
By: Richard Smith
Re: Lackey A

 Hello All:

 Found this on another echo, and since it deals with the type
 of personality we deal with to some extent here every day, I
 thought you might like a look at it, especially if you are
 big SF/Fantasy fans.  It also goes to show that ALL
 denominations of ALL faiths, etc., have problem children, or
 people that need to be `adjusted.'  I've never claimed that
 Pagandom lacked zanies, miscreants, or criminals, so take
 this as my bit of honesty this week about my path.  And keep
 in mind, if you exchange the word Pagan for Xtian throughout
 here, you will still be viewing a reality.  Enjoy.

 ------------------------------------------------------------

 Here's the deal. Most of the people who are going to read
 this are nice people. Some are nice people who are a little
 flaky, but that's cool. Some are nice people who are a LOT
 flaky, but that's cool, too. But some are not nice people,
 and they have real problems. A few of these are dangerous,
 and want to manipulate and hurt other people, including us.
 We just learned something recently that just happened to
 be....

                        THE LAST STRAW
                      by Mercedes Lackey

 This is going to offend some people. These are the people
 who most need to read this. This definitely has needed to be
 said for a long time. We're writers. We write fiction, which
 is, by definition, NOT FACT. Creative and entertaining lies,
 if you will, but still not truth by any kind of stretch of
 the imagination. So, we've written over 40 books, of which a
 grand total of three are dark fantasy that involve the
 occult, "real" psychic powers, and nonstandard religions. So
 what attracts so much trouble and so many lunatics you'd
 think it was a "Free beer and come as your favorite
 psychosis party" in downtown L.A.? You've got it. The "Diana
 Tregarde Investigations." Take, for instance, the undeniable
 fact that I haven't written (and at this point, don't intend
 to write) any more of them. Why? THEY DON'T SELL. The
 numbers are there in black and white. DT books are
 consistently and vastly outsold by every other type of
 fantasy we write. Now some people would decide that there
 was an Evil Force out there preventing the sale of their
 glorious books and determine to thwart that force and PROVE
 how wonderful the "unpopular" books are, but hey, call me
 nutty, but I believe that people are trying to tell you
 something when they don't buy a book, and that is, THEY
 DON'T WANT THEM! Why should we write something people don't
 want? If every hardcore Diana Tregarde fan bought fifty
 copies of each book, I could afford to maybe buy a new VCR
 with the royalties. There are plenty of other people who are
 already writing books people don't want, and doing it in
 bigger numbers than we can! Just take a look at the
 remainder- racks!

 But, oh, the rumors! Conspiracy theories that would make
 Oliver Stone burst into tears of envy! Someone periodically
 starts a rumor that the publisher is "suppressing" the
 books---the fact is, that like me, they want to publish
 books that are going to compete with our more popular
 series. Another is that they have been published, but a
 fundamentalist group bought them all so no one else could
 read them, ignoring the fact that if anyone bought an entire
 print-run of anything, it would be on the New York Times
 bestseller list! Or my favorite two rumors, that appeared IN
 THE SAME WEEK, one that Larry was a fundamentalist who was
 preventing me from writing them, and a rumor that Larry was
 an evil pagan who was preventing me from writing them! Then
 there are the let ters taking me to task for not following
 the letter-writer's own particular brand of politically
 correct neopaganism. THESE BOOKS ARE ENTERTAINMENT ONLY,
 PEOPLE! I'M NOT RUNNING A RECRUITMENT BUREAU, HERE! And if
 YOU want a book featuring YOUR favorite brand of religion,
 YOU go out and write and try to sell one, and good luck and
 don't let the door hit you on the way out!

 They were written at the time when horror was outselling
 everything else, and hey, I wrote them to make money. We've
 got a mortgage to pay. I suppose by some people's standards
 that is a heinous crime, but I'm sorry for offending your
 delicate little sensibilities. Actually, no I'm not. Get a
 life, get a grip, and grow a spine; you all ought to know by
 now that we don't do PC. Then there are the people who
 insist that the Guardians are real. Hey, if there really
 were Guardians, you'd see panicky skinheads buying up the
 Rogaine supply like the KKK at a white sale. There'd be no
 such thing as a crooked televangelist, when they'd have real
 demons popping in on their shows to tell them where they
 were REALLY going.

