{"id":2108,"date":"2024-07-30T13:45:10","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T17:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=2108"},"modified":"2024-08-01T20:21:20","modified_gmt":"2024-08-02T00:21:20","slug":"when-people-cant-leave-bad-enough-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/when-people-cant-leave-bad-enough-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"When People Can\u2019t Leave Bad Enough Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Damn, is\u00a0there nobody around Tom Monteleone who can tell him to just stop<\/i> already?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was one of the many people \u201clucky\u201d enough to get his first Substack newsletter, in which he tripled down on the racism and transphobia that got him booted out of the HWA last year.\u00a0And I hit the “Unsubscribe” button with a quickness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I will not repost\u00a0the entire mess, but according to Tom, just about anyone who won an HWA lifetime achievement award while not being white, male, straight, or American only got the recognition because they were minorities. Why would he think this? Because he’d never heard of several of these people, and\/or he considered their body of work too trivial to deserve the award. The newsletter was loaded with right-wing scare buzzwords like \u201cMarxists,\u201d \u201cDEI,\u201d and \u201cwoke.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure there are people in the horror field who read his rant and said \u201cRight on!\u201d to their basements, but many of us (he spammed this to a lot<\/i> of people) took to social media to express our disgust.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is such an\u00a0ugly thing to do to these authors, to undermine their hard work and their achievements this way.\u00a0To think he calls Linda Addison a friend and then so coldly\u00a0dismisses her accomplishments, right down to putting “horror poetry” in quotes like\u00a0it’s not a real\u00a0thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

And how the hell do you not know who Koji Suzuki is and somehow think your ignorance means the HWA has a\u00a0problem? Tom dismissed Suzuki\u2019s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award as a choice \u201cfrom out beyond Neptune.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dude. Seriously? Suzuki is the author of The<\/i> Ring<\/i> novels, which were tremendously popular and influential in both Asian and American horror and were made into multiple films and spinoff properties. For that alone, I’d say Suzuki is more than deserving. He also wrote Dark Water<\/em>, another work\u00a0that got film versions in both Japan and the US. The Japanese and American movies\u00a0based on the Ring<\/i> novels are downright iconic. That\u2019s just embarrassing, Tom.\u00a0And it should make people\u00a0question his assessments of the other authors in his rant.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Tom wishes\u00a0he’d ever created a character half as well known as Sadako.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Full disclosure: I had a great time at his Borderlands Boot Camps. I made my first in-person horror writing friends there. Tom tore into my submissions like Jason Voorhees going after horny teenagers with a machete, but he gave me a lot to think about. Out of the four workshop leaders in 2020, he was probably the hardest on the segment of The Keeper of the Key<\/i> that I brought for critiques, but he also said \u201cYou could publish this, but it needs a lot of work\u201d\u2014and he was right.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That being said, I\u2019m not all that surprised that Tom\u2019s knowledge of recent\u00a0genre works is lacking. During the craft lectures, he and the other faculty used\u00a0works that were several decades old as storytelling models. Like The Maltese Falcon, <\/i>which is nearing 100.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing wrong with the classics, but if you’re teaching writers to seek publication in the 21st century, maybe use\u00a0a few works that are, I dunno, recent<\/em>. Market awareness is an important part of anyone’s publication journey.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t enjoy posting this negative stuff about Tom, but because I mentioned him in Tidepool\u2019s<\/i> acknowledgments, I want to be clear where I stand. At the workshops, I found Tom funny and charming. A few things he said on his Facebook page back then made me suspect we didn\u2019t see eye-to-eye politically, though\u00a0I had no idea how deep the rot ran until he went on the tirades that got him the boot.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But I liked him, and I hate that he’s done this. Tom\u00a0could have had such<\/i> a great legacy as an\u00a0esteemed horror author and editor running these workshops to help the next generations of horror writers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But he decided to be\u2026this<\/i> instead. And that\u2019s a real 2024-style tragedy. He\u2019d rather throw away the decades of respect and goodwill he built as an author, editor, and mentor than let go of his\u00a0resentment that the horror genre has evolved\u00a0beyond what he’s familiar and comfortable with.\u00a0It’s everyone else who has the problem; it certainly couldn’t be him<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Personally, I think our genre is far richer and more interesting when we read and recognize work from diverse perspectives. I loved The Reformatory <\/i>by Tananarive Due, this year\u2019s Stoker winner for Best Novel. I loved The Devil Takes You Home<\/i> by Gabino Iglesias, last year\u2019s Best Novel winner.\u00a0Both authors\u00a0wove their\u00a0backgrounds into stories that felt fresh and new while being\u00a0terrifying and heartbreaking.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s Tom\u2019s loss that he refuses to see that diversity makes horror\u00a0stronger, but he\u2019s apparently never going to understand that.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s so fucking sad.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Damn, is\u00a0there nobody around Tom Monteleone who can tell him to just stop already?\u00a0 I was one of the many…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,65],"tags":[131,23,137],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2108"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2108"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2133,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2108\/revisions\/2133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}