A playwright has accused critics of showing up for a performance in a state of drunkenness, which is, apparently, not the best condition in which to review a play (insert derisive snort here). Critics accuse playwright of being a sore sport. Upscale wank follows. A sample:

It began with a Walker review in which he said his night was ruined by “Giant Haystacks sitting directly behind me: his huge, hot tummy protruded ever more insistently against my head and shoulders as the evening progressed. I am not sure if he was leaning forward or he was simply so colossal that his tummy could impact upon me even with his back to his seat. I didn’t dare look. I started to fret that this was the way I was going to go: fighting for my breath in blubber.”

The man in question was Shuttleworth, who also edits Theatre Record and says he has “several times pointed out egregious howlers in Tim Walker’s reviews”.

The often childish – “boo hoo, fatty started it” – exchange between the two men was, ironically, much discussed at the long lunch on Monday.

A designer shows us all how to deal with a very bad client who does not want to pay for work. Multiple hat tips to the many folks who sent this in, including Brian Crowley and the talented actress Kacey Camp who had an awesome audition this week for a nerdtastic TV show. Fingers crossed for Kacey.

A sample of the post you must not miss.

Dear Simon,

Disregarding the fact that you have still not paid me for work I completed earlier this year despite several assertions that you would do so, I would be delighted to spend my free time creating logos and pie charts for you based on further vague promises of future possible payment. Please find attached pie chart as requested and let me know of any changes required.

Regards, David.

Haven’t we all had clients like this?

Fantastic uber-meta plagiarism wank as fan artist pinches another artist’s painting to make nice and sweaty pic of Kirk and Spock (Version 2.0). Why Spock is way-green, we do not know. But, he’s naked and hot, so why get picky? Oh yeah, he’s with Kirk. Like that does me a damn bit of good.

Caught pinching a painting she did not do or credit, artist pulls derivative slash painting and related posts. Then it turns out the pinched painting she pinched was pinched from a photo. Now that’s meta. Hat tip to Arlene who sees all wank and knows all wank.

All of this could have been avoided if the pinchers had simply credited the work they pinched. Then everyone would have said “Nice use of reference!” and we’d all move along.

Speaking of plagiarism, a NaNoWrimo writer whose work consisted entirely of plagiarized snippets was banned from the contest. Another one from Arlene.

And a fandom wank on the greying of fandom, which I missed when it came out, but think is must-read. I had meant to write a long, stinging commentary on why traditional science fiction fandom is greying and good riddance to same, but I can’t bring myself to do it without frothing at the mouth. Yes, I realize much about fandom is great. No, I do not think it’s productive to pretend that it is all great.

I recall a long letter in a 1989 Lan’s Lantern (a Hugo-Award winning fanzine to which I used to contribute) on the greying of fandom from a young man who was tired of he and his fellow young fans (male and female) being treated like fresh meat for dirty old fen. They were not welcome at conventions to game, watch movies, or enjoy themselves except as potential targets for a grope. I can relate. And how.

And while every convention is not a weekend at Tailhook, there’s more than one sad saga of Heidi Saha to be found out there. The crass exploitation of the 14-year old in this picture is celebrated by some, but just makes me frickin’ queasy. Her parents started her on this sordid road when she was 12. A quick Google search will bring up many posts by men lamenting the fact that the pretty little girl walked away from fandom when she was at her tastiest.

Yuck.

Boy oh, boy, I do not miss some aspects of fandom at all, and hope they die like the bacteria under my Clorox wipes.

From an interview with Angelique Trouvere:

It was around this point that a short, thirty-something woman with long brown hair strode in, looked at my costume, scowled, and proclaimed, “Oh, that’s so tacky!” and left in a huff. I was like: Who was that? What? No hello?

My friends explained to me, “That’s Heidi’s mother, Taimi Saha.”