 "But Guardians must be real," comes the cry, "How could you
 make something like that up?" Oh for crying out loud, an
 "occult police force" is one of the oldest gizmos in horror
 fiction! The Nine Unknown Men, the Hunting Lodges, the White
 Lodges, Dr. Orient, Agatha Christie's Harley Quinn, to name
 a few; there's been more good and bad books involving occult
 "police" than there have been books about vampires! That's
 FICTION, people! Do you really, truly, think that if there
 WERE an "occult police force" they'd have let those kids in
 Florida kill their mother and drink her blood, that they'd
 let kiddie- porn and snuff-film makers continue to operate,
 or that they WOULDN'T make it their business to track down
 and dispose of serial killers? What're these guys supposedly
 doing, punishing junk-bond dealers?

 The thing is, on one level I can sympathize with people who
 would really like to believe that Guardians are real. The
 world is a scary place, and more and more scary things are
 happening in it, things that really look as if there was a
 single evil hand behind it all. Hey, I wish there were
 Guardians! I also wish for peace, prosperity and an end to
 war. There's about an equal chance for either.

 But now we get a little more into the shallow end of the
 reality pool, because some of these people claim that the
 Guardians are this big, cohesive group watching over
 everything. As far as that goes, in MY books, the Guardians
 aren't even organized! They're about as cohesive a group as
 a herd of grasshoppers! The closest thing to "organization"
 they have is when two of them run into each other at the
 Karaoke Club and find out they both want to sing "Poisoning
 Pigeons in the Park." There's NO group meetings, NO
 politics, no nothing---yet these same people have invented
 an entire complex hierarchy for them, complete with lodge
 meetings, secret handshakes, and decoder rings! Cripes! They
 aren't even reading the books, they're just reading what
 THEY want to see into the books!

 It gets stranger. A whole lot stranger. We aren't even in
 the reality pool, anymore, we're out in the crabgrass around
 it. There are people claiming to BE Guardians---and people
 who claim they would be Guardians if only some Evil Force
 wasn't keeping them from finding their own little Yoda and
 having their occult powers activated. Okay, I can even
 sympathize with this one, because I've been there too. When
 your life is in the crapper, you can't get a job that
 doesn't involve a paper hat and a nametag, and you think
 that if you dropped off the planet no one would miss you for
 weeks, it's comforting to believe that all your misfortunes
 can be blamed on an Evil Occult Force.

 I had myself talked into that one for a while, but at one
 critical point I had what the Twelve Step groups call "a
 moment of clarity," when someone else who had bought into
 the delusion began coming up with things I knew just weren't
 true and I realized that the world is what it is, and it
 doesn't take an evil force to make it that way--- and that I
 was doing a better job of keeping myself unemployed than any
 Evil Occult Force could. That's when I forced myself to
 admit that I had the best chance of making my life better if
 I just got a good suit from Goodwill instead of wearing
 costumes, pounded the pavement looking for work instead of
 waiting for a Dream Job to be given to me, and put more and
 smarter effort into realistic goals, like learning computer
 programming instead of spending all my time staring at a
 candle and trying to contact my Personal Psychic Trainer.
 That's when I also realized that I really liked making up
 the stories, so I didn't give them up, I just stopped
 telling myself they were real. And I started writing them
 down, which was a lot more fun when other people started to
 read them and told me how good they were. But guys, people
 who tell you that they are Guardians never made that jette
 back to coolsville (To quote Dennis Miller). They're still
 in a wobbling pirouette that's taking them straight into the
 orchestra pit.

 And here we go right off the end of the bell curve, because
 the same lunatics who say that they are Guardians are bound
 and determined that I am a Guardian! Jeez Louise, if I had
 occult powers, would I be sitting here writing my ass off
 for a living? Heck no, I'd be out in Vegas in the VIP suite
 with half a dozen semi-naked chorus boys feeding me caviar,
 that's where I'd be! I'd be cruising the Bahamas on the way
 to my own tropical island. I'd have a mansion and fifty
 servants, and the biggest aviary outside of a zoo, that's
 what I'd have, and I'd have more semi-naked chorus boys to
 do all the cage- cleaning and feeding for me! Meanwhile
 Larry would be winning Le Mans and Sebring in his
 unbreakable Lotus (a real occult miracle), and on the side
 he'd be having one-man shows at the Guggenheim and his
 personal Ford Indygo would be winning the Pebble Beach
 Concours d'Elegance. Oh, and he'd also take a few hours off
 to do some hawking with his Ornate Hawk-Eagle, taking the
 prizes for high- catch of the day, of course. I'd write for
 fun, when I felt like it, and not every day, eight hours a
 day, seven days a week.

