The plot thickens

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. -Mark Twain.

So, as it turns out there is more than one potential villain in our little piece. Now, there is no doubt that Barbara Bauer sucks. She called up the ISP for Absolute Write (in the process of being reborn on a new server - go AW!) and demanded they take down the site because it contained her e-mail address and people there were spamming her. Her e-mail address also appears on her webpage, and she is totally googleable, so how she knows where her spam is coming from is anybody's guess. Also, bilking hopeful (yet sadly uninformed) new writers out of thousands of dollars is OK, but spam is totally evil! (Well, it is, actually, but so is that other thing).

(My favorite Barbara Bauer story is when she demanded $1 billion dollars from Writer's Weekly for defamation. I wonder, did she hold her pinky to the corner of her mouth when she said that?)

So. Lunatic woman makes a lunatic demand. Why did the ISP do it?

As it turns out, this is a husband and wife team who've been working on their own forum for writers and hey! What a coincidence! It turns up the very next day after Absolute Write is taken down. (I'm not giving the URL here, suffice it to say there's no one there but Stephanie and James, who are the husband and wife team, and a few Backspacers asking pointed questions that don't seem to be getting answered. Odd, that).

James gives his side of the story here. It seems our choices are between thinking they are mean-spirited and thinking they are just really stupid. The comment trail at Making Light is filled with techie-types explaining why nothing James says makes sense to people who know anything about running an ISP. Me? Well, the screed starts out with James asking us to excuse his spelling and "grammer". Perhaps if he hadn't pissed off every writer in existence he could have gotten someone to proofread it for him.

He also says we should go ahead and keep posting about him because he's taking down all our names and he's totally going to sic his lawyer on us. I know I'm shaking in my boots.

On somewhat related notes:

Miss Snark rocks.

The really stupid thing about attacking writers is that they are smart and creative.They don't call talk shows and whine...they build websites (or post really really sardonic yet useful comments on Making Light) - Miss Snark

Neil Gaiman contributes (and his blog gets a few readers, doesn't it?)

And also joining the fray are Andrew Wheeler, Jackie Kessler, Kristin Nelson (like Miss Snark, she's a real agent), Heather Brewer, EJ Knapp, Marie Lu, and my brother RoninHighlander. And those are just from the blogs I read regularly. (and now the whole "I never have time to read the newspaper" thing is making a lot more sense...).