Well, it seems that Mrs. Saha hated me from the moment she saw me because she thought that I was stealing her baby’s thunder. I didn’t mean to mess up her plans. I just wanted to enter the masquerade as my favorite character. But to Mrs. Saha, this was supposed to be “Heidi’s con & masquerade” and I was viewed as a potential threat.

Heidi could not have cared less but her mother did, a lot, so she tried to get me barred from entering the competition on the grounds that my costume was cut too low. This was news to me as I was unaware of any problems with it before—after all, it WAS a Vampirella Costume.

Anyway, it was Phil Seuling who came to me and told me that I would have to do something about that if I wanted to enter. He was very nice about it but he felt that he had to back Mrs. Saha on her concerns for decency.

So, let me get this straight, she’s parading her underage daughter around in sexy costumes and she’s concerned about decency? Sheesh!

…She wasn’t entering masquerades anymore, not since some very unsavory stuff went down at the July 1974 Seuling’s Comic Art Con. I believe that Heidi’s father, Art, decided to put a stop to the costuming activities which pleased Heidi to no end. I was very happy for her too.

And more here:

I think what upsets me about the whole Heidi thing was that she was going through terrible emotional turmoil at that time but felt helpless to do anything about it. Her mother once forced her to dance in front of a gathering of comic professionals at a private party like some trained animal. Friends who witnessed that said that her discomfort was obvious to everyone except Taimi who was too busy playing the cassette recorder she brought with her and shushing the audience.

Heidi had alot of potential but her parents desire for her stardom really messed with her head–and let’s just say that we’re lucky that she didn’t die on us.

Jesus Christ.

c

When creators deliver late, it can cost them their contracts. Everyone in the production chain on a book pays when creators screw the deadline pooch. As the schedule gets shoved back, people wait longer for jobs and payment, and schedules on other projects have to be rearranged – on creator and publisher end – to make up for delays. Deadlines push up against other deadlines, one project dominoes against the next. Contracts sometimes include financial penalties for late delivery.

However, in all the years I have been in publishing, I have only had one publisher pay interest on their late payments. The small amount due meant that I got about 50 cents in fees, but I was surprised to get the fee at all. I’ve been paid months or years late – or not at all – for jobs, and this year was the first time I have ever had a publisher pay their contractually obligated late payment interest fee.

While reviewing a royalty statement recently, I found one of my clients had made an error in calculation. They had been shorting me on all my payments for nearly a year. However, I did not review my previous statements carefully, so didn’t catch it sooner. The cumulative effect over one year’s worth of royalty payments shows the publisher owes me another $2,000. I was nervous about contacting the accountant to point this out, certain I must be mistaken myself. But within a half hour, his assistant called to politely admit that, yes, I had been shorted and the amount would be calculated back into my payments in the next accounting period.

Which means that even though I’ve been getting shorted on each statement over the last year, I will have to wait until the end of the next accounting quarter to get my extra $2,000. And, of course, I would love to have that money before Christmas, but probably won’t. I’d love to pay off the $600 I owe on my car repairs now, and the interest on the money I owe on VISA accumulates.

I won’t be getting a penny in late payment fees on those royalties. The company is not obligated to do so in this case, and the mistake was an honest one. But if you or I paid someone late for whatever reason, we pay through the nose in interest. When clients pay us late, we lose big time.

Almost every small press I ever worked for paid late, very very late, or not at all.

They seem to think not paying freelancers is an inconvenience, not a hardship. But the value of the money a client fails to pay his creditors shrinks with every minute that client doesn’t meet his obligations to them.

Every minute your money is not being used to pay off debt or is not being invested it is worth less than its face value.

Consider that some of these publisher debts go back years.

The average freelancer is probably carrying debt and paying interest on that debt. And the client makes no provision to pay late charges on any of the debt he says he may or may not pay sometime in the dim and distant future.

An unpaid debt of $1,000 is not an unpaid debt of $1,000. If the freelancer is carrying debt on credit cards with an average interest rate of 15%, that unpaid debt of $1,000 over the course of two years just cost an additional $347.35.