 Have we got that straight, all you cosmic cupcakes? Do you
 think if I had occult powers I wouldn't have KNOWN those
 freaks in Oklahoma City were going to blow up a building
 with a day-care center full of kids in it practically in my
 own back yard and have DONE something before it happened? Do
 you think if I had occult powers I wouldn't have warned my
 friends in Los Angeles to be somewhere else when the
 Northridge Quake busted loose? Or warned my parrot-breeder
 friends in Florida to get their setups into concrete
 blockhouses long before Hurricane Andrew came through? For
 crying out loud, wouldn't I have KNOWN Larry's studio was
 going to have a fire, that our rearmost room was going to
 flood, that his car was going to have a wreck, and that our
 garage was going to get hit with a tornado???? Wouldn't I
 have DONE something to avoid these things? And just because
 those things all happened, that DOESN'T mean that I have
 these cosmic powers and I either LET them happen or MADE
 them happen because I am evil! Shoot, if you're looking for
 someone with Major Occult Powers, try someone like Dick
 Clark---filthy rich, no scandals, and he looks HOW old? Or
 Paul McCartney, who hasn't aged a day since 1972. The guy
 that invented Pet Rocks---geez, how many of us did he sucker
 into buying a road-rock in a cardboard box? Had to have been
 occult powers. Or--- it has to be the way the world works.

 Reality check time, people, here's a whole ROLL of quarters,
 there's the clue machine, GO BUY SOME. And people, why would
 someone who belonged to a super-secret high-risk
 occult-society with amazing powers at her beck and call be
 stupid enough to draw the attention of all the Bad Guys by
 WRITING ABOUT IT? "Hello? Is anyone paying attention? Oh,
 no---well, let me just run up a GREAT BIG SIGN that says
 'Guardian here! Come and get me!'" Just what was that
 supposed to accomplish? Was I supposed to be looking for
 other Guardians? But if I BELONGED ALREADY to this so-called
 "Inner Circle" why would I be looking for them? Was I
 supposed to be recruiting new Guardians? Guys, that gag is
 straight out of THE LAST STARFIGHTER. Yeah, that's a good
 idea, Gunga Din; let's just raise our profile a lot higher
 for the Bad Guys to shoot at, and meanwhile, we'll sort
 through all the mail from every guy who ever wanted to
 levitate and shoot lightning bolts "Just like in the comic
 books." Hey, we'll find a LOT of potential Guardians that
 way!

 Now at this point, if you've somehow been sucked into a
 group like I've described, and you've raised these
 objections, your Fearless Leader the Great Cranko is saying,
 "Well of course she'd say THAT, she wouldn't want to blow
 her cover"---like it wouldn't already have been blown higher
 than a palm tree at Bikini Atoll---but just how many of
 those "of course she'd say that"s are you going to accept
 before your logic circuit kicks in?

 Oh, it gets better! Not only am I a Guardian, but I'm
 supposedly the source of (or involved in) political
 corruption among the Guardians. The Old Order has gone bad
 and is trying to suppress the Young Turks (you know, if I
 tried to write that plot, my editors would reject it as
 being too trite). I helped organize some whoop-de-ding
 spell- casting session to "burn out" all of those who
 wouldn't follow and obey us. And it's time to destroy the
 Old Order to make way for the New, Pure of Heart, Full
 of---well, it rhymes with "hit." Follow and obey ME? I can't
 even get plumbers to finish fixing my pipes on time! Where
 the hell did this paranoid delusion come from? If there are
 any of you out there who have bought into THIS particular
 schizoid fantasy, I have some real harsh words for you.
 PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY.

 You are responsible for your OWN thoughts, actions, and
 attitudes, dudes and dudettes. Somebody else may preach
 these things, but YOU are the one responsible for hanging
 your logic out to dry, putting your brain on "record" and
 forgetting that you're supposed to think as well as believe.
 And if your "coven leader" is feeding you this line of
 garbage---when you READ that this is the last thing we would
 believe in, you SEE and HEAR that our books are preaching
 compassion and not trashin', and you can find out with no
 trouble whatsoever the amount of charity work we do---WHO
 DOES LOGIC SAY IS THE REAL BAD GUY?

 Whose ACTIONS are consistent with someone who does the right
 thing as well as talking about it? Who goes out and tries to
 help, instead of blaming some poor fantasy writers for
 "oppressing him?" And kids, when he tells you that you are
 all going to have to destroy the old order to make way for
 the new---think REAL HARD for a minute. Those same words
 have been spoken by other people who got their followers to
 go out and do horrible things FOR them. People like Thomas
 Mitzger, Charles Manson and Jim Jones---people who worked up
 hysteria and paranoia among THEIR followers then sat back
 with folded hands while real blood flowed, and said, "but I
 am innocent, I haven't done anything!"

