Episode 50: On Being Nuked.

Wow, I managed to make it to the big 50 for posts! Three cheers and a Tasmanian Devil for me!

As most of you probably know at this point, I seriously detest being censored. On any kind of level. On any kind of medium. Real world and Cyber world.

I don't mind censoring myself when the situation calls for it, like at work where we have an open floor plan and sound carries quite a bit, or on my blog when people can take certain offense to certain concepts/phrases/words that I may blog about.

But I do loathe being censored when the situation 100% doesn't call for it.

Case in point: I belong to a couple of writers groups on Facebook, and each one has very sensible rules that you must follow in order to play in the very large sandbox. Without exception, I follow all the rules to the best of my ability and everything becomes just fine and ducky.

The other day, I finally decided to use one of the Amazon gift cards that was given to me last Christmas. There was one book that I wanted to purchase, simply because I follow the writer's podcast. However, all he has out is a hardcover version, and as you undoubtedly know, hardcover is where publishers make their M-O-N-E-Y (in this case, $24.99).

Now as a rule of thumb, I'm not a big fan of purchasing hardcovers unless they become deeply discounted. My preference is to purchase softcover. So I went to one of my writer's groups and asked for some suggestions from those writer's current and back catalog, with the only restriction being that they had to be stand-alones.

I get a couple of responses on the post, but when I go to FB to check it out, I found it to be nuked to smithereenies. Naturally annoyed about this, I asked the admin who nuked it (this group has about one dozen or so admins) why they nuked it. They responded by saying because I was asking for people for suggestions of their own work, that it was a book promo, and thus shouldn't be posted until the appropriate day for it came about.

I said it wasn't a promo post, since i was asking folks for suggestions for the simple reason of wanting to throw some financial love their way. However, my answer fell on deaf ears, since the admin had already made their mind up that it wasn't going to be restored, so ultimately, with discretion being the better part of getting ejected, I dropped the matter with the kind of response you would give to a superior politely letting them know that they aren't smart.

I'm still very annoyed over this gross misinterpretation of the rules, so I'm making myself persona-non-grata from that group for awhile, so that I can calm down enough to participate w/o becoming overly nasty.

Sometimes, you just can't win if you do play.

{c} 2020 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved