At the end of the day, with the Wright fiasco and his sudden withdrawal into a shell of his own making after someone posted links to his screed on Wikipedia and it stuck, pulling his posts down after him, I can only say:

And because my blog is also turning into my personal web scrapbook, here is Catherynne M. Valente’s wonderful open letter. Oh, and also Hal Duncan’s wonderful open letter. And Jeff VanderMeer’s post where I first heard of all this.

(Previously at the beginning of this blog post:)

I said over at Tor.com in a comment on Jason Henninger’s post about outrage and artists that I would drop an author who said/did things that trigger me. For me, it’s mental self-preservation until I get to the day when I no longer have that hair-trigger in my head.

What does trigger PTSD for me is an odd thing; finding out that an author abused their own children would do it, but even an author who expresses the wish that, for instance, “all Asian women should be rounded up as sex slaves to white males” ((No one has said this that I know of, though there are people who have a pattern in their work that all but screams this when looked at as a whole.)), doesn’t.

People actually doing certain things, on the other hand, are what get me. Actually committing genocide, beating wives, abusing children in any way…. those are the lines for me in the end.

I guess it comes down to the fact that my father was what can only be described as libertarianism taken to an extreme with an extra strong dose of every ‘-ist’ you can think of, but it was the abuse that stuck out in my mind. The rest was a somewhat secondary concern.

I’m not saying that everybody should think like I do, nor am I saying that this is the best way to react to such things, nor am I saying there is anything good and admirable here, nor am I even saying that actions “mean” more than words, nor am I saying that words cannot hurt people. (My father’s emotional abuse was, in some ways, worse than his physical abuse.)

I need to get back into making ebooks. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks.