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.

REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

At the very last moment, I decided to continue blogging. That is a lie – even this last-minute post is written ahead of the game. Time travel at work, once again. The eighteen-blog cycle ends, and starts afresh. That, too, is a lie.

   Somewhere along the way, I was forced to write an emergency blog post – with those words in the title. Meaning I’ve blogged nineteen times over this eighteen-post stint. Let’s blame someone. Kacey Vanderkarr. She dragged me into an internet writing game. I released unpublished fiction on the blog.

   Another post told my audience that I’d turned my back on nonsense like that. This caused a disturbance in the realms of space and time. Now I’m left unsure. I prefer not to release snippets of fiction on my blog…

   Been there. Done that. My personal carer, Dr Anton Phibes, is employed to prevent this foolishness. There’s me, and there’s the blank page. Then there are the readers who tackle my work in e-book form. I don’t feel an overwhelming desire to share fiction at an intermediate stage.

   True, my blog opened with a short story on a stormy Hallowe’en. I had to put something on there. True, I believe a fiction author’s blog should contain fiction. But not too much. Admittedly, you can read an entire novel on this blog…

   Yes, I’m in two or three minds about placing fiction on the blog. Dr Phibes holds to one view. None of that nonsense, now. I participated in a novel that ran from blog to blog. How I managed that without seeing my carer run amok, I’ll never know.

   He’s there to ensure that I don’t go wild with the concept of social networking. I’m permitted to go mild with social networking now and again. That’s it. Blogging is pretty much my limit. And I almost quit blogging today. Dr Phibes would approve if I crashed my blog into the sea. My 0.75 readers may object. I can see my in-box being flooded by a complaint.

   What’s next? More blogging. Thoughts on publishing, from an author on the run. The same thoughts. Don’t stop writing. Keep going. I almost stopped blogging so that I could tackle more writing. And I may yet abandon blogging, if Dr Phibes gets his abominable say. So what happened to that intergalactic space cockroach porno I was working on? Knew that would raise a smile.

Yet another disruption to a blog post. I spent an evening wavering. Not contemplatively. I just didn’t feel well. My choice was to shut down and recover. See if I could recharge anything. Overnight, dreams told me that I was placing things in order. Symbolically.

   Quite how I came to that conclusion after being stalked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, travelling on the London Underground, I’ll never know. There were many lost socks scattered in those subterranean passages. Women dressed as knights assisted.

   Imagination at work. Even lying down in a dark room last night, my mind was sparking with ideas. Ill, the imagination rattles on. I feel better today. Feeling better hasn’t suppressed the imagination, fortunately.

   There is something about feeling down or out-of-sorts that propels fiction. With my strict publishing timetable consigned to the dim and distant, I entered the loose planning phase. All part of my scheme. I took ups and downs and converted them into words.

   Instead of dealing relentlessly with the back catalogue of ideas, I found myself conjuring a lot of new material. My approach to writing is changing. Gradually. And it is the electronic publishing of my work to a strict timetable that set up all the changes.

   For the better, I hope.

   What advice is there, for writers thinking of following in my digital footsteps? It’s still the same advice. Read. Write. Experience the good and bad in writing. Find out as much as you can. It’s all there, on the internet.

   Read copyright law.

   Be prepared to act alone. For the sharp end of writing is done alone. Be prepared to publish as part of a writerly community. I’ve had conversations with countless authors. Sometimes you are just shooting the breeze. Occasionally, you become mired in technical discovery.

   For the most part, contact with other authors is limited. You say hello and ask a question or point something out, then you are off on your way again. Clicking links. Or setting them up. Try to avoid becoming lost in the maddening swirl of the internet. Though try to become lost in the maddening swirl of the internet at least once.

   The one place you should be lost is in the maddening swirl of your own writing. Just get through it. That advice applies whether you write fiction or non-fiction. It applies whether you plan to publish or not.

   I feel it is important to champion writing, no matter the purpose of that writing. You may be reading this thinking that you’ll write a novel and that novel will go out to the world. There are plenty of people who have no desire to publish. They write stories for themselves. Nothing wrong in that.

   Yes, I feel there is something wrong with people who want to publish yet declare loudly that they can’t bring themselves to. These cries for help are easily-silenced by the command – PUBLISH. What are you scared of? Shadows. Misty nothingness. Failure?

