Day: November 13, 2003

I think this is important enough to say separately from the previous thread, and it’s addressed to anyone who thinks I might be overreacting to a simple blowhard:

I take threats seriously.

Repeated threats, I take very seriously.

Repeated threats with others joining in adding suggestions, I take extremely seriously.

You think I shouldn’t?

You weren’t standing in an elevator with Bill Mumy at SDCC when a fan lunged for his throat shouting, “Send me to the cornfield, Bill!”

You haven’t had friends who have had to hire private guards, obtain court orders, and never set foot in certain cities, all to avoid stalkers.

You haven’t been subjected to letter writing campaigns of harassment from people because you *refused* to confront them.

You haven’t done a store appearance where a guy showed up and berated fans on line for a solid half hour simply because they wanted your autograph, and the store clerks wouldn’t throw the guy out because they were afraid of him, so you had to do it yourself.

And you don’t have to be worried that you’ll be standing at a convention holding your one year old daughter in your arms, chatting with someone, and suddenly some guy is going to come up to you and take a shot at you and he misses you and you’re standing there covered in your child’s blood.

And of course you can say, in the words of Superchicken, Well, Fred, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it. For every perk of fame, there’s a drawback. And that’s true as far as it goes.

But don’t for a microsecond think that I don’t take threats seriously. And for those people who claim they “know” the people making threats, and “know” they would never, ever, ever, do something truly violent: The majority of murders in this country are committed by someone the victim knows.

Yes, kids. I take threats seriously. If you don’t, that’s nice. It’s nice to be able to afford that luxury.

I can’t.

PAD

Go forth and speak. (You do that, and I’ll stop trying to sound like Warren Ellis.)

I appreciate Michael Pullman, on an earlier thread, bringing the following to my attention, since it serves as such a perfect example of how to do it wrong…the “it” being having a gripe about the way an author wrote a story. If you have a grievance, do you (a) Go to the author’s publicly known website and ask him about it, or do you (b) mischaracterize it through hearsay and then make a series of threats against the author. If your answer is the latter, then the following is the place for you:

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=84384

It’s actually a pretty handy thread. Rarely do you see the worst of the fan mentality so neatly encapsulated in one place. Anyone planning to do a research paper may want to reference it.

PAD