It's a fleeting visit. I fly in lunchtime on Saturday, and out again Sunday evening. I have a couple of sessions on for the Festival.

Saturday 2.30-4.00 pm "Ask a Columnist" for Writer's Victoria.

Sunday 11.30-12.30 "Monsters and Mayhem." Gettin' down with The Dave!

If you can find a way to get to either, I'm always happy to catch up.

I'm planning to drop into Mark Dapin's book launch at Fed Square, 5.30 on Saturday for a few fizzy sherbets.

Saturday night the publishers sometimes spirit us away somewhere to a party. I'll check on that, but Sunday arvo drinks, or even breakfast might be nice.

Not sure why, but we have trolls. Possibly related to a tweet I sent about the Reclaim Australia rallies. You'll notice the occasional one line comment, usually abusing the first commenter in any given thread. I have snuffed out a hand full already.

Those with access to the comment deletion cannon may now exercise free fire privileges.

Inspired by Steve Stirling’s imminent anthology I’d like to run an idea past you all. As you know, there are two Dave Hooper ebooks coming out later this year – although Dave is only mentioned in one (SOUL FULL OF GUNS), and appears as an extra in the other (A PROTOCOL FOR MONSTERS), with no point of view passages. These will be the last big releases for the series this year, but I have two other possible side projects involving the Dave, and potentially involving y’all, at least in one case.
I’d like to publish a collection of fanfic stories from Dave World, but in a very particular way. I want to collect eye witness accounts of the war between the UnderRealms and the Above. An obvious example of this format from recent genre fiction is World War Z, but WWZ was itself drawn from Studs Terkel’s excellent oral history of WW2, The Good War.

What I’m looking for are first hand accounts from all over the world of the week the monsters came back. It could be your personal account. You could take on the role of another. I’m going to write a bunch of them myself, and I’ll edit those that come in. Some, I'll edit heavily.
Now the deets and logistics.
I’m planning to release this as a free book, almost certainly self published. It’s an experiment. I won’t be getting paid. You won’t be getting paid. But there is of course a benefit to me.
It’s funny how that works out.
I’ll be using this book to gather email addresses for a newsletter I plan to start publishing in the second half of the year. Long story short, anyone can get this ebook for free. At the end of the book there’ll be a link to a sign up page for the newsletter. Anyone who signs up gets a second book for free. Probably Demons of Buttecracke County. Yes, I’m going there.
Buttecracke will also be a self published experiment (pending approval from the various publishing Death Stars) but it will be available in two ways. A couple of bucks to buy. Free for the price of an email address. I’ve been doing some research into newsletters and they’re a proven way to service a fan base with the added advantage of providing a channel under my control to augment publisher’s marketing efforts. That’s all very Inside Baseball, but it's important for me to put it out there up front. If you contribute a story to the oral history of the monster wars, I will ruthlessly exploit it to harvest those email addys. And all you’ll get in return is a thank you, and maybe a little pat on the butt next time we meet. If you have a firm and pleasing butt, I might even throw you a squeeze.
If anyone is up for it I’ll use the email from the last fanfic festival
miniburgerfanfic AT gmail dot com.
IN BRIEF:

1st person story. 250-2500 words
Eye witness accounts from the first days of the Monster Wars.
Pay day? Nope.
Attribution? Yep.
COPY DUE June 30

And so it begins.

The Burger Shop.

I went with Redbubble on Wolfcat's recommendation. I can't vouch for them yet because I have no idea whether they're any good. But I've decided to dogfood my own merch by ordering a hoodie and a coffee mug.

I'll let you know if it's any good. I'm thinking about getting the art done again because it shows up as a solid block on any colour other than white. My inclination is to wait until I get my order before putting the Splodey Burger art up too, but if anyone is especially keen, let me know and I'll do it now.

Eron Gjoni, the guy whose post about his ex-girlfriend helped fan the GamerGate firestorm contacted me on twitter last night. Asking for my email so we could discuss the flaws and inaccuracies in my column on Saturday, and my inevitable retractions.