   Never be scared of that. Failure is important. Writing a story that draws to a clunk rather than a conclusion IS IMPORTANT. You’ll do better next time. Experimenting with the second person narrative, in which you describe everything using the word you, and failing in that experiment…

   IMPORTANT.

   Learning how to handle flashbacks within flashbacks, failing every single time, will be frustrating. Until you finally get there. I know the hardest advice to follow is the advice to keep going. Keep failing until success comes to you.

   I bang on about this, knowing I was going to end my blog. Ending a blog doesn’t end the writing. The Fiction Factory is still slowly grinding out material amidst a cascade of sparks. My doubt doesn’t diminish the advice to have doubt. Use your fear.

   Perhaps you are ill. Tragic events surround you. Life takes a sponge to your plans, and wipes them off the board. Declare yourself a writer and you must write. Never mind if the writing is crap. At least you are writing.

   Feeling low? Climb. Or sink, if sinking leads you to another route. Use whatever works. Even if something appears dreadfully negative, it may carry you to the place you find most useful. Lamenting the near-crash of my blog should be gloomier than it is.

   If I had ended my blog in these closing paragraphs, I’d still have encouraged people to write. Maybe blogging isn’t for you. I recommend it. Doesn’t make blogging the law. There’s a real feel of winding down, but I’ll still blog. Stay tuned.

   Perhaps it’s a sense of perspective that I’m seeing, as I cast this blog post adrift on the vast ocean that is the internet. After a year of blogging, I can see where I’ve been. I took a trip on a twisty road with many alternative routes. If I managed to get one person writing in all that time, I’ve done okay.

   About now, I should end on some fantastic upbeat message of hope and pastel-shaded sentiment. But that’s not my thing. I’m a grumpy curmudgeonly figure, fending off sentiment with a cauldron of near-boiling cynicism. Cynically, I couldn’t quite see my way to stoking the flames for the full effect.

   Over this year, I helped other authors. Often in minor ways. The minor ways are important. If you are stuck in a gremlin-packed avenue, you’ll appreciate the tiny piece of technical advice that comes your way and unblocks the traffic-jam.

   Occasionally, I helped out in a major way. Something I never thought it wise to do – until now. Publishing my own work was anti-climactic. I pressed a button. Job done. I’m going to be far more interested in seeing other authors publish. After the help I gave, I want to be sure that I didn’t ruin anyone as a writer.

   The internet has this unfortunate effect of destroying tone and concealing meaning. Often, I’ve seen advice handed out by writers as though the law. I know that these writers aren’t dictating. The internet is stripping warmth from their words.

   So I’ll repeat myself, at the risk of being crude. There must be 50 ways to…whoops. Paul Simon reference. I’ll repeat myself. Advice freely given is free to be ignored. My advice is to read and to write. Read crap stuff. Learn from the crap. Write. Just get it down. Worry about how crap it is later. Stop worrying about how crap it is. But do worry.

   Worry about being unpublished when that van hits you. You might fall into a river laden with terminal levels of shopping. Two lorries, heading for a motorway collision, risk ending your literary career in a way that a poisonous review never could.

   Write your way through hell and back. Learn as much as you can on the trip through fire and brimstone. Perhaps most important of all – know when your story is finished. Let it go. I let my first few books go to a timetable. Deadlines are important for self-publishers. Stick to them.

   Learn from failing to stick to a deadline. See what went right and what went wrong. You are always going to be too close to your own writing – so damn well accept that. What is it you want to achieve? Ask yourself every time you write a story.

   The comic book writer/artist Howard Chaykin tackled western stories almost solely to embarrass himself into learning how to draw horses. He could have concocted a western without a single nag in the tale. But he went for it. To hell with the criticism he’d face. He could draw people. Why not horses?

   Ask yourself what you want to achieve, in writing a type of story you haven’t tackled before. You should ask yourself what you want to achieve in writing a type of story you’ve tackled many times. If you have to dredge the internet for advice, do so.

   Remember what I said about advice freely given.

   Time to end this blog post, though not time to end the blog. I struggled to hit 1,500 words this time out. Then, true to form, I managed to ramble across the finish line with words to spare. Keep writing. Don’t give up. Learn. Not just in an educational way. In a visceral way – by learning from mistakes. Enjoy writing. I do.

NEXT EVENT: REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE (VOLUME 2) IS PUBLISHED.

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Update. I scrapped the collected blog posts. The blogs exist on the internet, but not as collected volumes. HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.