 Okay, so maybe all these guys want to do is have you all
 hold hands in a circle and try and give me a headache. Hey,
 knock yourselves out, have a good time, and don't drive home
 intoxicated afterwards. But maybe they want to manipulate
 you into doing something very bad in the real world. I've
 got news for you, kids. IF THEY DO, YOU ARE STILL
 RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS. YOU will go down; maybe
 embarrassment, maybe to jail---maybe to Death Row. Why?
 Because YOU handed over your brain and conscience to a
 would-be tin-pot dictator who gets his jollies out of
 manipulating people he thinks are weak- willed and
 suggestible suckers.

 And right now some of you are saying "oh that couldn't
 possibly happen among fans!" (or pagans, or whatevers).
 Guess again. It not only can, it already has. Within my own
 very limited circle of acquaintances, I PERSONALLY have
 VERIFIED with mundane sources---one man ennobled in the SCA
 who took on a contract-killing and is currently in prison
 for it, one man in fan circles who was convicted of child
 molestation and went to jail for it and died there, one man
 in RenFaire, sf-convention and pagan circles who was caught
 and convicted of multiple torture-murders, one man in fan
 and SCA circles who was caught and convicted of setting
 pipe-bombs in public buildings. That's just among people I
 knew.

 I'm not the only author who's had their fiction distorted
 like this, and it makes all of us want to track the creeps
 responsible down and pound them into the ground like tent
 pegs. But WE are adult, compassionate, responsible (there's
 that word again) human beings, and we know that would be
 wrong. So we sit in our offices and get death- threats and
 wonder which one of these loons is going to be THE one---
 and if this time someone is going to get hurt. It might be
 the psycho himself, or it might be one of his followers who
 decides to show up. Maybe Aleister Junior will egg one of
 his followers into buying a Saturday Night Special and go
 blaze away at a book signing. Most of us writers are only
 partly worried about ourselves---because maybe what happens
 is an innocent fourteen- year-old flings herself into the
 line of fire, or is just standing there getting a book
 signed, and becomes a statistic. How the hell do you think
 we'd feel about THAT?

 I can tell you that there are at least some writers---or the
 people left behind (if it was the writer who got
 toasted)---who wouldn't sit in their offices and wring their
 hands afterwards. They'd track down the creep responsible,
 and for half an hour forget they were adult, compassionate,
 responsible human beings and turn him into a thin layer of
 red gel on the concrete. It would be wrong, but that's what
 they'd do.

 Want to make a judgement call on good and evil? Anyone who
 would be the instigator of something like that is hardly on
 the side of the angels. Anyone who causes that sort of
 disaster is propagating the real evil in the world, not some
 poor hacks writing thrillers to pay the mortgage.

 So before your local wizard who claims to be a Guardian or
 one of the Nine Unknown, or the leader of a Hunting Lodge
 gets you into anything deeper than some joyful, joyfilled
 celebrations of life, compassion, and all that is right and
 good in the world---maybe you'd better draw his attention to
 that paragraph about the thin layer of red gel. Because
 sometimes, boys and girls, what you think is a striped worm
 turns out to be the tail of a tiger and no magic is
 required.

 ### Now, for all of you who are still with me, if you
 encounter any of these people, DO NOT flame them, engage in
 arguments, post to their bulletin boards, or have anything
 whatsoever to do with them. If you meet them in the real
 world, DO NOT argue; just smile and nod, back away slowly,
 and when their attention is taken away, RUN LIKE HELL. These
 are unpredictable people, and they could decide that YOU are
 the embodiment of the great evil that is oppressing them.

 If you wish to write Mercedes concerning this post, you can
 contact her via postal mail:

 Mercedes Lackey
 P.O. Box 8309
 Tulsa, OK 74101 USA

 Notes from Firebird

 Misty asked me to post this in our on line catalog after the
 latest round of problems with death threats. Given that
 there is an ongoing investigation into this matter by the
 FBI, the amount that I can say about it is limited. What
 bothered Misty more than the possibility of getting shot, or
 Larry getting shot, was the vision of some 14 year old fan
 standing in line at a book signing, getting into the line of
 fire and ending up dead or worse. I'll say it again: The
 idea that a fan of her work could end up in the wrong place,
 at the wrong time and end up dead or worse is what is
 driving the "Last Straw" letter.

