members, sadly. Pointless cameos from original cast members. Also. Never set your movie up for a sequel that isn’t going to happen. That’s another point against it.
   Have faith in the title of your movie. It is GHOSTBUSTERS: ANSWER THE CALL. Apparently. Who you gonna call? Not this director. If you, as the director, object to the movie’s full title and need to have it buried in the movie’s closing credit sequence, you are the wrong director for anything. Including traffic.
   I’ve mentioned the trailer for GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE before. There’s a thing in that trailer that should not be there. Won’t say here. It’s a cool moment that should be part of the movie experience. Not the trailer experience.
   If you plan to watch the movie and you haven’t seen the trailer…just watch the movie. There never was a GHOSTBUSTERS 3. (Which we, now, all suspect would’ve been ghastly.) Instead, we faced a second reboot…
   Someone has to save this cash-cow. Reboot with AFTERLIFE.
   Was AFTERLIFE any better than the 2016 reboot? The 2016 reboot mess just barely wallpapered over the original movie. Then the wallpaper fell off. The misguided attempt to reference the original, while breaking free into “new” characters and cameos one-step-removed…tried and failed to tap into an audience for a much-loved earlier film.
   And then AFTERLIFE…strip-mined the ever-living fuck out of the nostalgia train at an industrial scale, harvesting the feel-good factor all the way down to the nostalgia train’s rails. It was a basic-bitch move. Take relatives of an original ghostbuster and pass the torch on.
   Either you’ll hate that more than the 2016 reboot…or…you’ll embrace the barbed wire of nostalgia in the hope that the distraction allows you to ignore the pain. I recommend swallowing two pills beforehand – the first two movies in the series. Then you’ll be as fresh as possible when it comes to the assault on the nostalgia front.
   And it is a barrage. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a corporate entity dipping into the audience’s pockets looking for those nostalgia coins. And, damn it. I hopped on that nostalgia train knowing the audience was in for a corporate mugging.
   There were a few giant missteps in AFTERLIFE and also in its immediate nostalgia-steeped sequel, FROZEN EMPIRE. As ever, there are rumblings about what happens next. It’s getting harder to care when yet another movie bod is thrown on the pile of people talking up what’s next. Nostalgia is next.
   When does it end? More. What is it good for? GHOSTBUSTERS II is okay. And it did enough money at the time to hold out the promise of closing the movie franchise on a third film. Alas, it was not to be. The second film’s legacy was, at a considerable distance, the revival of Vigo the Carpathian as an internet meme connected to the very red portrait of a man named Chaaalz.
   There is no Chaaalz. Only Zuul.
   Ruh-roh. There’s that word. Legacy. Don’t concern yourself too much with the legacy of a movie that was great on its own and patchy as a franchise. You always have the original. It’s right there. That’s your golden ticket to nostalgia. A crap sequel does not ruin a great film. Even if the people you liked from the first production took the money and ran after filming the later one.
   A bad movie adaptation of a good book doesn’t destroy the book. And a good movie adaptation of a good book…is a movie. What works on the page may have to be condensed on the big screen.
   GHOSTBUSTERS isn’t ruined by GHOSTBUSTERS 2016. Of course, I must add…maybe you don’t care for the first film at all. Or any other films in the intermittent series. This blog post isn’t about your tastes, though. It was about my allergic reaction to a movie trailer, welded to recent movie people talk of where the franchise goes next.
   As movie trailers devolve instead of evolve, I feel there will be more allergic reactions that spare me from experiencing entire franchises. Movie trailers are tailored to phone screens. When movies are filmed on phones, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that movies are set up, in terms of cinematography, to be viewed on phones in a Covid-tainted environment.
   Covid just speeded up the inevitable tumble into the abyss technology periodically provides. They don’t make ’em like they used to. That’s because you used to see movies on the big screen or on TV years after the cinema release.
   The trip from movie to streaming is a short one, now.
   One day, they’ll beam the movie into your brain. And you’ll have a fast-forward function for an extra fee. By fuck, you’ll pay it. You say you won’t, today. Bless your wee cotton socks. You’ll go from sweet summer child to sour winter adult in one swift move.
   GHOSTBUSTERS from 2016 was pre-Covid. It’s difficult to compare box office results for what followed. AFTERLIFE boasted post-Covid box office numbers. The box office returns weren’t too far off each other. Tellingly, AFTERLIFE had a slashed budget. Made it more of a winning proposition for the sorcerers being employed down in accounts.
   We shouldn’t concern ourselves with budgets, box office receipts, or movie companies and their creative accounting. When creators talk to you through gritted teeth for contractual reasons, you tend to tune out the noise.
   What’s really telling, here? Time. With the two movies from the initial run, there’s a gap of five years between releases. Then nothing in cinemas until 2016. I’m aware of the cartoons and the video game that’s the spiritual version of GHOSTBUSTERS 3.
   After the failed reboot, Covid stepped in and changed the landscape. Technically, AFTERLIFE is just barely a pre-Covid film, having finished shooting in late 2019. But Covid dogged the movie’s release. So you had a reboot followed by the release of a reboot five years later.
   If you want to wrap up a trilogy, don’t take more than a decade to release it. Yes, The Lord of the Rings spoiled moviegoers who were into Tolkien’s work. Year on year, Frodo Baggins turned up in winter with the frequency of a pantomime character in search of a fortune.
   Much-delayed sequels deserve our contempt. When you look at the inevitable exposé of what went on behind the non-scenes, there’s only one conclusion to draw.
   The scrip wasn’t right. That had nothing to do with the script. Movie development hell simply means someone in production wouldn’t pad out the pay packet of an actor.

