Thinking about internet trolls made me remember the Fremont Troll in Seattle. It is a huge sculpture under the Aurora Bridge, clutching a Volkswagen. It has a Wiki page if you want to see it. The car has a California license plate, and that’s probably on purpose.
My character in ‘Blue Whiskey’ encounters trolls, and I tell how he handled them.
I talk about a click-bait article on the Huffington Post by a woman named Lynn Shepherd who says that JK Rowling should be satisfied with her success and stop writing, especially in the crime genre. This woman is committing career suicide if you know anything about the passion of Harry Potter fans. She says all other writers are envious of JK Rowling’s success. I’m not.
This woman says that JK Rowling’s books ‘suck the air’ out of publishing. That’s life, lady. Deal with it. Most people like Spiderman better than Marcel Proust. Accept it. This lady is a snob, and if everyone liked the snobby things she likes, she wouldn’t like them anymore. That’s the ‘hipster paradigm’, as coined by yours truly.
Rowling came out with a thriller called ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ under a pseudonym, and once the word got out, it sucked the air out of everything, too. This woman hates that, too. What a surprise. Stephen King wrote books under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, and that lasted a lot longer than Rowling’s secret.
Next, I read a couple recent reviews of that lady’s book. Surprise! She’s getting attacked by Harry Potter fans via one-star Amazon reviews. I read a couple reviews of my book, ‘Band On The Run’, by people who didn’t read the book. I rarely comment positive or negative any more due to the possibility of offending someone who might attack me through fake reviews.
I mention an article that says indie music is cooler than indie books, but I’m saving that one for
a future episode. 28 years ago, ‘Master of Puppets’ came out, and it changed my life. I didn’t like it at first, because it was so different than the things like Guns n Roses I was listening to. I talk about the Big Four of thrash and which one I didn’t listen to very much.
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