Support classics and boycott Harry Potter pleads British schoolmaster

Today, in a scathing broadside, Graeme Whiting, headmaster and creator of the British boarding school, the Acorn, blamed mental illness and bad behavior in kids in part on sensational books, such as Harry Potter.


Here are the highlights:


After pointing out that we have a conscious and subconscious mind, and that stuff is stored in the deep recesses of our brain, and ragging on therapists (which he has never seen despite being a child of the War, being bullied by fellow students, and beaten by teachers), he gets to his point that classical literature is good and modern young adult literature and modern technology is the spawn of the devil.

"Imagination is so rich and important that I cannot understand why any parent would not actively prevent exposure to modern-world electronic gadgets, screens, films and literature that will encumber the minds and especially the imagination of their children. Let beauty reign within the subconscious minds of our children, not fear and disturbing images cultivated by their amazing brains."


"Children are innocent and pure at the same time, and don’t need to be mistreated by cramming their imagination that lies deep within them, with inappropriate things."


"Parents walking around a modern shopping centre with their children are magnetised by the colourful and graphic attraction of the new book cover, and often, very little of the text is reflected in the beautiful and attractive cover. Such colourful covers attract children to the point of mesmerising them, and they make demands of their parents stating that they want one because every other child at school has one!"


"Sensationalism is the key for marketing literature in today’s world. Publishers and authors don’t really care who reads what, as long as they achieve high sales figures, and they go to great lengths to create those pictorial covers that hide the sometimes demonic, influential and unacceptable words that may lie within the text. Gone are the classics..." which are hard to find in bookstores yet, can be brought cheaply on Amazon "for less than the cost of postage! Indeed, sets of classical literature, the stories that I read as a young buy, [sic] could be purchased and delivered to my door for less than the cost of driving to a bookshop."


"This is the age of the mentally ill child, the obsessive age, the age where celebrities affect the lives of those who have been encouraged to adore them and who wish to be like them, but never can."


And if a mother at the shopping mall can check out the temperature of her baby's milk, why will she not check out the books that her child reads in thirteen years. Because she is lazy, and just follows the masses. Sheeple! Sheeple!


"This is the age of the mentally ill child, the obsessive age, the age where celebrities affect the lives of those who have been encouraged to adore them and who wish to be like them, but never can. This is a trap of falsehood for children."


Again with the celeb-hate! and the Sheeple!


"I stand for the old-fashioned values of traditional literature, classical poetry, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, Shakespearean plays, and the great writers who will still be read in future years by those children whose parents adopt a protective attitude towards ensuring that dark, demonic literature, carefully sprinkled with ideas of magic, of control and of ghostly and frightening stories" are never read by their children.


And these bad books being read by children with bad parents "will cause the children who read them to seek for ever more sensational things to add to those they have already been exposed to. What then of their subconscious minds? What then of the minds of children whose parents couldn’t give the time to look closely at childhood; the sensitive period of the development of every human being? Where will this addiction to unacceptable literature lead?"


"I want children to read literature that is conducive to their age and leave those mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world’s ‘must-haves’, contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children; yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children. For young adults, this literature, when it can be understood for what it is, is the choice of many!"


"Buying sensational books is like feeding your child with spoons of added sugar, heaps of it, and when the child becomes addicted it will seek more and more, which if related to books, fills the bank vaults of those who write un-sensitive books for young children!"


"It is the duty of parents to spend time to study such matters and form their own conclusions, not to think that because the world is filled with such sensational literature they have to have it for their children, because everyone else does! Beware the devil in the text! Choose beauty for your young children!"






You can read his whole tirade an the Acorn School blog. Or not, after all, I just copied and pasted the majority of it.


My f***ing response as a writer that wants to get some of that sweet, sweet sensational literature money:

Dear Graeme Whiting,


Screw you!


My need for therapy and meds has nothing to do with what I read as a child. My entire family needs therapy and fistful of pills, and I am one of the few who willing cracked open a book this week. Bad children literature does not drive someone to becoming an ax murderer---that is the job of your bad employer, your loud neighbors, and a little thing called a hormonal imbalance. In fact, I am not even sure that any ax murderer has ever cracked up a book, good or bad.

So you are saying that all the good stuff was written before the War. And contains no trace of magic. Fine, great. I see that you are good at justifying your curriculum which your students hate. I assume that you have removed, and never mention, the Little Scottish Play.


And by the way, Shakespeare was a hack who wrote for money, so you should just remove all of his writings from your syllabus. He wrote for the masses, was sensualist for his time, and once had someone chased off stage by a bear. And his witches had beards. So quit pretending that Shakespeare was somehow more noble than J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett. And hint, many of your other favorite writers were hacks who liked money and/or attention.


Just be grateful that today's kids want to read any book. And good luck at getting them to give up movies, TV, and the internet.


But no, you are a snob, who thinks that the 1950s was the best time in human history, or at least, one of its high notes. It is people like you that make literature students hate, nah, loathe literature.


And yes, I realize that I am prime example of the horrible person that reading such literature leads to. Yes, I read the Hardy Boys and Doc Savage, and Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a kid. And yes, my parent were horrible people who did not beat me enough and allowed me to do so. Well, my mom beat me, and forbade me from reading any science fiction or fantasy literature---and I did it anyways because it was a way to take my mind off of the fact that I was dirt poor and the oldest of eight kids in an abusive household.


And horror of horrors, I turned out to be a non-Christian writer who writes for money and the pleasure of writing satirical sensational stories. Oh, I imagine that I, and my parents, should be burned at the stake for this fate.


I am so sorry that your students do not enjoy the type of ennobling and enriching literature that you think that they should enjoy. Maybe you missed the whole point of teaching literature in school which is to ensure that people have actually read the classics---because quite honestly if a bunch of professors would not have gotten together and declared literature to be a noble discipline, most people would never crack open any of the books that you prefer people to read.