BLOGGERATION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

When I blog, I preview the blog to see what Blogger fucked around with. Sections of the text appear tiny. This is usually a paragraph problem. I select the entire paragraph of tiny text and change the size around a few times, hoping that uniformity strikes like a snake at the irritation of awkward formatting.
   It takes time for the venom to have an effect. Usually, it’s quicker to take a sledgehammer to the cracked saucer, rather than embark upon a long and laborious repair.
   In that case, I select the entire blog post and change the size around a few times, hoping that uniformity strikes like a strikey thing. A nuclear strikey thing. Everything in the blast is covered for all eternity plus a few years.

*

Yes, there is work backstage, offstage, and in the cluttered parking area behind the theatre. Once in a good while, or bad while, Blogger is updated with a lick of paint that came from a cat’s tongue. This is an unpleasant business.
   For a trial period, Blogger allows users to revert to the classic style. The trial period expires and the classic style is sent to the grindy-grindy machine come midnight. Does it matter if the handy button for doing that thing is now top-left instead of bottom-right?
   Yes, it fucking matters for the first few scrabbling grabs at digital thin air on the user non-interface. We’ve made it more user-friendly! How’d you manage that? Kill off all the regular users so the raw recruits don’t know any different?
   Change on Blogger leads to bloggeration. Wrath-of-God-type-stuff. Dogs and cats, living together. The most annoying change I faced on this shaky platform was the change I am facing now.
   It’s the paragraph problem.
   I type the blog up in a file…aaaaaand copy the text over to Blogger. Simple. Too easy. Blogger changed the width of the stage, the height of the audience, and the no cream in the coffee.
   But I wanted my coffee without cream, and this new lack of cream isn’t the same as the old lack of cream. Can we go back to the complete lack of cream that wasn’t there before? That non-tasted so much better.
   Now, as in…right now…I drop the text into the Blogger box and…
   The paragraphs are standing on the corner of Fucked-Up and Normal. They separate. Oil text and water text.
   Blergh.
   I didn’t have to take a guided tour of the internet, but…I took a guided tour of the internet to find out what the fucketty-fudge was going on. Just fix it. The internet just fixed it. I mean the internet just barely fixed it.
   Why are all the paragraphs separated by space, the final frontier?
   Paragraph by bleeding paragraph, I have to go in…I don’t have to go in… (I really must go in) and I cut the gap between paragraphs. Then I pump up the typographical tyres with a borrowed slice of keyboard wizardry and I am falling asleep typing this.
   The point is…using Blogger was always irritating. Over time, Blogger endeared itself to me by turning all user-friendly and that is a lie I tell myself as the realisation dawns that I have to fix this bloody blog post before it goes out to a semi-suspecting public.
   I learned the fix, and that’s as far as things went. Merge the paragraphs. Cut the paragraphs apart again. Like an angry baker throwing lumps of dough back into one huge boulder, I wonder how it came to this.
   How did it come to this?
   I might as well ask why there’s a pet snake called Reggie aboard the plane. Wait, is that where the idea for the Samuel L. Jackson movie comes from?

