The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Elise, sweetheart, I'm so sorry. I don't want to pester you with e-mail right now, but I imagine you'll read through this thread at some point, so please know my thoughts are with you. My condolences to the rest of his family and friends as well.

I didn't know Ford personally at all -- I don't think we ever met. But I've admired and enjoyed his writing for many years. I'm glad Fred Bush and I got the chance to interview Ford for Strange Horizons a few years back. Coincidentally, I just re-read The Final Reflection a few weeks ago. It's still as good as I remember.

Ford clearly touched a tremendous number of lives, both in his person and in his writing. These accountings remind me of a bit from a Star Trek novel -- not one of his, but I think he would have approved the sentiment. It's in reference to a young pilot who has just died:

"He was all fire, that one; they burn bright, and burn out. He knew what he did, and he did well. Leave him his brightness."

-- Diane Duane and Peter Morwood, The Romulan Way

Every time I encountered Ford's work, I was similarly impressed and intimidated. Often I wasn't sure I was smart enough to follow exactly what he was doing; sometimes I wondered why I bothered trying to write at all, given that I'd never have his casual brilliance. Which, of course, is obviously not the way he would have wanted me to think. I suspect the best I can do to honor his memory is put aside my anxieties and try to write something good, and honest, and true.

So, saddened, back to work.

Just a note, since some here know that I'm from Sri Lanka, that I and my immediate family are safely in America at the moment.

I don't know at this point whether I'll still be going to Sri Lanka in February as I had planned (for a writing research trip). I also don't know whether various members of our more extended family there are safe.

I just wanted to stop by here briefly and formally sign off this thread -- between a week of houseguests and looming book deadlines I'm suddenly feeling swamped and like I really shouldn't be reading lots of journals and journal comments at the moment. I think I've pretty much said what I wanted to say.

But I also didn't want anyone to feel like I had abandoned a conversation with them -- if you have any further questions for me, please do feel free to send them to me in e-mail, and I'll do my best to continue the conversation there. Thanks.

I really don't want to read over the whole thread of responses to find the ones that seem inappropriate; it was more a matter of tone than anything else, phrases and statements and mocking poetry that left me with a bad taste in my mouth the first time I read through. I suspect it'd make me queasy to try to read through it all again.

I'd rather encourage people to re-read what they wrote, and decide for themselves, as John did, whether they think what they wrote was appropriate, or whether they got caught up in the excitement, perhaps went too far, and put more emphasis on appearing clever than on writing anything constructive.

I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail here, because I think it just perpetuates the nitpickyness. But to address a few points:

- Michelle, I'm sure there were a bunch of moderate critical posts among all the severely inflammatory ones, and yours may well have been one of them. I honestly don't have a problem with criticism of Todd's actions (I thought I said that?); what I was trying to address was the personal attacks, which seemed over-the-top and inappropriate. Sorry if my use of "y'all" seemed to tar everyone with the same brush; my comments were mostly meant to be directed towards the extreme segment.

- I have come late into this, and it's possible that Todd initially said something even more stupid and/or dangerous than what I read. That's certainly a reason to correct him. I just question the manner of correction offered.

- And yes, of course I think Todd should apologize too -- I wrote three paragraphs on the subject in my initial post, including my slightly far-flung voting analogy meant to perhaps demonstrate to him why people might be upset by this kind of thing. I don't know if he's still reading this board, or if he agrees with my assessment. I'm glad to hear that he appears to have stopped handing out that particular piece of bad advice. Beyond that, it's up to him. Honestly, I don't know Todd well enough to care particularly about his response -- I met him once, for a few days, at a convention a few years ago.

I care a lot more about you guys, about the spec fic community.

I understand that it's easier to be kind to someone once they've apologized. So if some of you want to wait for that, it's certainly your choice. From my point of view, whether Todd corrects his bad behavior or not isn't reallly relevant to the question of whether some of you also behaved badly, and might want to apologize.

Let me try to phrase this another way -- leaving aside the question of whether Todd did something wrong (or a hundred different things wrong), what I'd like to see is a measured, appropriate response. I'm not asking for gentle-loving-kindness, or turning the other cheek. I'm asking for civility and courtesy. I'm inviting you to step over onto the high road.

I think in a lot of ways the spec fic writing community is far more closely-knit than the literary fiction community; certainly, there's a lot more back-and-forth, fast-paced communication. I don't want to see it become a weakness, when it could be one of our greatest strengths.

But you guys didn't confine your discussion to his advice; I'd have no problem with it if you did. You took it a lot further, and frankly, I find that kind of behavior professionally inappropriate. In a public forum, I find it better to be cautious and courteous, especially when interacting with potential colleagues. I've been careful not to pay attention to which of you have said what, above, because I don't want to be prejudiced against you if I ever end up reading your submissions for an anthology I'm editing.

I find disturbing the ways in which Todd's specific advice, to create a small journal of your own with your friends and then list it as a publication credit, is being portrayed. It's true that he used a stupid rhetorical device to get attention, with the 'lie a little' element, but the actual practical advice, while a waste of time, in my opinion, is also not anything that I, as an editor, would find horribly offensive. I wouldn't blacklist a writer for it; I'd just think they were ignorant and annoying.

There are other things they could lie about that might end up with me blacklisting them -- if they lied about a well-known writer giving them a particular quote, for example. Todd's phrasing suggested actually lying, which was a stupid mistake, but his intended advice (I think) was to create a small publication by you and your friends. There isn't anything actually unethical about the latter.

