Tag: scam alert

It never ends. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. This is just never going to end.

Ok. Wait. Stop. Backup.

It MAY be coming to an end as the emails are not so numerous any more.

One can hope although I’m torn between the differing points of view my beloved Red and Andy hold on the subject of Hope.

Anyway, after I was done with ‘Michael Lewis’…..and I actually had to send him one more email after the one I posted just so I could be, and he could be sure, the jig really was up! I mean, seriously, WTF? I thought the email I posted here was rather clear but I guess not. After our dear dear ‘Michael’ within 48 hours I received a nearly identical email from ‘Suzanne Collins’.

And…yeah…again…WTF?

I was not so nice. I was not so kind. She feigned confusion…oh my! What had she done? that went on for an email or two wherein she kept insisting she was ‘Suzanne Collins’ even though I repeatedly told her she was full shit. On the last one I told her I saw that she’d woken up and chosen violence that morning. I was happy and wanted to play but warned her she needed to check the real Suzanne Collins’ website first. I added this image to the body of the email for effect.

Poof!

She went away.

(You got the ‘chosen violence’ reference, right? It’s not obscure is it? We say it around here all the time. LOL)

If you’re out there, the real Suzanne Collins, I thank you from the bottom of my hardening heart for that little blip you were so kind to add to the very top of your front page. I guess you were sick of it too. https://www.suzannecollinsbooks.com/

Now, it seems, we must all be on the look out for the Discord Groups we’ve been being told were really happening places for voracious readers of our particular genre but not invited to. Suddenly….here’s your invite!

Hi Author,
I wanted to personally invite you to join a community where writers talk, learn, and grow together. It is called Writers and Authors and it lives on Discord.

It is a simple, relaxed space where you can meet other writers, exchange ideas, share your work, and find daily motivation to keep creating.

Here is the link to join: https://discord.gg/3KzerX8mJS

If you enjoy meaningful conversations about writing and want to connect with people who understand the creative process, this is the place for you.

Hope to see you inside.
Warmly,
Writers and Authors Community

OK…first…this is a good one because whomever sent it remembered to put the ‘r’ in ‘discord’ in the link. The others it just reads ‘discod’. That’s not suspicious. Right? Other than that, the link is exactly the same in all of the emails I have received thus far. So they all go to the same…Chat Room…or something. Right?

Admittedly, I don’t know much about Discord (other than it can be popular with Swatters, Gamers, and occasionally, serial killers) except Long Ago and Far Away in a place called WOW we used it to communicate with our party while playing the game. Never used it for anything else. Not once. However, WOW with family was a ton of fun and I kind of miss it.

I guess this the culuminating point of all of the emails us authors received from people who ‘ran’ these…or this particular?….group(s) telling us all about how wonderful the people were and how much they would really love our book. They stopped asking for money or ‘tips’ for the most part. Well, I cut off several of them at the first email telling them to share the link all they wanted but I wasn’t paying for it in any form. Most of them went away quickly. One has hung one to send me ‘updates’ about ‘the group’ the last one asked me to share my inspiration for The Heart of War with her so she could pass that info along. The inspiration is no secret. I’ve never made any bones about it.

He inspired it

But this picture, oh this picture, actually fucking WROTE it in my head in 30 seconds. All I had to do was get it out.

So I told her that, I was even kind enough to send the above pic. I asked her where all these wonderful voracious readers who were so enjoying my book were buying them because I had yet to notice an uptick in sales.

Oh dear. Crickets.

I think she went away.

Me? I decided, at this worst time, to take a break from marketing and everything else. After all, I’ve been running out of candles and it is candle season. I didn’t have any money for wax but hubby bought me 35lbs of it for my birthday! I missed the Hunter’s Moon by one night, old eyes looked at the calendar wrong, but I made some the next night.

I love those little pumpkins. I think I bought 9 of them at Dollar Tree last year intending to sell them but they were so cute I just kept them all. I put them on my mantle. The others are my bath candles or, the tall ones, they’ll go on the altar next to my bed and so will the Anything is Possible candle. They cinnamon and cinnamon/apple scented. I’m not a pumpkin spice girl. Sorry.

Then I got a little funky and creative the next day just playing around and having some fun without thinking about liars, scammers, and grifters.

That caddy with the 3 candles has been sitting on a shelf over the stairs collecting dust for years. It made its way downstairs. It got nicely cleaned up and I wanted to use it but votive candles are a PITA in that thing. I poured directly into the glass, hoping it wasn’t going to shatter because it’s rather thin. Came out pretty good. The others are all kind of happy Autumn-y maybe sunset-y and are cinnamon/vanilla or just cinnamon.

Halloween is coming and I have wax and very large jars. Most without tops. Oh well, I’ll have fun decorating them, that’s always the best part when I do these. Just sort of playing with wax and pretending I’m Jackson Pollock or something.

Better than opening my email to see yet another one of these things feeling it chip away at that tiny bit of trust I may have still had in humanity but, worse than that, battering and bruising that wonderfully terrible bit of Hope nestled way deep down inside where it used to be safe.