Consequently, for every $1,000 the client has not paid, the freelancers have lost that $347.35 in interest, and the face value of the $1,000 has dropped to $652.65. In only two years, the $1,000 has lost more than a third of its value.

Late paying clients aren’t an inconvenience, they literally drain the life right out of the freelancers they do not pay. A creator spends the hours of their life working to earn money just like anyone else does. Every minute you live costs money. Every minute you labor for which you are not paid has to be earned out somewhere else. The freelancer has to do double time to make up for deadbeats.

The time these freelancers could have spent working at McDonald’s would have been more profitable for them than working for most small press publishers. One month working for McDonald’s would have brought in over $600 and would have come with benefits.

Being published isn’t good enough. There are simply too many bottom feeders out there who take art and money, and who never come out with the finished work. And even when they do, the books usually bomb in the marketplace to the benefit of no one. It is not worth it to work for bad publishers to get a “big break”.

And to be perfectly frank, getting a clause in your contract which provides late payment penalties is easy. Collecting on those penalties from a publisher who pays you late is virtually impossible.

c

This post was originally written in response to the indifference Tight Lip Publishing exhibited toward freelancers to which the company owes vast sums of money. To date, out of the tens of thousands of dollars owed, only one freelancer has been paid a portion of their fees. They received $100.

This chirpy article reads like a press release, is written by a Rojek freelancer, and makes no mention of Rojek’s felonious past.

Crazy? Perhaps. As Rojek reached out to publishing companies in search of books to review, one publicist bellowed, “What idiot starts a book review in this economy?” The idiot savants went on to publish 115 reviews in that first September 2008 issue. Today, the company boasts 100 book reviewers, and this month they started their second publication, San Francisco Book Review.

Here’s a blog post about the big fat fraud for your perusing pleasure. Several former Rojek associates came forward to discuss their dealings with the facial recognition scammer whose So Called Life left fans and pros wondering what happened to their money and what happened to their lunchboxes.

Meanwhile, Ross is still ripping everyone off. Including Jason, who had done something like $80k in billable hours consulting for him. After months and months of delays, Ross started mailing out the DVD box set, but without the lunchbox, saying that he’d have to ship it seperately once they were manufactured. At one point, Another Universe declared bankruptcy and sold all of its assets to another company, of which Ross Rojek was the sole owner.

At The Sacramento Book Review website where Rojek now does his business, the biography of Himself:

After making some poor decisions and becoming involved with a shady set of telemarketer organizations, in April 2004, he was arrested for his part in a telemarketing fraud. He plead guilty to two counts of fraud, and served just under four years in federal prison camps. During this time, he went back to school and started writing book reviews for the local community college school paper. His experiences in finding new books to read for himself and other inmates in his job as prison librarian, lead him to develop his “dream” book review.

Ross’s story is proof that you can dust yourself off after falling down and begin anew.

I’m verklempt.

c

PS; Just got an email from a sensible person who wants to know if Rojek will be channeling some of his profits into paying people he ripped off.

What a faboo idea! I also await my check.

In short, there are a number of book packagers out there setting up deals with aspiring creators, then selling the works to third party book publishers trying to get a foothold in the graphic novel racket.

Some of these packagers are contracting overseas talent on the cheap. The overseas talent is ruthlessly exploited. Sometimes they are not paid at all, and they often lose all rights to the work.

I don’t know to what extent the publishers involved know what is happening with these creators. They might want to have a look into it, because in more than one case, the packager has failed to secure contracts from the talent prior to execution of the assignment. Which places the publisher in a bad position, to say the least.

In some cases, the packager has gone back to the talent and asked them to sign post-dated contracts.

That’s a no-no. It’s an even bigger no-no when you consider that work for hire contracts must be executed prior to the start of the assignment to be valid.

Dear Freelancers: Never, never, never, never work for ANY client which does not present you with a contract up front, which does not allow you to show this contract to your attorney, or in any way whatsoever balks at getting you this contract in time for you to review it before the start of the assignment.

