Trolling the Trolls

So there's a brilliant flowchart. Drawn by someone who actually knows how to draw flowcharts. I can just leave it here to address the topic of trolls. Sure. He's addressing reading your Amazon reviews, but it's all the same, isn't it? You don't here the good ones. You only obsess over the mean, crappy ones. Thus, the decision tree for how to handle Amazon reviews (sub in trolls).

What? I shouldn't just leave that here and walk away? Dang. Okay. How about the Psychology Today article pointing out what the internet, even in infancy, knew about trolls all along? That they're narcissists, psychopaths, and sadists. Not that I'll claim the internet knew any such thing with the experimental and researched certainly that Psychology Today likely knows it - but who among us had been on the internet for more than an hour before being given the Second Rule of the Internet: Don't Feed the Trolls (the First Rule is: All Caps = Shouting = You're Making Yourself Look Bad). The interwebs, in its amassed unconscious wisdom, knew from the get go that the only way to deal with trolls was to starve them out. That by denying them sustenance, we'd be essentially trolling the trolls.

Trolls are all about themselves. No one else. It's all about them. Always has been. Always will be. Little dried up emotional vampires, they feed upon any and all reaction they can elicit from others. The danger to you is that this is how they multiply. Responding to trolls is the internet equivalent of getting a gremlin wet (and/or feeding them after midnight. Pick your poison.)

Trolls. Save your time and your energy for you. Don't feed the monsters.

Haters Gonna Hate; Raters Gonna Rate.

So I have to confess to another bad habit, at least a bad habit for writers.  I like to go to the Amazon page of books I enjoyed (or Goodreads or what have you) and read the one-star and two-star reviews.  And, sometimes, they have valid points, and I can see where they were coming from.  Other times, said reviews are crazy-sauce.  If the internet has proven one thing, it's that some people will fundamentally mis-read something, and have loud opinions about it.

Knowing that, am I going to be able to keep myself from reading my one-star and two-star reviews? 

No, I'm not.  I'm really not.  I just don't have that kind of self-control.

However, what I think I'll be able to do is roll with those bad reviews.  I won't respond to or challenge the reviewers. I will likely rant and scream a bit within the confines of my own household, but nothing public.  I mean, I was an actor and theatre producer, so I've had bad reviews before.  I can take it. 

But.... I might also see some valid points. Points that I could learn from in the next project.  Or give me insight into which aspects of the books are or aren't working for people.  Because, it would be the height of hubris to think that I've got everything figured out and there's nothing left for me to learn.  Even the most misguided, vitriolic bile-spitting hate-screed of a review could have a seed of value I can harvest.  And if there isn't, then... ignore it.

And since there's always more to harvest, it's off to the word... fields.  Hmm.  That metaphor isn't quite as romantic, is it?

Dealing with the Trolls Among Us

Once upon a time, in an era when milestones were measured by the number of households adopting a strange new thing called the "internet," I worked for a trailblazing company managing online communities. I was paid, as one boss put it, to "keep those crazies away from him."

In those early days, everyone had an anonymous username, but everybody in the community knew who they were. Oh sure, the home address might not have been posted, but members of the community were known. The annual in-person get-togethers would put the antics of Comicon to shame.

Guess what? There were trolls back then too.

The ratio of assholes to normal people hasn't changed now that every developed and developing nation is online. What has changed is that one's online presence is no longer an escape; it's an extension of your very real everyday life. Societies are adjusting to no-barrier connections. Where to censure? What to censure? How to censure? There is no such thing as "behind closed doors," and privacy is more of an illusion than it ever has been. Individuals are still learning to cope with shrinking boundaries. The constant connectivity offered by smartphones and wireless networks expands our prisons of availability.

As individuals, we are being forced to redefine our Safe Place.

It is hard. The Web makes it worse. For all of its the vastness, it is not temporary. We cannot cross the street to avoid the acerbic wit who feels entitled to demean anyone in his or her path. We cannot decline the invitation to drinks with the whiner, the bitcher, or the brute. The Web surfaces all the dreck, and delivers it in a neat bow. It's there waiting for us in our email boxes, blog comments, Facebook feeds, or Twitter timelines. 


Then there are our expanded personal networks of tattletales and search results. Even when we make a concerted effort to distance ourselves from the negativity, it finds its way to us. That snarky comment in a forum you know nothing about? It's now a screen capture sitting in your mailbox.  That book reviewer who posted she'd rather slit her wrists than read another page of your work? Cross-linked and feed-fed into multiple mainstream outlets. Now it shows up whenever you promote your book.

