The last time I fought I troll I did so quietly and with anonymity.
Last night on Twitter that did NOT happen. Was it the glass of wine or the late hour on a Friday night or the nature of the attack? Nope, it was because this guy had nothing to spew but a generalized hatred of the world, its laser beam focused on me. Why? I invited him to.
On this thread on Twitter, one of its known trolls on the #MSWL and #querying tags is a fellow called Gary Kadet. I’d seen him in a tweet against me last year when I’d started my querying journey and decided to stay the hell away. But in the thread, I did comment that some of the contents of the article were frankly disgusting. Because child pornography is disgusting.
It was a very detailed well-researched timeline of Gary Kadet’s publishing timeline and some other facts that were disturbing but appeared accurate enough to be retweeted by the esteemed Victoria Strauss. For those who don’t know; she’s a fabulous writer and runs Writers Beware, a website dedicated to protecting authors.
But my comments were noticed.
Out of the blue an account, I now know attacks Victoria Strauss regularly had a go at me.
And I stared at that for a few minutes… and decided that this time I wouldn’t slink off or ignore it.
I retweeted the comments bringing the account to the attention of Victoria Strauss in case she wasn’t aware of it (and I’ve since found out she’s aware of the account). In the meantime it appeared Proserpine wasn’t done mocking me.
What proceeded was a series of tweets where I damn well stood up for myself.
And then another account started screenshotting my comments from the main thread and starting vitriolic nonsense.
I called him on his shit and he blocked me. I then asked for the #WritingCommunity’s support and got in spades, but made it abundantly clear that the behaviour wasn’t acceptable, I wasn’t going to lie down, and I wasn’t going to just “take” it.
Other accounts talking the same trash blocked me, and do you know what? It felt fucking glorious.
You don’t get to win against the trolls and the bullies of the world very often, and I’m honestly pretty proud of myself for standing up to that nonsense. So what’s the point of the article? You can too.
Don’t let yourself be bullied by anyone.
You can walk away, block, or vanish. Or you can fight back. Either is valid but you have to decide for yourself what you will and will not tolerate, I’m just here to show you it can be done.
I can’t say this won’t come back to haunt me, it might. Just like those original comments, I posted on that thread. But I won’t be bullied by the likes of Gary Kadet and his sock puppets, I’m not afraid of them, and you don’t have to be either.
The trolls of this world will be called out, and if they come for me, guess what? I’m ready.
E. J. Dawson 