*

Anyway, I use the fix. There might be a better fix than the fix I use now. But the fix I use now is a fix that works. Merge. Cut. Merge. Cut. Paragraph by ill-fitting paragraph. Of course, I tried to make it easier on myself…
   I set up a file with wholly separate paragraphs and dropped that into Blogger. Separate paragraphs. Little rafts of text, making their way down the not-so-rapid rapids of Formatting Falls. Blogger detected my cunning ruse, and I still had to merge the paragraphs before cutting them apart with my bare teeth and a rusty saw I found by the side of the road.
   In short…
   (Notes futility of making a point about the formatting problem by creating a one-line paragraph that will still be adjusted later, regardless of size.)
   Every fucking time I blog, I have to adjust the entire blog. No more dropping the text off at Blogger, running a preview, and kicking the blog over the grass and out into the world.
   No.
   I could hunt for another fix.
   Or I could change platforms.
   I think I had a WordPress account for five minutes, back in the Jurassic.
   Perhaps I shall mimic Defoe, and write without let or hindrance – abandoning the many benefits the paragraph brings to the scribbler. Robinson Crusoe isn’t paragraph-free. It just feels that way.
   The challenge is not a difficult one for the blog writer. Though something tells me, call this a wild and impulsive view, yes, something tells me the reader may not feel the ease of the reading challenge wrapped up in a one-paragraph blog.
   Usually these blogs run to 1,500 words or so. The challenge in writing is to avoid hitting the return key. You may think of that as the enter key. Bless your heart if you’ve never experienced the fun of using a manual typewriter. Big fun. All the fun.
   No fun.
   Should I inflict a one-paragraph blog on the readers? Yes, if it is also a one-line paragraph. But wait a bit. How long are my paragraphs anyway? Not long. Back in the Jurassic, I’d rarely go over six lines for a paragraph. On average, I’d write three lines.
   When I saw how my stories looked when transferred to Kindle, I knew the days of the six-line paragraph were dead. A six-line paragraph on the Kindle non-page took up the whole screen.
   I cannot inflict that on the readers. Once, just once, I wrote of a character who babbled for a whole page of text. One paragraph. The paragraph of doom – a doom that rolled over the readers and squished them flatter than pancakes.
   So I decided to blog about this paragraph problem. And I am not looking for answers. I have the fix. The fix is in. And it is annoying. But I no longer care. Perhaps I never cared. As soon as I found the fix, I fixed the problem. Inconvenient to me as the fix is, it is still a fix. There may be a better fix out there.
   I suspect the better fix will come along when Blogger is once again “improved” for the delighted user. Normally, blogging is painless. One paragraph is a different size when the text hits the preview. It is a basic formatting problem. I nuke the paragraph free of its formatting then resize. Job done.
   But here I am, down on the factory floor, conducting paragraph maintenance every time I drop a wad of text into the blogging machine. Could I sidestep the issue by typing raw text straight into the word-sausage maker?
   No.
   If I type directly into blogger, I must still use the fix. The fix is annoying. Instead of hitting the return/enter key, I must hit that key and the shift key at the same time. Yes, this is the fix. It is, to use a technical term, fucking annoying.
   Eat. Drink. Be merry. Wine. Women. Song. (Not wine, though. Wine is decaying grape juice on a long slow journey into becoming vinegar. And people who can’t sing shouldn’t. Other than that, you’re golden.)

Screenshot from the movie Sideways appears under the copyright doctrine of Fair Dealing.

I consider the office and the bookcases and the space for more bookcases and the shelves in those bookcases and the books on those shelves and the words written by good and bad authors in those books.

   Great books by absolute shits and shit books by otherwise great people.
   And I consider the coffee it takes to write those books. Right now I am considering the mints I popped like pills to get me through this meta-textual morass that is a blog post about the annoying change to my blogging routine.
   Imposed on me…
   The change to blogging, not the mints. No one imposes mints upon me. I receive mints graciously, in a room built for the very purpose. Why, yes, it smells of mint. However did you know that?
   See also Would you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge? It’s a steal at that price. Ah, but before we even get into that bit of nonsense, I must away and slash through the thorny wilderness of formatting to carry this blog from my computer to the internet.
   Also, the chance of being sent to Sing Sing for attempting to sell the Brooklyn Bridge was always rather high. As high as the bridge itself. 

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.



*

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.

*

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.