Hoisted by My Own Petard [1]

Date: November 2006
      Published:
      Silicon Valley Romance Writer's of America Newsletter
      November 2006 (Volume 10 Issue 8) pg 4-5
     
      Everyone, unless they live in a cave, knows I "know" Fabio (have for 13+ years, not in a biblical sense, just enough to hug hello), and I do his website (for free, since 1995). I added the caveat about how well I know him because you would be amazed ... Or, maybe not.
      I do this hobby site, www.FabioIFC.com, which takes hours a week if he does things like appear doing sexy as with America's Next Top Model candidates. (Over 300 emails the day when he got whacked by the goose - including a half dozen reporters - and Extra in my livingroom.)
      I do it because I got straight-As in my Marketing Communication Professional Certificate courses, and was Director of Marketing at a high-tech firm for a couple of years (after about 16 years in Sales and Marketing departments). I am trained. Experienced. Capable. And his website is linked to mine!
      What am I marketing besides the hunk in cowboy boots?
      ME!
      As a busy-with-children-Mom, I found that novels did not exist as something I could do, but essays, blogs (before you-all called them that, I was one of the first to be posting on-line), and even short stories could. Quick writes.
      And, I could post them on-line and listen to the comments. (Like the woman who was in a car wreck, who was bedridden and going bananas until she found my site, and wrote to tell me she was half-way through the few thousand entries and to thank me for keeping her sane. And the woman who ended up becoming my emotional support while I was dealing with John; who wrote to me first at 2AM one night to tell me she snuck on-line while her husband was asleep and was reading all my Fabio Stalking stories. We have been friends ever since.)
      Learning. Writing. Practicing. Doing.
      This lets me practice my craft.
      You know the rule - Write something every Damn day! Anything!
      So I do.
      Kept me sane between campouts.
      One day, I was feeling put-upon, all the demands of work and family and Boy Scouts and school, and I was storming around the house, bitterly complaining. Damit! I want to be a writer!
      Then I noticed what I do for a living. Have done since the 1970s. I write technical documentation, docs of every size and shape, using various software packages, thousands of pages, and hundreds of documents. I even wrote highly inter-linked instructional websites before we had Flash, Author, Director, Dreamweaver, etc. (Try HTML 1.0.) Before people suddenly woke up and went "On-line training! What a concept!" Duh!
      On reviewing all these things, I had a stark revelation. The clouds parted. A sunbeam appeared. I smiled
      I WAS a damn writer!
      So I published my little efforts to the web.
      Regency.
      Erotic Regency.
      Erotic Science Fiction.
      Science Fiction shorts (written in the 1970s).
      Jettison will join them as an eBook when I get to it. The Star Trek version (fan novel).
      And on and on and on.
      Over 5,000 postings at last count.
      Now I have a work-in-progress. Drako Lanzoni du Sang, the Italian Vampire, egged on by the Fabio fan club, inspired by the thunder-snow that hit back East, complete with a new headshot of the Italian himself. (I told you - I removed the women from those Top Model shots.) The hero even has Fabio's last name (with permission).
      They (the fans) are eating it up. (They have vivid imaginations.)
      They feed back my motivation to put butt in chair, as the man who wrote "Getting the Words Right" told me to do. "Enough conferences. Put your butt in a chair and write!" This was in the 1980s. Several others in our conversation at the time nodded wisely. Sages.
      So here comes the Gotcha Contest.
      Everyone says you have to win it. You have to enter. It's the best. You get feedback. You get better. You could even sell something. What a concept!
      And what do I see?
      If I have published anything on my website over 20,000 words in a category (Jettison is 100,000 words, The Italian Vampire is over 20,000, Jacks are Wild, I have to check, and so on), - well - then I cannot enter that category!
      Let's see - that eliminates SciFi (they hate that nick-name by the way), paranormal, hysterical, er, no, make that historical, just about everything I write!
      My name is well-known.
      I've published textbooks and technical articles, humorous essays and editorials in magazines.
      I've been on Extra, E! True Hollywood Story, and written up in Newspaper articles all across the country.
      I am all over Google, no matter how you spell my name.
      Companies and charities who want to hire Fabio know my name and my website. I screen them.
      Marketing departments of the products Fabio supports know my email and my stories. They read them.
      Producers write to tell me they love my writing (esp, the Stalking Fabio stories).
      Some women love the stories about my cat. Ranger has his own fan-club, the wretch.
      I have been in Romantic Times many times in stories and photos, not to count the reviews and ads.
      I am even the target of my own internet stalkers.
      Yep.
      My PR campaign is working.
      But I just screwed up my contest-entering.
      I was a little too efficient.
      Shucky darn!
     

[1] The word remains in modern usage in the phrase to be hoist by one's own petard, which means "to be harmed by one's own plan to harm someone else" or "to fall in one's own trap". Shakespeare coined the now proverbial phrase in Hamlet.