Assholes happen. Online and offline. 

As artists, we writers proactively place ourselves in the public awareness. "Public" includes the nutterbutters, the narcissists, the sociopaths, and that mean girl from the yoga studio.

What can you do when they lash out at you? Ignore them. Acknowledging them in any way feeds their need for attention and drains your positive energy. Yes, I know, we all want to be liked. Yes, I know part of you wants to punch them in the face, while the other part wants to hide under the covers. Yes, I know the negativity hurts. Yes, I know that if you never developed the coping skills when you were younger it is going to be hell to do it now.

But you must, must learn that how you perceive yourself is the only thing that truly matters.

And you must learn to see yourself in a positive light.

As James said yesterday, we're professionals. We focus on the work. We focus on what we can control.

We cannot control the trolls.  We can only control how we react to them.

Trolls and Toxicity - Battle Strategies for Dealing

Our topic this week is Managing The Trolls: How you handle it when people/readers are talking about you...and not in a nice way?

Well, Ursula, warrior and Heir to the High Throne of the Twelve Kingdoms, featured on my fabulous new cover above, has her way of handling things.

The rest of us have to come up with something not involving the sharp edge of the blade. Alas.

This topic is timely because just yesterday I was talking with a friend who asked me for advice on ridding herself of lingering nasty feelings. A family member struggling with childhood issues had dumped a huge load of poison on her. Part of that was resentment that my friend has moved on, put the past behind her, and the family member has not. Two days later, she still felt the toxicity of that emotional upheaval.

So, though we're ostensibly talking about how to handle it when people talk about you in a mean way, I'm looping in dealing with people who want you to wade into their emotional cess pools, because it's the same advice for both.

It's not easy, but it's the best advice I have.

Don't go there in the first place.

Seriously, cut it off before you ever get close.

Now, this is difficult for a number of reasons. Top of the list is curiosity. Humans are curious people. We WANT to know what's going on. Click bait and all kinds of marketing is based on this simple truism that once our curiosity is piqued, we really want to know what it is. What IS #7 that you couldn't believe? Who ARE the Top 10 Best Beach Bodies - and can we see their pictures? Milas Kunis is pregnant with Ashton Kutcher's baby??

Another reason is that we're particularly curious about terrible events. We see this all the time. People cause wrecks on the highway because they slow down to rubberneck OTHER wrecks and don't pay attention. We're particularly drawn to the tragic, the horrible. Murders, rapes, abuse. Someone held captive in a basement for fifteen years? We can't look away.

This is why trolls have power. They play on both curiosity and the tragic. So we're doubly drawn in. And, like the trolls of mythology, they feast on our attention like so much rotten flesh.

People who want to dump their emotional toxicity, like my friend's family member, are doing much the same thing - they feed on this attention. And they depend on yet another reason it's difficult for us to cut them off - people are also kind.

Yes. People are kind. They WANT to help.

I know, everywhere you look someone is saying how awful and cruel people are and how the entire world is going to hell in handbasket, but most people - the vast majority - really do want to be helpful. Particularly if we're asked. So turning a cold shoulder on someone who's asked for help, particularly someone we care about, is enormously difficult.

So in trying not to go there in the first place, we're fighting two things: our drives for curiosity and kindness.

I learned a lesson about this in my mid-twenties when I met and fell in love with a man who had two children. The divorce was fairly fresh and had been hard on everyone. I'd never planned on having stepchildren, but I wanted David and they came with him. (Twenty-four years later, that's still the case.) We really struggled with creating a calm and peaceful life, for ourselves and for the times the kids lived with us. Differences over the divorce and financial resolutions took years to resolve - and frequently involved tremendously toxic fights between the exes. These battles would wreck David for days and my own peace of mind would be collateral damage. We finally decided we couldn't continue this, so David cut off contact with the ex, except as mediated by professionals or the courts.

It made a HUGE difference. I think it's not going to far to say it turned our lives around.

The decision took a great deal of resolution on David's part. After all, one is supposed to amicably work with one's ex where children are involved. People judged him for it. More, his ex hated that they no longer had that connection, unpleasant though it was. One day, when the kids came to stay for the weekend, they brought a letter from their mother to David, for him to read.

If this scene were in a novel, that envelope would have been steaming with green nasty smoke.

Remember the two things? Curiosity and kindness.

David threw the letter away and it sat there in the kitchen garbage, muttering to itself, unopened and unread.

My stepdaughter stared at it with her huge blue eyes and asked, "aren't you going to read it?"

David said no, he wasn't. She asked didn't he want to know what it said? and he said no. She got all teary and told him her mom wanted him to read it.

