Hmm... what better use could an author have for all that writing -- defending, attacking, conspiring... if he simply closed the browser and got to work...?
He seems obsessed with forced sodomy; might as well start there. There's an audience for every niche, even the shitty ones.
Once again thank you for another letters from the labyrinth. It's been my Sunday morning ritual for awhile now. In a few hours Dee Sniders house of hair will be on another part of my Sunday morning. Thank you for explaining about that guy. I've just started seeing some items from him on Instagram and while yes what has happened to him is terrible. He sounds kinda like he wants and enjoys the attention. Based on some of the samples of his written statements, replies,what have you - he sounds imo potentially dangerous and threatening. I could be wrong but you just don't say stuff like that and get a pass. Anyway moving forward. Thanks again for another informative "letters"
Yup, Patrick would routinely post pictures of his guns on Twitter along with vague threats of violence. There are screenshots out there of all his threats on Twitter. Patrick is also litigious and has lost several frivolous restraining orders and a lawsuit (he owed the defendant $80,000). Currently Patrick is suing the Milwaukee PD in another dubious lawsuit. It’s clear Patrick is trying to use the legal system for a big payday.. Hopefully the Milwaukee PD’s legal team see Patrick’s arrest report, Twitter threats of violence and rape in addition to his past history of frivolous lawsuits. Also, hopefully publishers and the Sci Fi writers will stay away from this extremely disturbed guy.
Hey Brian, I loved your write-up on the Rick situation. For the record, I was the one who FOIA'd the police report, and it is 100% real. The dude is not right in the thinking meats.
Is there anyway some of Pat’s most extreme documented behavior (the arrest, the violent Twitter gun/rape threats, the faked vandalism footage and fake bomb threat) can be sent to the lawyers who are working for the Milwaukee PD in the case Patrick has brought against them?
Thank you Brian. I've followed Rick's online antics the past few years with increasing disgust and feel this is a very fair and even-handed summary of his sad case. Sure there's such a thing as victim blaming but there's also being a grown-ass man with a wife, family and friends and an obligation to not take them along with you on your endless, pointless hell-ride. (Not to mention not suing people over online bullshit and abusing the legal system in other petty ways, and savaging Leslie Varney online and off.) I used to wish someone cared enough about Rick to get him some real help; now I just wish someone would limit his ability to harm others. His online enablers aren't helping matters a bit; quite the opposite. I won't be surprised if once Rick has been studied a new disorder is named after him.
On a happier note thank you for the if you like / you'll probably like rundown. Definitely gives me some new authors to check out!
Rick doesn't have any children. He signed away rights at birth. From his tweets he doesn't seem to have much resect for his wife either. If you listen to the Josiah tapes he has had friends, family and lawyers try to talk him down but Rick knows best. His harm has now been somewhat limited by the fact that the SFWA isn't funding his legal battles (using members fees) and the fact that after SFWA ghosted him once he signed an NDA, his poor wife had to pay over $100k in legal costs including $83k of that going to the person Rick was targeting.
This is why Rick is so quick to conflate the people who were swatting him, with the comedy forum that have been making fun of him for 6 years. He is still looking for revenge for being humiliated by a fake huff post reporter. If you read the entire Apostlegate files it even proves rick frabricated evidence and either him or his lawyer committed a felony to gather 'evidence'.
Have you seen the home security video Patrick sent out which he said was one of his “stalkers” vandalizing his motorcycle? In this video, the person walking on to the property is clearly Patrick. In other words, he staged a criminal event. He is a very odd man who seeks out any attention even if it is negative.
And to add to this, the video was only released b/c the fake huff post reporter asked for evidence so that's the only way it came into existence. He would never have posted it publicly b/c its obviously him walking through his backyard. He used temporary marker that washed away easily as well since he didn't want to actually vandalize his bike. We know its him simply b/c he 1) Looks exactly like him and he has a very unique shape to his head and body and 2) when the motion lights activated in the dead of night, the 'stalker' didn't even flinch and just did his business as usual. That person would have had no idea it was a motion activated light. It could have been someone switching a light on to see what was going on and the person didn't even flinch. He clearly didn't think that tape would have been seen by anyone.
That picture is from a live stream he did the day he was suspended on Twitter during one of his book releases years ago. He was in a very foul mood and the entire stream was very awkward for that reason.
Patrick is perfectly polite and cordial providing you agree with everything he says unquestionably, has time to 'craft' his reply and it's beneficial to him.
I've been following this Patrick fellow for a while - it ironically started with him blocking me for an innocuous tweet innocently disagreeing with him on something silly, politically, I then looked him up and was astounded - and while I don't have anything else to add, I do have a question about a word you used in your description of him.
Specifically, you call him a "midlist" author. As an avid reader of science and fantasy fiction novels that amusingly had never heard of Patrick before... for obvious reasons... I've always used this term differently, so hopefully you can clarify for me.
My definition has always been the following:
1) You must earn out the advance your publisher gives you, and go beyond. - Pat does not qualify.
2) You must consistently sell books. Not on the levels of Rowling or King, obviously, but every novel should at least crack four to five digits. - Pat does not qualify.