Dearest Freelancer, I hate to break it to you, but when your creep of a book packager attempts to dazzle you with their connection to the Big Name Publisher, you do realize that you do NOT work for the Big Name Publisher, you actually work for the creep of a book packager. You do not have ANY agreement with the publisher. You have an agreement with the PACKAGER. Therefore, you do not get any perks, any cache, any brownie points whatsoever for your credit with Big Name Publisher. The packager does.

Beloved Friend Freelancer, if the book packager violates the terms of your agreement, or rips you off in any way, the Big Name Publisher is not liable for diddly squat because YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTRACT WITH THEM! You have a contract with the PACKAGER! If the packager decided to fold up its tent, declare bankruptcy, and open up again under another name, you can’t go to Big Name Publisher to get your royalties.

Freelancer, please pay attention: there is no blacklist, there is no blacklist, there is no blacklist. I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this, but, there is no blacklist. I am astonished at the level of paranoia floating around this business, but half the aspiring creators seem to think every publisher has the entire internet bugged and is just running around looking for the merest whisper of dissent. At which point, the sad freelancer who had the temerity to complain about not being paid by some crook of a book packager will NEVER EVER WORK IN PUBLISHING AGAIN! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

For crying out loud, would you people listen to yourselves? I spend half my freaking time on this blog outing bad publisher practices, telling you where to get legal aid, and relating jolly tales about class action lawsuits against publishers no one in their right mind would ever want to work for in the first place. And I work for EVERYBODY!!! NOT BLACKLISTED YET!!!

And what do some of you do?

You sit around worried that some evil client who DOES NOT PAY YOU will keep you from ever working in a business in which you are so desperate to work that you will allow yourself to be abused, and robbed and exploited without airing a single complaint. And THEN you worry that the Big Publisher may never hire you again!!!

Holy Cognitive Disconnect, Batman!

Look, Freelancer, if this client IS NOT PAYING YOU, if they are STEALING YOUR COPYRIGHTS, and THREATENING YOU, then WHY THE FLAMING HELL WOULD YOU WANT TO PRESERVE A WORKING RELATIONSHIP WITH THEM????

Do you honestly believe that if you squeal on some packager doing business with Random House (just an example,) that Random House will never hire you again? Really?

And if your work is all that and the bag of chips, what makes you think Random House is your only option?

How does your book sell? If your book sells, it’s a guarantee that ANY publisher in today’s marketplace is going to be happy to have you cross their palm with silver. Seriously, if your crap ass book packager has not been paying the clients, and is exposing their publishers to liability by not properly securing contract rights before they license works to third parties, YOU ARE DOING EVERYONE A FAVOR BY DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Including the publisher!!!

And news flash: you really want to make your California-based-we-are-totally-in-with-Hollywood-we-will-get-you-a-movie-deal-even-though-we-can’t-seem-to-come-up-with-the-moolah-to-pay-you-$50-per-page-for-an-adaptation-of-the-work-of-a-best-selling-novelist-packager SQUIRM LIKE THE LITTLE PIGGIES, then kindly hidey-ho yourself over to this info and make sure you let that creep of a book packager know that YOU know this:

Under California law, a party transferring rights a work made for hire agreement is an employee for purposes of workers compensation and unemployment insurance and thus there are a wide variety of issues related to those said matters including but not limited to the need on the part of the engaging party to have workers compensation insurance covering that party. Failure to have such workers compensation insurance is a crime under California law as well as exposing the engaging party to unlimited liability and substantial fines and penalties. And this is irrespective of whether or not there is any injury.

Work For Hire Agreements With Creators Outside of California

The California Department of Insurance states:

“Out-of-state employers may need workers’ compensation coverage if an employee is regularly employed in California or a contract of employment is entered into here.

In other words, even if you hire someone you found on Elance who lives in California (and you do not), if you want SEO copyrights, you may still need to treat them as an employee subject to California employment laws.

