Thomas Wictor

Fanfare has published a very long interview with me. The deal was they’d send me copies of the magazine and tell me when the interview would go on the Website.

Neither promise was kept. Color me SHOCKED!!!!!!!!!

The interviewer was Robert Schulslaper. Note that it’s a classical-music publication. The was Mike Albee’s idea of publicity. Take a wild guess how many classical-music fans will be interested in buying Ghosts and Ballyhoo.

They actually should, because Scott Thunes is a classical player. Here’s his version of a fugue from Paul Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis.

Time for a rant

I once read that Anne Rice and Stephen King had contracts that prohibited their work from being edited. The manuscript had to be published as received. At the time I thought this was amazingly prima donna-ish behavior, but I’ve learned that for whatever reason, writers are despised by the very industries that depend on them to survive.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no longer a professional writer. I’m now an investor who writes as a hobby. That being said, I’m extremely excited about my next novel. It’ll be self-published because I don’t need the money, and I want Tim to do the cover. I’ve learned a lot about book marketing, so I think the novel will do better than the Ghosts Trilogy. And if the novel is successful, my previous work will be discovered.

The novel will be in part about the Chicago mob in the fifties. That’s all I’ll say right now. I’ll begin writing it in a few days.

During the attempt to market the Ghosts Trilogy, virtually every single person and organization I either hired or interacted with on any level turned out to be dishonest or incompetent. But when you read my mobster novel, keep in mind that it’s fiction. As you gasp at the vicious way I disembowel the entire publishing and publicity industries, remember that all the e-mails I publish will be fake. I’ll have made them all up.

Everything in the novel will be pretend. Got that?

The protagonist of the novel will have published a memoir called Ghosts and Ballyhoo, but it’ll be a different book about being a failed L.A. music journalist. Seriously, everything in the novel will be fiction. Every single word.

Actually, I have nothing to rant about. Therefore, cancel this rant.

Instead, let’s talk about…this thing.

It keeps ringing the back doorbell, and when I answer, it just stands there, smiling. I’ve asked it what it wants, but it won’t say a word. It may be one of the neighbors’ children; I haven’t seen them in a while. Tim and I thought maybe they’d gotten too fat to fit through the doors and come outside. I suppose the opposite could’ve happened, and they somehow mummified themselves.

You could mummify yourself with the right balance of temperature and humidity. If the neighbors keep their house cold and dry, they could end up like those Inca mummies that appear to be napping peacefully. Or the mummies scattered all over Mount Everest.

Tim and I clearly live in some kind of portal to hell. I have a screaming toilet, my fridge clucks like a chicken, there’s a man-goat nearby that vocalizes loudly for several hours a night, and helicopters occasionally fly down the street two feet off the ground.

I’ve never actually visually confirmed that they’re helicopters, but I just assume that they are. A car couldn’t possibly make that much noise. And nobody would stop people from flying helicopters two feet off the ground here. The cops have pretty much given up. They all retire at fifty on disability, and then they get a another job in Nevada. They’re jet-skiing on lakes with six-figure incomes while Tim and I have to live among mummified children, man-goats, and low-flying gangbanger helicopters.

At any rate, go read my interview, if you want. It was one of two that Mike Albee got me in seven months.

You know what’s really hilarious? I found two authors that Mike Albee represented, and I warned them. One had already determined that Albee and Sandpiper Publicity are fraudulent, but the person appreciated my concern. The other flat-out didn’t believe me, despite all the evidence I gave her.

“How did you get my e-mail address?” she asked.

Well, by going to her Website and clicking “Contact.” Not too hard to figure out.

I just visited her site a few minutes ago, and she’s had “Contact” removed from the menu! What happened was she told Albee about my message, and he said, “Thomas Wictor is insane!”

“Well, I don’t want messages from crazy people, Mike! Please help me!”

“There, there. I’ll just fix your Website so that nobody can bother you.”

“Oh, thank you, Mike! I love you!”

And now he’s draining her bank account while she daydreams about her life as a famous author. The Website has only one blog entry almost a month old, and under “Reviews” it says “Coming soon!”

When I warned her that she was in the hands of a criminal, the author literally covered her ears and shouted, “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you! La-la-la! La-la-la!”

There’s nothing you can do for people like that. And when she finally discovers that Mike Albee is a crook and fraud, she won’t admit it. She’ll just move on to her next big plan.

Lady, my father was the same way. When he was told that he had bone cancer, he covered his ears. Five years later he found himself in a hospice bed, going, “Holy fuck! How’d this happen?”

On January 7, 2014, Scott Thunes alerted me that Mike Albee is a fraud. I felt about three minutes of room-spinning nausea, self-loathing, and black despair. Then I accepted that once again I’d made a terrible choice, and I set about trying to ameliorate the damage. I was grateful to Scott and gave him a twelve-string bass guitar as a gift for saving me.

This sounds harsh, but I have no sympathy for a person who gets rid of all methods of contacting her rather than hear about how she’s being scammed. If I could press a magic button that would stop Mike Albee from stealing her money, I would. But if I find out that he took her for $800,000, I won’t care.

She’s working really hard on being an idiot. Bad things happen to voluntary idiots. She’s a thundergirl mutation, is what she is!