Anyone who's hung around here long enough knows I have no problems correcting my own errors and apologizing for them. I don't have plans to make any corrections to the GamerGate piece, although I might publish a par this weekend with Eron's denial's, rebuttals, whatevs.

I @replied to him, even though I routinely ignore most GamerGate approaches at Twitter because mostly they're (1) empty abuse, and (2) utterly pointless.

I was fascinated to talk to him because he's such a pivotal figure in this latest flare up and I'd read he had some regrets about the consequences of his original post, if not the post itself. I won't insult him by psychoanalysing him here. That wasn't the purpose of this post.

I instead wanted to reflect briefly on an incident that played out (and god help me is still playing out) in my timeline during the exchange with Gjoni. Early on in the exchange, when he was still pretty fired up but showing some signs of being able to talk reasonably, another user jumped in and gave him a serve. I quickly replied asking her to dial it down, although looking at my tweet now I can see I just said "Dial it down, Ann", which looks like an order. Very poor choice of phrasing, JB.

Well, you can imagine what I woke up to this morning.

That's why this piece in The Atlantic resonated with me. Robinson Meyer nails it. Not Gamergate, but the exhaustion of Gamergate. The exhaustion of all online echanges these days. Gamergate, writes Meyer, "is an enervating army that makes itself known as soon as the “#Gamergate” hashtag is tweeted. It’s an attentional brushfire that, even when it’s not being discussed, could flare up at any time. It’s a source of exhaustion even before it has done anything to exhaust."

He goes on to explain why this is an existential crisis for Twitter, but to me it looks like a... well, maybe not anything as immediate as a crisis, but it looks like a deep rooted systemic flaw in the very structure of online communications. Flame war seems to be the default setting now, although maybe it always was. I remember talking Murph out of his ennervating battles with online foes at various sci-fi forums, and we've all learned to skim over the worst, if not most, of the comments at places like Blunty, assuming anyone but the trolls reads them these days.

Meyer asks:

Is living such a public life worth the trouble? Is such a life worth being constantly exposed to vitriol and rage and threats from strangers—especially when the patterns of that abuse seem so random? Is the kind of work that would be required to sustain a “good” public, online social network possible? Is asking people to perform that moderating work something we even want to do?

No it's not. Not really. But I've decided that everyone who has the ability to nuke trolls out of the comments here will be holding onto it for a while yet. Probably forever and I'll probably be extending the power to even more of you.

A few minor tweaks to the old clubhouse coming up. I'll be talking to Dan later today about setting up a dedicated site to sell my books. It won't be my bookstore. Instead it'll send you off to your preferred and geographically appropriate online retailer.

I'll provide links to all the major sites, including Amazon. But for Australian online sales I'll be preferencing Booktopia.com.au. They have a very generous deal where they top up my royalty by 7.5%. My actual preference is that people get off their arses and walk down to their local independent bookshop, but that's not always possible. So I'd much prefer an Australian online bookshop get the sale rather than Amazon. Hence Booktopia. I'll investigate what deals the other chains are offering. But they'll need to match or beat that very generous top up.

Here at the Burger, the current banner ads will soon swap out for book related banners, I think Audible and A&R are among the first, but they wont become any more prominent than they are now. Dan's Civicnet banner will stay.

I want the bookshop site to be quite simple, but if anyone has particular things they'd like to see there, now is the time to lobby for them.

I've always meant to build a dedicated book site but I wanted to shake out the changes here first. When I had Dan renovate the Burger it was with a view to running it as a full time blog that could replace some of my media income. I built the traffic up to a point where I could have done just that, but it was a full time job. And I already have a full time job, writing books. I'd prefer to concentrate on that and make any online efforts supportive of the books, rather than competetive with my media work.

It won't mean radical changes here. I'll be increasing the frequency of posts as we draw close to launch day for Emergence and channeling more traffic in from Twitter. But that's about it.