Yes, my dear Freelancer Buddy! That’s right! Your California-based packager – the one which had you sign that work for hire agreement, the you didn’t-really-know-what-you-were-doing-agreement, because English is your second language – well, that California-based packager may owe you a wad of employee benefits. Even if you live in Timbuktu.

And as much as I appreciate your trust, my dear Freelancer, you should not be coming to me for help. You need an attorney. Now. Soon. Yesterday.

At the bottom of this post is the tag LEGAL and you should click on it. That will take you to various posts, particularly a post on the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. You should read that post, and then contact that organization for help.

There are literally HUNDREDS of attorneys affiliated with the VLA in California alone. No, you do not need to be a US resident to receive legal aid. My very dear friends at Black Mermaid Productions used the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts to handle a serious and thorny small press problem which was settled with Black Mermaid retaining ALL rights to their original creations. Our lovely friends from Black Mermaid are way down there in beautiful Australia. You know, the other side of the planet.

I appreciate your letters. Your stories are terrible, and sad. I am sorry that these things are happening to you.

But I cannot help you if you do not take action on your own behalf.

If you have stayed in a bad situation year after year after year, you MUST take responsibility. You MUST walk away. You MUST get competent legal counsel and stop trying to handle this on your own.

You DO have resources. You DO have rights.

There is NO BLACKLIST. Fighting for your rights will NOT end your career. And if you have been treated this badly thus far, ask yourself why you are so desperate to maintain such a lousy working relationship anyway.

This bad experience is NOT the way it is supposed to be. This is not normal. This is not the way reputable publishers behave. Just because you are working for a book packager which treats you badly, that says NOTHING about the publisher you have not bothered to inform of your treatment. At all.

Why are you holding them responsible for what is happening to you? They do not have a contract with you. They do not know you. You have never even spoken with them. Do you assume they have psychic powers that they can intuit what is happening to you at a third party supplier?

Take your ball and go home. Leave. Get an attorney. Walk away. Don’t look back except to sue the bastards.

And if you aren’t doing these things…

What are you afraid of?

Are you afraid no one else will hire you? Do you really believe this publisher you don’t even work for has some kind of magical powers that can steal your appeal from you so no one else will ever want you?

You don’t really believe that.

If you do not have enough confidence in your work to walk away from a client which is treating you like dirt, lying to you, and stealing from you, then you do not have enough confidence to be in this business.

You have to believe other people want you. You have to believe your work is powerful.

And if you don’t believe that, I cannot help you at all.

c

In the meantime, go read some links.

Rich Johnston is following the strange tale of a fraudster who has been passing himself off as various noted comics artists, taking advances on work, and running off with the dough. This scam has been going on for months and months. The story of Josh Hoopes started at Rich’s old Lying in the Gutters column, but is now continued at Bleeding Cool. (And if you missed my earlier post about fraudsters, go back and read it now.) LINK FIXED.

Impersonating comics creators is not new (it’s happened to me) but Josh Hoopes excels at this scam. You can see his face here.

Publishing companies should always do an internet search and contact creators directly before contracting with them. Almost every creator has an internet presence and it is not difficult to contact them or their official representatives.

How this dude managed to convince people he was a penniless Art Adams looking for dough, I cannot fathom. I know what Adams’s original art goes for! Man, all he has to do is a pinup or two, and he’s set! No need for Adams to be working for chump change for small publishers!

Also at Bleeding Cool, the latest on the bizarre tale of Rick Olney, who does not appear to be any closer to paying the people he owes than years ago when he originally incurred his debts to artists and writers.

For some bizarre reason, I got the weirdest mail from Olney (whom I do not personally know) about my Very Bad Publishers posts. Olney convinced himself the posts were about him and his family. Here is the entire text of the letter which came in some time ago:

Colleen,
You made a remark about my father being a ‘bad’ businessman. My father was NEVER a bad businessman. He actually had a great business and had much more than you could ever realize or be willing to give him credit for. It was not until after his brain bleed and subsequent operation saving his life back in 1995 that his life began a slow decline. Your idiotic comments about my family are something you should be proud of. I’m going to tell you once, knock it off. Talk about your worldly theories about me all you like but leave my parents out of your crap slinging. I realize that you can’t help yourself It must be tough living a life of estrogen driven, dysfunctional personality psychosis, with overtones of jealousy and insecurity.

