Tuesday 3/4/25
In trying to get the News section of this site updated, I thought about Katie Ryder and how what happened with Katie Ryder back when she was at Harper's could only have gone that one way because of who Katie Ryder is and what she isn't.
As I said, she--like Christopher Beha--is no longer at Harper's. Coincidence?
I'll tell you this: These people would not have voluntarily left that job. So something happened. Further, just about everyone and their late great grandmother is listed as a Harper's contributing editor, but neither of these two are there, with Beha's absence being more conspicuous, given his former position as editor in chief.
We'll do a quick recap regarding Ryder. I'd send her stories at Harper's, which I knew were not so much as looked at. At all. They weren't opened. Do I seem like someone who would just say that? Or do I seem like someone who would only say that if I had empirical proof of what I'm saying?
Anyone who knows me at all, in any capacity, knows the answer to that question.
Let's talk about what broken, evil children these people are, in the example of a Katie Ryder, though practically speaking we could be talking about virtually any of these people, because this is how they are.
Ryder received five stories from me. She did not read them. She didn't open them. She lied and made it sound like they'd been read, vetted, evaluated. I knew this was a lie and had proof of it being a lie. A Katie Ryder would never allow the likes of me--of which there is only myself--to pass if she had any say. When you have an evil, broken child of no ability whatsoever, and someone else is their opposite in every possible way, that person is going to discriminate against that other person.
I said something to her. Mild. Very mild. About those being strong stories. I made no allegation.
But she knew what she was really doing, obviously. And she was worried that I knew, which of course I did. I'll always know what you're up to if you're one of these people and you operate in this fashion.
She made her now much-mocked line about the competition being so formidable for fiction at Harper's, which is bound to make anyone fall over laughing if they read the likes of the Diane Williams/Harper's prose off that we put up a while ago. Yes, what formidable competition indeed. (Nothing like a prose off, is there?)
I repaired to this very journal, and I said something about how there was this venue to which I'd contributed in the past that had a bunch of stories of mine and I didn't think they were being read.
Now, this could have been so many places, right? There was nothing that suggested this had to be Harper's.
But as I said later, guilty is guilty, and guilty tells. Edgar Allan Poe understood that. And while Katie Ryder's fear--in terms of saving her own reputation--wasn't the same as the guilt represented by the imagined beatings of a heart under the floorboards, the idea is similar. She was going to give herself away, just like the fellow in "The Tell-Tale Heart." I'll say it again: Guilty is guilty.
She read that entry on the blog--on her own; it's not like I sent her the link--and then goes and tattles--with no proof, no nothing--to the clown that is Christopher Beha, who had also received stories from me and never once replied, because, again, I'm as unlike him--due to good qualities such as character, expertise, and actual ability--as anyone could be, but now he was going to play hero and tough guy.
Yeah...those aren't going to be roles that a man like this is going to be able to seriously inhabit.
He writes me this throat-clearing email about defending the honor of his staff. That's what he writes me for. Not the masterpieces that piss all over the fiction these two fools were running.
Now we come to now. Want to head on over with me to Katie Ryder's threadbare website where we can read that she's a freelance writer and see the fifteen--that's right, fifteen--pieces she's published.
These go back to 2012. Kind of a while, right?
Here I was this week trying to get twenty new works--with an industry against me--up in the News section of my site, berating myself as per usual for not having hundreds of other links up in the sections where they belong and despairing about how I'm ever going to get that in amidst everything else, when there's this person with what you see being the sum total of her writerly existence.
Each piece is about the same kind of thing. And your eyes would feel less dry from reading her writing if you instead rubbed chalk over them. It all reads like a more boring version--flatter, with less life--of Wikipedia. There is not a single idea. There's no color, no voice, no personality, not so much as spark. Humorless. Robotic. Go ahead and click on any of the fifteen for yourself.
And each publication is the result of a hook-up. There's nothing that was a result of an idea, a pitch, honest effort. Nothing was earned. Someone like this can't earn anything. They don't have anything to earn anything with.
Now imagine you're that person. Writing about boring books, the patriarchy. You suck at writing. You've done next to nothing. What you've done hasn't anything to do with your ability, which you don't have. You're not gifted, intelligent. You're weak. There's no range to your game. Your game is about being one of these people. And along I come. With what I am and what I represent. How those things make someone who is an evil, broken, envious, talentless, insecure, entitled child feel.
How do you think it's going to go? It can only go one way, right? And that way isn't, "Wow, loved all of these stories, we'd be honored to publish X."
There is no earthly way if this person has the power to make that decision. They're not going to let it happen. You have a better chance later today of flapping your arms and flying around the earth a few times.
But, if you'd like, you can contact her at her website in order to hire her so that you can spend money for her to edit your work, this amazing writer herself and judicious editor.
Sounds like a joke, doesn't it?
This is how an evil, broken child operates, and it's the only thing someone like this could likely ever be, unless they pulled down all of the nonsense, the pettiness, the propensity for discrimination that defines them and has for so long, and started all over again.