 For the record Misty and I have been friends for close to
 two decades. She has in that time changed from working full
 time as a main frame programer for a large airline, to a
 well respected and successful writer in the fantasy world.

 Once she achieved a certain level of visibility, something
 strange started to happen. Odd people started crawling out
 of the woodwork. And some of these people were very, very
 odd. There were the old so-called friends who could not
 stand her successes. Vicious personal attacks came from
 people within Science Fiction & Filk fandoms. There were the
 SCA households that assumed that now that she had some books
 published, she was rich, and should give them funds to run
 their extended households. And got angry when she said no.
 There were the fanfic writers that wanted her to get them
 published, and got mad when she did not wave her magic wand
 and get them the publishing contract of their dreams.

 There was the real life tragedy that ended in a murder,
 suicide, and nearly ended up as a double murder, suicide.
 This incident started when Misty and her husband Larry Dixon
 sheltered a woman escaping a bad marriage and her child.
 This episode included: pipe bombs, people, (not just the
 woman's ex-husband), keeping Misty's house under
 surveillance. People with high powered rifles being run off
 the property in the middle of the night. Police that would
 not take the threats seriously. a unresponsive legal system,
 and a judge with attitudes firmly rooted in the neolithic
 age. The nut case involved tried to kill his ex-wife, and
 the people trying to help her. He only managed to kill his
 two year old daughter and the shoot himself. This was done
 on a court ordered visitation, despite everything Misty and
 Larry and the mother, and the lawyers could do.

 And then there were the pagans. Once the Diana Tregarde
 books were published, every pagan nut (please note, the nut
 applies to specific pagans, not to all pagans) with an ax to
 grind decided that the portrayal of magic in the books was
 not correct. Some of these people did not take no for an
 answer, and when their dearly held believes were not
 accepted and enshrined in the Diana Tregarde books, they got
 nasty. Big time nasty. Death threats, curses, hate mail
 directed at Misty. Once it was clear that these avenues were
 blocked, or at least ineffective, some enterprising souls
 started going after people close to Misty. They tried to get
 to her through Larry, Firebird, family, and friends.

 The problem is not SF fans, or pagans. The problem is with
 people who have boundary problems. People who are not real
 clear on where to draw the line between their own life, and
 their favorite author's life. Most of Misty's fans are good
 caring people, who would never think of stepping over the
 line. However, and this is a big however, there are people
 out there who are incapable of recognizing where the lines
 are drawn. These people range from annoying, to the truly
 deadly. And it is impossible to tell them apart.

 This latest death threat is being taken seriously. It
 threatens Misty, Larry, and anyone who is with her. How
 would you like to be standing in line at a book signing when
 the nut with a gun or a bomb shows up trying to take Misty
 out? What? It could never happen? People don't do that?
 Remember the two year old that ended up with a bullet
 through her head? Not a character in one of Misty's books.
 But a real world small child that lived under Misty &
 Larry's roof, played with their cats, pulled the tails of
 the parrots, and never hurt anyone in her life. A small
 child Misty and Larry tried to protect. Dead. Brains
 splattered all over the crib. Too graphic for you? You bet.
 True? You bet. And it could be you next.

 Is Misty angry? Yes, she's furious. Nuts out there have
 repeatedly threatened to kill her, her husband, their
 friends, and now the threat is to you, her fans. All over a
 set of characters in a fantasy book.

 Becoming a successful writer should not be equal to living
 in a war zone. This is the kind of treatment fans are
 dishing out to many of your favorite authors. Crazy fans are
 making Misty's life hell by projecting their own fantasies
 on her.

 By all means buy Misty's books, her music, Larry's art work.
 Enjoy the products of their creativity. Empathize with the
 characters, and the life situations that the characters find
 themselves in. But beware if you or anyone else starts
 confusing the characters with the author. . Do not give the
 nut cases any more power. The single most important thing
 you can do is avoid these nuts. Isolate them. Laugh at them
 from a distance. Don't let them into your life. Don't let
 yourself get taken by some charismatic lunatic with murder
 on the mind. And run like hell if anyone tries to get you to
 buy into their warped view of the universe.

 Teri Lee
 Firebird Music

 Copyright 1997 Firebird Arts & Music of Oregon, Inc.

 "I must create a new system or be enslaved by another man's;
  I will not reason and compare:  my business is to create."
    -- William Blake