All these years later, I remember that moment vividly, both the impulses to make her happy and satisfy my curiosity. I imagine it was ten times worse for David. But he persevered and that was the turning point. Things changed after that, gradually becoming better and better.

So, this is all a way of saying that the best, cleanest and most effective way to deal with the mean things people say about you - and they will! no one escapes that - is not to look in the first place. Resist the curiosity, the temptation to rubberneck. Know that your innate kindness will prompt you to offer help.

Then go do something positive for somebody else. Something of your own choosing.

The Troll, Black Widow, and Poison

Look for a conference that intrigues you. Look at the subject matter. Is there a theme? Are there costumes involved? Workshops? Peruse the website (if there is one) and look at workshop offerings. You're looking for workshops that intrigue you and light your interest. The conference that's best for you will speak to your particular (or peculiar) interests. You'll find workshops, activities and social opportunities that excite and possibly terrify you on a small scale. This is good. You're challenging your paradigm. When you find a conference or convention that speaks to you, if there are costumes involved, take your cue from people who've been to the conference before or go in civilian clothes once just to observe and get the lay of the land. There's a world of difference between RT costumes and the costume at right. That's Baba Yaga (who was the ONLY troll in attendance at this con) at Steamcon where the theme was Victorian Heroes and Victorian Monsters.  

Once you've looked around a conference you'll know a couple of things: Whether or not these people are your kind of crazy, and if they are, just how you want to costume up to fit into your chosen corner of weird.

 

This particular Steamcon was the same year the Avengers came out. We had a complete set of the heroes at the con, but none of us thought to get a photo together. That's me in the stupidly high heels, dressed as Black Widow. No combat moves were made. Not in those 4" heels. The pallid young lady beside me was a vampire. Her father suggests it's not a costume.   

 

Cons offer you the opportunity to indulge your imagination. Prepare to be blown away by the flights of imagination you see and enjoy the heck out of them - like this mummy. Note her mummified cat. One of the aspects of this particular convention that appeals to me is that I can walk up to anyone, ask politely if I can take a photo, and then ask how they pulled off their costumes. One group had come as the characters from Disney's Atlantis and the level of detail they'd put into their props and costumes were amazing. Which is NOT the point - the point is that conferences give you the excuse to talk to ANYONE about something you both love. Make the assumption that most everyone is a decent human being, act with respect, and you will be stunned at how much you can learn. I realize every single one of my photos are from Steamcon, but this lesson, applied at RWA conferences has garnered me mentors in everything from handling rejection to how to write a synopsis so someone will want to read it.

 

Last but not least, the pro tip is: The more friends you can corral into your madness, the more fun you (and they) will have. (Yeah, I'm behind the camera on this one.) So go forth, find your poison, and indulge.

Pay the Toll to the Troll

by Allison Pang

I'm paying closer attention to the troll aspect of this week's particular subject - for a number of reasons. First is because I seem to have picked up a troll of my own. (Yes, she's a puppy...but even at 8 weeks, I can tell she is going to be a sassy, back-talking little troll. Whee.)

But on a more serious note, I tend to be fairly concerned about the trolls that routinely hang about the convention scene - simply because it is so prevalent and often it's disguised as "compliments."

Of course, some of this depends on the sort of convention you're attending. Sometimes writer-based cons tend to be a bit more mellow (particularly the romance ones, as there is often a higher female to male ratio. The exceptions, of course, were stated earlier by some of my fellow word whores - there are some cons that do employ male cover models and sometimes attendees can get out of control. There is no excuse for the sort of thing. Ever.)

However, that being said, the majority of trolls/harassers at most cons do tend to be men - you've got the cosplay creeps who decide that just because someone is wearing a skimpy costume, that gives them free range to touch/poke/be lewd or whatever. And god, the catch-22 thing kills me. Often said trolls will look down upon female cosplayers for being "slutty" - after all, why would they dress like that if they didn't want attention? Oh wait, maybe because the many (male) comic book artists draw their superheroines with melon ball breasts, costumes made of metal and dental floss and have them "expressing their STRONG FEMALE POWER" in poses that aren't actually possible. It's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy breeding ground of dudes who are used to comic books catering to their gaze and then complaining about being "friend-zoned" when lady cosplayers object to being treated like a piece of meat.

And no, not all guys are like this, and some are obviously completely socially oblivious - but there are plenty of professional trolls who know exactly what they're doing and how to go about doing it. (Women are often taught that it's not polite to say "no" - it can make it very difficult to call someone out, because then you're accused of making a scene and hey, he didn't actually mean anything by it...)