Your problem is not with people being sheep; it is with them not being sheeple who think that your course material is the greatest thing such sliced white bread. Let me guess--you have tried your hand at writing "literature" and have gotten nothing but rejection slips saying, "You are boring people to death; please, please, never write another word ever again."

Screw you!

Mad Uncle Morgan

How corporate censorship is hurting erotica writers

My overall ebook sales trends.

It is official--first quarter of 2014 was my slowest quarter as a writer since I made the switch from doing the print market to being an indie writer selling ebooks though online retailers (Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, Apple, etc.). Well, if you ignore my very first quarter which I tend not to count because my stuff was only available though Smashwords, and Smashwords alone that quarter.

So overall, over the space of ten quarters, I have went from nothing to making good money back down to almost nothing.

And I know exactly what to blame for this sales trend.

It is not laziness. It is not fickle customers. It is not my own personal mental and emotional state. It is not my ill physical health (migraines suck). It is not the national economy. It is not the global economy.

No, all these things together do not account for the sales trend.

No, this trend is all about corporate censorship of erotica.

The big spike in my sales was when I full distribution, as in even Apple iBookstore was carrying my full line of offerings.

Since then, Apple has discontinued carrying a lot of my ebooks. And even those stories which were rewritten to confirm with iBookstore standards do not move--gee, I guess even Apple fans do not want to read watered down vanilla erotica. Kobo has killed all my money-making erotica. The Sony Readerstore has gone under, transferring users' libraries to Kobo (my own personal library of other writers' stuff had a third of it not transfer over--and I am not into the extreme types of erotica). And the less said about Amazon, the better.

The only place that my full line of erotica offerings is still being carried is Barnes and Noble, and they did a weird thing to the default search so that you have to trick the system in showing you erotica even when you punch in the exact title and author into the search inquiry.

In other words, you can only find my best selling erotica at one online retailer who is hiding it behind a search wall.

(Please note that the recent addition of Scribd has not worked its way though the system yet...but I imagine that corporate censorship is to follow as soon as they decide that they do not want their customers using their service to pay yucky smut.)

As for my other types of writing, they have been slow, but steady without no great increase or decline in sales. Too bad that my overall sales depend upon heavily on erotica ebooks. If I could find something mainstream or even niche to write that would move at a quicker pace I would devote more time to writing it than writing erotica.

Bottom line: Corporate censorship is hurting erotica writers and their income. And that includes little old me.

Has PayPal backed off from censorship?

It looks like PayPal has decided that censorship of erotic ebooks was a bad idea. A couple of days ago, they informed Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, that they would no longer insist that Smashwords erotic writers abandon writing of the Forbidden Four and their ugly pseudo cousins. Smashwords have rolled back their terms back to its pre-PayPal censorship form.
It is still unclear exactly what PayPal's new position is, for their new terms of use have not been released yet. But at least, one credit card company, VISA, denied responsibility for PayPal's censorship stance. Hopefully, this might mean that erotic writers can get back to making money and writing dubious stories.

Money rules PayPal censorship

The Smashwords PayPal censorship saga continues...much to my surprise.

One of the strangest ideas that I have seen being floated is that this is merely a ploy by Smashwords to get rid of all those "icky" books. The person who said this obviously does not realize that economics is driving this particular situation. If Smashwords actually just wanted to make the forbidden four disappear, they could have easily done so long before this point. But I imagine that Smashwords, like most indie writers sooner or later, realizes that some dubious books actually make a decent amount of money. And considering that Smashwords makes their money by taking a percentage of the money a writer earns, it does not make any sense for them to kill the forbidden four (at least one of the forbidden four is a gold mine).

On the other hand, PayPal has every reason to want to kill off the forbidden four. After all, PayPal is trying to run their business as cheaply as they can. And the forbidden four generate more costs than other types of transactions.

One thing that I have yet to locate is an actual figure for the percentage of returns/chargebacks that there is for ebooks. In fact, I cannot think of a single outlet that gives refunds on ebooks. Then again, I never thought about claiming that my ebook purchases were a mistake, fraud, or "not to my taste." Honestly, I am not sure that ebooks, even the forbidden four, really create more chargebacks than the normal stuff, like food and gas.

But Morgan, what about the two romance outlets that killed off the forbidden four. Well, one of the outlets killed off ALL indie writers using the forbidden four as an excuse, then left all their own in-house stuff with the forbidden four up. And the other one wasn't someplace I would have thought about looking for the forbidden four on in the first place. So I am guessing that the forbidden four were not earning that much money for those two outlets--at least, in the hands of indie writers.

And if you think Amazon counts, well, go over on Amazon and search for the forbidden four. Amazon is still knee deep in the forbidden four; the only real change is that Amazon has managed to get rid of their legal responsibility if the s*** hits the fan.

Of course, if you do not think that economics do not drive the engines of censorship attempts, just watch the matchup between One Million Moms and Toys R' Us. “Please remove all the same-sex ‘Just Married – Archie’ comic books immediately from your shelves. My decision to shop in your stores depends on it.” Whether Toys R' Us pulls the issue from sale will depend on whether they think that conservative moms outweigh the same-sex marriage rights market share--whoever represents a bigger slice of pie will win that battle.

(I find it interesting that there is research showing that the most conservative regions of the United States consume the most porn--I am guessing that they also consume the most forbidden four erotica also.)

And that brings me to tonight's final point about the Smashwords PayPal censorship saga: The only way that PayPal will allow the forbidden four to exist will be if PayPal discovers that they will lose more money getting rid of the forbidden categories than they will save. Money talks when it comes to corporate censorship.