This post may be a little more humorous, though I am still misanthropic and curmudgeony. So if for some reason you came here looking for fluffy bunnies and unicorns farting rainbows, well, sorry.
It occurs to me that I have reason to be disgusted with myself for being so desperate that I fell for flattery and thus put myself among disgenuous people who cared not a whit about how their behavior might hurt me, so long as they got what they wanted.
The detractors are in a category unto themselves, and it's pretty straightforward. "U suck and aren't "trve" evil, black, metal, death-obsessed, what the fuck ever. And I hate U. And U suck. So there!"
Well, I suck. That's pretty unflattering. But it's also pretty much right to the point. These people don't like me. I'd rather be straight up disliked than to have people pretending to like me to get something out of me. Oh sure, some of these people may have actually convinced themselves that they did like me. But they "liked" me because I held the key to His Nibs. Truth was, they couldn't have given a fart in a category 5 hurricane about me.
Still, when you've got people gushing over your first-ever published story and you're the kind of person who tends to be desperate for approval because you've been misunderstood for your entire life, you tend to put on blinders. It's awful that I was so starved for love that I fell for this shit.
"Lily, you're wonderful, this is the best story ever!"
Yeah...if your name is Lily and you've written a story, tell me that wouldn't make your heart (and ego) swell up 666 sizes too big!
But it's a sham. You look at the Devil card, and there it is. Lies and flattery. And I became a captive of that flattery. I would have done anything to get more of it.
Except there was a little part of me that was screaming "no, this is fucking WRONG!"
It was glamour, a siren song, a spell.
None of this wonderfulness had either Jack or Shit to do with me, or with what I'd written.
I could have plagiarized a manual on the care and maintenance of septic tanks and tacked onto the end "His Nibs says 'Don't forget to wipe your ass, Folks,'" and these types would have been as twitterpated as fans of both Twilight and Justin Bieber upon learning that Biebs was going to do the soundtrack for the next Twilight movie.
Nah...my writing skills, such as they may be, hadn't a damn thing to do with it. These individuals are, as one of the few real friends I made out of this whole mess said, "a flock of Find a Grave graspers."
I love this. Find a Grave graspers. Genius! And absolutely right.
These are dissatisfied women of various ages searching for the Demon Lover. Like Jim Morrison, His Nibs fills the bill. He's handsome, mysterious, brooding, Byronian, gives an air of danger and divine madness, and died young so he will always be all of those things.
I'm still torn about how I feel regarding having written the book. On one hand, I did make a handful of true friends that I still keep in touch with more or less. On the other hand I'm still recovering from the wounds I received upon realizing several ugly truths.
Most people are not open-minded, most are not kind, and most do not have the best interests of anyone but themselves in mind. There are a few shitty people (trolls) who really and truly enjoy hurting others. There are a handful of genuine good souls who are worth all the treasure the Earth has to give and then some.
Most, however, are not deliberately malicioius. They are simply self-absorbed. They don't give much thought to the consequences of their actions. They don't care who their actions hurt, so long as they get what they want.
I have come to the conclusion that the majority of people are neither good nor evil, just selfish.
In some ways, I'm glad I wrote the book.
But in other ways, I don't think I'll ever get over the trauma of dealing with the detractors and graspers.