Part of the issue is that many cons do not have clear rules as to what constitutes as harassment. (In fact, SDCC is under fire for having some pretty vague rules - they actually admit that having a more clearly defined policy in place would indicate there are problems at their con.) *blinks*

The good news is that many cons are listening and doing what they can to educate con-goers and also to provide safe places for people who are feeling threatened. Cosplay Is Not Consent is one such page on Facebook that is committed to trying to stop the perpetuation of this sort of behavior.

Now, cosplay trolls are perhaps the most obvious, but there are still those people who use their industry power to get what they want - I've seen that at gaming conventions, comic conventions...and yes, writing conventions.

In some cases, said perpetrators are well known to be such, but because of who they are, convention planners are sometimes unwilling to make a stink about it because they don't want to offend the person. (However, in recent years, I've noticed that this is no longer the case - several high profile attendees are being called out as being inappropriate and are no longer welcome at some conventions.)

For a somewhat depressing look at the convention harassment timeline, check out this link - it goes back as far as 1973, so this is clearly not a new issue in any sense.

In the end though, the only thing that is going to make things better is for people to speak up - not just those being harassed, but those who associate with trolls - if a friend of yours does something inappropriate, call them out on it. Silence is often seen as consent, approval (or at least lack of disapproval). It also means better harassment policies and a better implementation of those policies.

It also probably helps if we start seeing each other as people and treat everyone accordingly.

Ladies: Don't Be The Con Troll

Anyone with an ounce of sanity will tell you not to feed the trolls -- not at Cons, not online, and not on bridges. Conventions of all types are instituting formal processes for reporting and dealing with trolls. Coordinators, volunteers, and attendees are raising awareness that sexual predators and bullies will not be tolerated.  While it is tragic that the groundswell against trolls is necessary, it is laudable that it is happening.

#NoConTrolls

Being the service-minded Word Whore that I am, I am here to remind our readers that you don't have to have a dick to be a dick. Any gender can cross the line. A leer is a leer. An inappropriate comment is inappropriate. Fondling, groping, and ass-pinching are beyond the pale.  Acts committed in a pack do not absolve the individuals.

~drags out soap box~

~prepares to dodge rotten tomatoes~

Alas and sadly, I've attended more than one Con in which women have been the trolls. Recent example? A handsome hotel employee was formally reprimanded by his employer for helping a workshop run by women for women that somehow devolved into them insisting the employee take his shirt off, pose like a cover model, and beefcake like a stripper.

Are You Turning Troll?

If "but what's wrong with what they did" just flitted through your mind, you might be turning troll.  If you're annoyed that the employer took action, you might be turning troll.  If "it sounds harmless," "it was just his shirt," "but they asked him to," or "he could have said no" comes to mind as a defense, you might be turning troll.

A convention isn't high school. You're not a college kid on Spring Break. If you're an author, go back and review last week's topic about why you should attend Cons. No where in seven days of suggestions and advice did anyone say "because you get to manhandle men." What one person thinks of as flirting another may view as sexual aggression. That's a lesson for all genders.

"But men like it" is no more an excuse than men saying "but women like it." 

Yes, I am aware that certain Cons bring in the hunksome (often shirtless) cover models as eye candy. A lot of trade shows bring in hot chicks in provocative attire. Many of the models are there for the express purpose of taking photos with attendees. ASK FIRST (and politely accept rejection if it happens). Yes, I know certain sponsors provide a male-stripper experience for their themed parties.  (Imagine the furor if the same was done with a female strip show!)  I am aware the prevailing notions are "it's harmless," "it's just adult fun," and "it's all consensual."

It is not an excuse to behave like an oversexed predator.

Lest you think you're safe from turning troll by locking down your libido, do not ping to the other extreme and revert to slut-shaming other women.  We can be horribly catty, wretchedly critical, and covertly cruel. You should be nothing of the sort when attending a Con.  "Pleasantly Professional" is a mantra worth repeating.

KAK's Top 5 "No Con Troll" Tips:


Tip 1: The Golden Rule applies at any and every Con. If you wouldn't want it done to you, don't do it to others.

Tip 2: If you can't say something nice ... smile instead (then walk away).

Tip 3: Resist Mob Mentality.  It is easy to get swept up in the moment and the atmosphere. Take a breather now and then to remember who you are and why you're there.

Tip 4: It's your reputation. Everything you do in public can be broadcast on Web.  If you wouldn't want "people you know" to see it, don't do it in the first place.

Tip 5: Have a good time (but not at someone else's expense).