GOOSED BY CONTENT

[sorry, this is old and i meant to finish it that day, before i got distracted.]
29.07.08:

sheesh. earthquake? *sneeze* legal notice shenaniganery? *covers self in filth*

i mayhap have subjected you to a shrill, possibly drunken diatribe at one point in the past couple years concerning one author of whom i might rather disapprove. like any good Christian conservative, she is completely fucking insane and a proper hypocrite.

well, maybe she has a point, but not in the way she intended.

back in the hoary old days of 2006, i worked for *nameless and soulless digital content company*, and they had a contract to scan, OCR, and upload *publishing company*'s books. a proofreader's job at this company was to check the OCR-produced text file against the scanned page image. not terribly demanding, as evidenced by the intellectual prowess of my co-workers. YA-oriented celebrity-twin horse fiction took up rather too much of my day, or at least the bits that weren't filled with the interminable drivel put out by paulo coelho or the disturbing discovery that isabel allende (GIWLF) passionately believes a cheese log rolled in fucking diced prunes is conducive to, ah, fucking. *wipes self uncontrollably, swears to never eat any food listed in the aphrodisial cookbook ever again*

once we started in on one of the *publishing company*'s imprints (namely the jeebus one), however, the remnants of my bleeding-heart baby-killing pro-civil-liberties homophilic hackles were raised, for i discovered the "life-changing fiction" of a latently racist, closed-minded hateful harridan with skin the color of a carotene-heavy diet's shit.

imagine, if you will: not one, but two novels blatantly exploitative of 9/11, down to their titles; plot twists that include an amnesiac who can pass for a woman's dead WTC-fire-fighting husband TO HER AND THEIR DAUGHTER, for months; claiming marijuana use promotes, nay, instigates violent gang rape on the part of the partakers; mise en scene creation that hangs on killing off (in a fiery mid-ocean plane crash in the first two pages, no less) an innocent flight attendant (pacific islander) because, though saved by jeebus, she had a child out of wedlock with an airline pilot (not saved by jeebus yet - later, natch); all nonwhite characters are painfully of the Magical Black Man sort, even when they are neither black nor men; physical attraction loosely disguised as growing faith in the evangelical flavor of jeebus, heightening at a first chaste kiss more than a hundred pages in; and so forth, all couched in grating, breathless prose that cannot attain the height of craft acheived by the Left Behind series. (i'm not joking here. i read the first six of those.)

so the gall of filing a cease-and-desist order against a blogger who dare use the phrase "life-changing fiction" is near-appalling, save for the fact that she did change my life.

FOR THE WORSE.

fuck you, karen kingsbury.

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