I think a lot of this discussion comes down to rhetorics, in some ways. Todd was working with a particular kind of rhetorical strategy (one that bit him on the ass, when people took it more literally than I think he intended). And many of y'all have taken immense pleasure in being painfully persnickety about tiny details of his text; rather than subjecting his words to a careful critical reading, trying to figure out exactly what he was trying to say, you've chosen to interpret those words in as negative a fashion as you can. Fun, no doubt, but is it helpful?

Do I think you have the right to do this? Sure -- Todd was public, you get to be public back. Do I think it's a little mean? Kind of tacky? Absolutely. Would you want this whole crowd coming down and picking apart everything *you've* publically said? Wouldn't you rather have them give you the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps a chance to retract or revise your statements before they shredded you?

I don't believe Todd knew that he was giving bad advice. I don't believe he intentionally misled his students, or the people reading his web page. Aren't there other ways we could have let him know his advice was bad, rather than contributing to a massive internet pile-on? I've run along a hell of a lot of bad, destructive advice about writing in my day. There's plenty of it out there, and mostly from people who don't realize they're doing anything wrong.

We could have been kinder about this. That's what I'm saying.

Hey, guys. I wasn't sure what to say here -- but I feel that as someone who knows a lot of you pretty well (through Strange Horizons and the SLF), and as someone who has met Todd a time or two and has found him a decent, nice, generous guy (who very kindly took a bunch of grad students out drinking in New Orleans at AWP a few years ago, and made us all feel a little less lost and confused at our first literary convention), I ought to try to mediate a bit.

I wish I'd found this thread earlier. Here's my brief take on what happened:

Teresa found some public bad advice. She posted about it, in her typically intelligent and witty manner. She mocked it some. I suspect if Todd had found only that, he would have written back to her disagreeing or some such, and it would've all been sorted out reasonably amicably between them.

But instead, you all had a rip-roaring good time jumping on the bandwagon and also making fun of this random idea of a person. And hey, I understand that. I've done that, and it's darn easy to do on the net. Everyone of us has said stupid things in public, and even the professional writers and teachers and editors have undoubtedly made more than a few comma errors for which we could be most enjoyably mocked. You never expected that Todd would ever come read this board, and you certainly never expected that he'd feel brutally attacked by the posts.

He over-reacted a bit with the legal stuff, but I think he knows that, and has backed off. Mostly, he thinks y'all were mean.

Please -- take a minute, go back to the top of the page, and imagine it's you. You've given some bad advice, perhaps, you did something stupid, and then you found a whole crowd of strangers having a fabulous time shredding you, your professional reputation, your competence in your job, your integrity, etc. This discussion started as Teresa pointing out one piece of notably bad advice, but it spread widely from there into quite a few people just having fun showing off how clever they are, at a stranger's expense. And you never expected him to show up and be hurt by this -- well, now he has. The least you could do is apologize for taking the joke too far.

And Todd -- I don't know you very well, so I hope you don't mind a little unsolicited advice. But I do know that you're a good guy, and a friend of a very good friend, and that I've never heard anything but good about you before this. The lying thing? It was bad advice. Maybe lit fic is more forgiving of that kind of advice than spec fic, but in any case, you've got to admit that as originally phrased, it wasn't such a good idea, and probably not the best advice to be giving out.

I know it's absolutely no fun to get trashed on a public forum (and frankly, I'm a little worried that even this post of mine will lead to angry responses, and I hate that kind of thing, it makes me want to close my computer and hide from the net), but when you give public advice, you do open the door for people to publically respond. Sometimes those responses will be critical.

Let me put it in another context entirely, and see if that helps. If you found a Republican political website, and someone there was giving advice to voters saying that it was looking a little iffy whether Bush would win in this election, and so if they could, they should bribe their local officials and mess with the voting machines -- would you, at the very least, feel justified in writing and publishing a scathing and witty attack on this guy? Would you feel any obligation to look him up and send him polite e-mail first?

The dynamics of the net can be difficult, and just plain weird. But I've found that admitting to your own human foibles can get you really far in a new community.

When I taught at Utah, we flunked students caught plagiarizing, and put them on academic probation. If they were caught twice, they were expelled. I know of multiple cases of the first case, and none of the second.

I always gave a strict lecture on plagiarism the first day of class, including telling them just how easy it was for me to catch them. If I caught someone, I gave them one warning if I thought they were honestly clueless; otherwise, or on the second offense, they would have been sent straight to the dean and flunked out of my course.

Teresa, I had a related question for you. Over at the SLF, we've started a small press co-operative, designed to let presses share tables in dealer's room, exchange ads, throw joint parties, that kind of thing. Just did a table at WisCon, big success, lots of fun. Our table made about $900 for the various small presses who shared it (some presses made a lot, some made nothing, which is a whole interesting topic on its own). We'll hopefully be at World Fantasy too.

What I'm wondering is whether you think we ought to be selective or discriminating in some way. So far we've just let anyone and everyone join -- if you self-identify as a small press (including self-publishing of chapbooks and such), you're welcome to join us. Membership is free this year, and will probably be some miniscule dues next year (in the $5-10 range).

We've only been going for a few months, and haven't had any trouble yet, but reading this thread, I'm wondering if we ought to be trying to sift for scam presses and denying them access to the co-op? Although that makes me worry that we'd just be additionally penalizing poor authors who are already fairly screwed... :-(

Would appreciate your thoughts. Details on our co-op are here:

http://www.speculativeliterature.org/Co-op/

Thanks!

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