R

I have never worked with Olney, never known anyone in his family, and have not made comments about his family business, about which I know nothing. The Very Bad Publisher posts are clearly about my time at a company called Starblaze. I have no Earthly idea why this ridiculous Olney person would assume any of this material was directed at him, but then, this is not the first time some random nutter assumed I was speaking to them through the internet.

And me – jealous of Olney? Dude, what is he sniffing?

Olney followed up his bizarre email with another, alluding to the death of my cat last summer. Presumably, my talking dirt about his bad businessman father (which I did not do) resulted in the karmic backlash of the death of a 16-year-old cat.

I think my cat died of old age. He was 16 after all. And, of course, I said absolutely nothing about Olney’s father, his business, or anything else about the guy. I’ve never worked with him, Olney, or had any direct contact with anyone in his family whatsoever.

And what kind of karmic hoodoo kills an innocent animal over a blog post? Man, that’s messed up.

I used to try to be subtle on my internet postings, not naming too many names so as not to embarrass people from my past, while still writing candidly about my experiences.

It’s a wasted effort. There’s nothing I can do about Teh Crazy who thinks I am sending them secret messages through the computer, and ruining their poor little careers with my dispatches to the Sekrit Comic Book Industry Cabal.

There’s a couple more nutters out there who conflate the most tenuous connection (I spoke to them on the phone, I answered email, they met me at a show) in order to give them an ontological argument for why their lives suck: “Colleen was supposed to HELP my CAREER and now she won’t even talk to me except via SEKRIT MESSAGES on the INTERWUBZ.” Oh yeah, and I am STALKING them and out to GET them and a total HATER.

Jesus Christ. File right next to Olney and his weird karmic theory about my cat.

Fortunately, I don’t seem to have too many problems with Teh Crazy. I am not worried about this Olney person, either. But I thought you’d appreciate a direct illustration of the cognitive disconnect that occasionally darkens the corners of my happy life down on the farm.

The good news is, this sort of thing is extremely rare. With thousands of readers, I feel blessed that I have so few problems.

Count on fingers of one hand, have fingers left over.

Life is good. Really.

And I am happy to bring it to your attention so you can know what to look out for. When it comes to Very Bad Publishers, I don’t think you’re going to beat Rick Olney’s Tightlip. Do click the link and read.

There’s a part of me that feels a little better knowing I am not the only person who had to deal with a VERY bad Very Bad Publisher, while at the same time, I feel terrible for the creators who got rooked.

It’s never personal. Remember that. When you get involved with one of these creeps, or when you have some internet nutter railing about the Sekrit Cabal, just remember it happens to everybody in the bizz – well, the real pros anyway, as opposed to the resume-inflating wishtheywere’s who are sure the Sekrit Cabal stands between them and the riches and fame they deserve.

You did nothing to deserve Teh Crazy, and Neil Gaiman gets 437% more of this crap than you ever will.

And he seems OK.

In happier news, our good buddy Tom Stillwell has a new collection of his comic called Honor Brigade, and I have contributed a pinup. You can order Honor Brigade HERE

Also, Tom will be making a print of my pinup of Mystery Girl. The pinup will be available at Wizard World Chicago and ALL proceeds will go toward the medical costs of John Ostrander. If he makes this available via mail for some of the readers here, I will be sure to post the info. EDIT: See it here.

OK, now I have to work for 3 more hours to get this caffeine out of my system. Wish me luck.

c

PS: More trouble with the Dabel Brothers. Don’t really know much about that lot.

PPS: We are NOT hosted by Wordpress, even though this blog uses Wordpress software. If you want to post, you have to register here. Sorry about that.