The AfterDark World: AfterDark's Interview with Michael C. Laney

Check out my irreverant, candid and at points deeply personal inverview with AfterDark's Ray Sostre.

The AfterDark World: AfterDark's Interview with Michael C. Laney: In continuation of “A Man’s World Interview” with The AfterDark World, I am proud to bring a man who takes paranormal to a whole new level,...

I'm A One Man Show, It's Nothing New

I'm a one man show, a maverick, a loner, the oddball.  It's really nothing new to me.  For days I had struggled with exactly what I was going to do, with what I was going to try to do.  In the end I had pretty much resolved myself with staying a part of what I saw as pretty much was the "Great Circle Of Hypocrites".  Pay Pal had done its thing and there was no sign of revolution or rebellion.  No backlash from the world of independent writers to say, "Hell no, we're not standing for this crap!"  Just business as usual.  So I was going to plug on and be business as usual.  Write a funny little article.  Do my story to make fun of  Pay Pal and Mark Cocksucker, and explain how I was going to stick it to the system by continuing to sell my stories through ARe and smile each time Pay Pal had to disperse a payment to me through their system for the smut I had written they found acceptable.

That was until I got home this afternoon and saw that it was Read An e-Book Week.  And wow, in honor of Read An e-Book Week I see all these other people who are left over at Smashwords who were apparently unaffected by the Great Pay Pal Purge are offering all sorts of deals and shit to drive traffic to Smashwords and get people to buy their shit.  So, I suppose all the shit these people have written are works of art that are so great and so grand they will never, ever be touched by Pay Pal, so why should they ever worry about standing untied with some dirty old porn writers?  Of course that's not to say that there aren't writers out there who aren't doing things, like passing around an e-petition I'm sure that eBay and Pay Pal will do nothing more than wipe their asses with once they're presented with it, then ask if anyone has a copy of the First Amendment they can use to finish the job with.

So not that it amounts to anything, but this writer has made the decision not to be a part of the Great Circle Of Hypocrites.  I have pulled my library from All Romance eBooks and OmniLit.Com.  I have also removed all "Featured Creature" links to that go directly to Smashwords.  I do know a couple of you are solely distributed through Smashwords, which is unfortunate.  I am willing to carry the links for those works if they are on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but I refuse to do any direct linking to Smashwords or any other company that is going to let an outside vendor blackmail them into writing the publishing guidelines they want, when they are not a publisher, especially when the publishers in question have no backbone to stand up to those outside parties and are too greedy to hire their own internal accounting department.

I am and always have been a writer.  I wrote when the only audience I had was myself, and if worse comes to worse I will do so again, but I do not foresee this happening, because I am determined to stand up for myself and others, whether the rest of you choose to do so or not, whether you have the balls or backbone to do so or not, whether you feel the writers and works being discriminated against are worthy or being stood up for or not.  I will have an audience.  There is an e-book market for the stories Pay Pal feels are unfit, and if this whole thing is a set up to clear the market for eBay to start it own restriction free ePublishing service I promise you I will never be on it.  I've been published in eBook format for just over a year, and personally I've come too far to hold back, and I'm not going to hold back.  What's coming from me is out there, and I can promise if nothing I've ever written has never offended you before you might want to hold on to your blue hairs, granny, because there's no turning back, I had already decided I wasn't going to turn back, and the events of the past couple of weeks  have really cinched and set me on that course more than I was before.

So that's it basically.  Yes, there's still old Smashwords links on old post and reviews, but only because I'm not going to take the incredible amount of time it will take to go through and remove all of them.  Yes all those ARe and OmniLit links are there on my stuff too, but they're dead links to nowhere, because I'm done there.  I have my freedom and self respect.  Being an independent author means everything to me, they're not just casual words, I take them to heart.  I have the freedom to chose what I want to write and how long it's going to be and how far it goes.  It's never been about the money, and if it ever came down to it I would go back to Cat-Literotica or Flushstories or even lowest common denominator sites like  XN to get my stories out.  However, I don't think it will come to that, not even if I have to sell my stories as eBooks door-to-door.

Anyway, that's pretty much it.  That's what I'm doing.  Again, I may be a one man show, but again, it's nothing new to me.  I have my dignity and self-respect, and still no more and no less than I had the day before.  Everyone else can take what you want from this and do what you want, as long as you feel what you're doing is the right thing for yourself and your craft, that's all I think I can leave you with.

Master Vyle