I’ve just received my first review via letter from a prisoner. It mentioned my books by name but, when you read closely, it was somewhat unspecific as to their content. It got the count and the genre right, but the rest was all about how well he admired my views on marriage. Me, I think he read the blurbs, the mailing address of the publisher (me), and little else.
Of course (and I was not surprised), that raised my suspicions, given the reputation of catfishing for women pursued in prison correspondence. Then I looked him up, and the internet did not fail me. He was jailed a year ago at 29 for soliciting sexual images from a 13-year-old and using social media to meet her and committing a “lewd and lascivious act”. (His near-empty Facebook account is still up, the most recent post (pre-incarceration) resulting in the comment “Rapist.”) Of course, he had no way of knowing that I had 5+ decades on her, but he no doubt hoped for a lonely correspondent to pass the time.
No sale.
The letter wasn’t illiterate, and was mildly plausible (it had clearly been inspected before being sealed), but considering he was looking for a woman who was too dumb to look him up on the internet, and his list of sources (authors) would most likely have been indie, to be in the obscure distributor, and thus of an age to be his victim’s mother or grandmother (and maybe some would be pseudonyms for men), it’s a wonder he isn’t tempting a mob with torches to converge on the penitentiary in North Carolina in person.
On a practical matter of some interest to this group, he did claim that his fellow inmates were only allowed to choose books from a list of 3300, of which 95% are from “Project Gutenberg”. He claimed the service used was Paytel, a service I had never heard of, which, upon lookup, is focused on inmate communications. If you distribute widely, there’s no telling where you will get to. You might even end up in jail.
Now, I’m sure some of you can top this, so have at it, and do so. What odd little unintentional results have you engendered with your writing, good, bad, or just plain puzzling?
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “A dubious milestone”
c4c because this sounds interesting. ^.^
I’m not well known enough to get any sort of correspondence, good or bad, but one thing your post did convince me of was that I am making the right decision to pay for a P.O. box in the next town over rather than using my home address.
Now, you see, that’s where we may differ temperamentally… 🙂 I use my home address for the imprint, both in the books and on the websites.
I grew up in suburban Kansas City and just across the street was the mansion of candy king Russell Stover’s widow. Every year, the company helped her “do” Halloween.
Needless to say, the neighborhood homes couldn’t compete with that, so they would “go dark” and the local teenagers would concentrate on their tiger-hunting skills. As in… up in trees with water balloons or other opportunistic choices. Since the targets were going to come to us, where better to set up our ambushes? A lively time was had by all.
So, when threatened, my instinct is to choose my ground and prepare it. “Just try it, I dare you” is high on my list of potential insignia. A well-armed citizenry, etc. Mind you, I have the luxury of not having any innocents to defend, and my dogs can take care of themselves. But this is deer-hunting territory around here, we all understand the proper inflection to use for “Git outta here, bear!”, and they’ll never find where the loser ends up on 300 acres.
Hello, former neighbor! I grew up across State Line Road, in West Plaza and Brookside. Who would have thought all those nice Mission Hills kids could be so naughty? *ebil grin*
I’ve moved across the country now, and while I do use a pen name, I put the real name of my small town under my imprint on my copyright page. If ever I get popular enough for people to be writing me fan letters (from my typing fingers to God’s ears!), I’ll do what others have suggested here and get a P. O. box.
Hi, back at you! I moved away for college in 1971 and never returned to live there. I recently attended my 50th High School reunion and dropped in unannounced on my old house (unrecognizable), putting paid to any lingering nostalgia. Other than old school friends, I have no connections there any longer.
Looks like it’s still an astonishingly comfortable place to live, but my roots are gone.
Death threats via comments to me and any of my readers. Fortunately that was something the two sites my fanfic was on could shut down, just one *Bleep* of a person, but that was an ugly month.
Yet another reason to have an official, business post office box.
It’s even tax deductible as a business expense.
Yeek.
I don’t really see what good that does, unless you’re using a pseudonym and there’s no article online outing you. Otherwise, even a common name like mine is certainly not difficult to locate. I never wanted to go the pseudonym route though of course YMMV.
Speaking of common names, I never changed my name when I married, and my Lithuanian-surnamed husband is smug about the fact that if I had, the combo would have been unique in the US and (last time I checked) worldwide. (instead of in company with others on Amazon…)
On the other hand, as I inform him, it would have been a good deal harder to fit decoratively on my book covers.
It seems to work for us. It certainly diverts the junk mail to Peschel Press to the post office box instead of our house.
But, as always! You have to do what works best for you.
It actually does rather a lot of good.
1.) For those of us who move around a bit, whether in apartments or in jobs that change location every few years, a PO box and a mail-forwarding service means not having to change the business address and (if moving out of state) reincorporate.
2.) Most bullies are lazy; by making things difficult for them, you reduce the likelihood of them picking on you in favour of an easier target. A PO Box does not give them the ability for them to easily ship objectionable things that show up on your doorstep, or to easily SWAT you. (Most bullies are also cowards, and most internet bullies are far removed from a victim’s location: they won’t show up in person, but they have no compunction about spoofing a call to send the local police to harass you in their stead.)
It also means there are not address changes to make it easy to verify they have the correct target.
Right. For us it is worth it NOT to be SWATTED again, this time at a house we live in.
This sounds as nasty as the time I saw one young lady artist online getting creepy posts from a stalker. Who, when rebuked for it, turned to posting photos of dead infants. Which he also shared with everyone who supported her. Yeah. He had to get shut down four or five times before he either gave up or got run down by a truck.
The ancients were right; names have power. It’s one of those things, like when I compare an ai prompt or a sql statement to conceptions of magic spells which predate modern computing, that makes me wonder sometimes the really old cultures got up to, the ones who were ancient when our ancients were new.