3) You must be able to make a living off of writing. - If you squint really hard, Pat qualified for this for a span of three years, over half a decade ago. He got that 100,000 USD advance from TOR Books for three novels. Conceivably you could live off of 33,000 USD a year in places of the US, though personally I doubt Milwaukee is one of them.
Good question. In truth, the term is sorta outdated today, but still in use. I suspect it will fall out of use over the next decade/15 years-ish.
Easiest way to understand the midlist is to picture yourself walking into a chain bookstore like B&N, BAM, Waterstones, etc. Ignore all the toys and calendars and shit they have at the front of the store. We're going to the book section.
In front of you, you see the best-sellers -- James Patterson, Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Glenn Beck, Danielle Steele, Chicken Soup For the Soul, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, celebrity bios and cookbooks and shit, etc all. The stuff that the publishers have invested a SIGNIFICANT amount of money in and have paid enormous advances and provided big marketing budgets for. Probably showcased in endcap displays or special stand-ups, etc. Beyond those, you see the bookshelves and the section labels -- Horror, Sci-Fi, Western, Romance, Poetry, etc. In those sections, you'll see stuff that is forever in print: Orwell, HG Wells, Poe, Tolkien, Bradbury, HST, Bukowski, and so on and so on.
The paperbacks BETWEEN those two types of books used to make up the mid-list: new releases or popular reprints by various dependable genre authors. In Horror, it was folks like Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Ed Gorman, Bentley Little, Charles L. Grant, etc. This is the place where most working writers (regardless of genre) used to make their living, and in truth, it could be a decent living. It was essentially the blue-collar of the writing world -- if you were professional, prolific, and fast, you could make in a year about the same amount you'd make working at the foundry or driving truck or on the loading docks (I say that as someone who has had all four of those jobs). The advances weren't the million-dollar ones the bestsellers were getting. More likely, they ranged from $2,500 to $10,000. But if you built up a fan base over time, it was pretty common to earn that out. And if you were someone like Richard Laymon (one of my mentors and a great guy) and you'd been prolific for years and had a lot of books in print (what they call your backlist) then yes, you could indeed earn a very decent living without ever hitting the bestseller list.
The Great Recession hit publishing HARD, culminating around 2009-2010, when you saw most publishers drastically cut back the number of mid-list books they kept in print. And a lot of those dependable, blue-collar mid-listers moved to indie houses or to Kindle or began self-publishing. Or oftentimes, a mix of all three.
In Ricky's case, he had a handful of paperbacks published, I think? Three or four? I can't speak to advances or sales numbers, and I don't know if they set the charts on fire or not, but if he began earning out the advance, if sales were steady and the books remained in print, and if he stayed prolific and focused on the job, it could have probably been a pretty decent little mid-list career.
The key to being a full-time writer, of course, is to treat it like a fucking job. Be it a foundry or writing a book, you gotta show up for work. You gotta write the book, rather than write Tweet. In doing my research, I've gotten the sense that it's not about being a writer, for him. It's about fame and notoriety, and maybe he thought writing was an easy path to those things? But it's been my experience that folks with that mindset don't last too long in this field.
I think his best book sold around 25k copies lifetime and everything else dropped off heavily after that once they saw how dogshit his writing was. His last book I think sold around 2k copies, give or take which is why no one will touch his stuff these days. TOR books gave him a shot and he shit all over it b/c his books were just political commentary IN SPACE essentially with all of the same jokes with characters like (and I'm not joking) Fonald Plump, something something Kamala Harris etc. We've seen his book sales numbers and they are abysmal and of course Rick claims they are fake numbers but they're not. He's a pathological liar so of course he wasn't going to tell the truth. To be fair, I'd be embarrassed if those were my sales numbers as well.
Thank you for the (very relatable) explanation of midlist. I’ve seen Rick on record somewhere from back in his brief salad days quipping he didn’t think it was right he wasn’t rich and famous so he started writing novels to fix that. I think he was serious, though. It did apparently give him the excuse to day drink with his laptop in bars. Nice work if you can get it; I’m a compulsive reader who’s been online since early ‘93. I’ve contributed to too many fundraisers for ailing creatives to associate writing with wealth and fame.
I believe Rick had a trilogy published by Angry Robot and then a three-book deal with Tor. He also has some ‘wererat’ novel set in someone else’s kinky sounding fantasy world. I give him full credit for all that, accomplishing what many only dream about. His heart seems to lie in posting on X and broadcasting revenge fantasies, though.
Truth be told, he doesn’t even seem to enjoy the craft of writing. Pat constantly talks about how many words left he has on a project (as if it is a paint by numbers drawing rather than a creative endeavor). Back when he was published, he’d continually brag and sneer about how much money he made as a way to mock others. To Pat, it was all about fame and bragging. He also had such a high opinion of himself that he could not accept any criticism and this is a lot of the reason he has spent years and thousands of dollars in an attempt to “beat” anonymous online “trolls, pranksters and funsters. Finally, as you indicate, Pat spends hours upon hours a day on social media. He gets off on being picking fights and being nasty to his perceived “enemies” on the internet. Apart from the handful of Swattings (he wasn’t Swatted 50 times), Pat deserves everything he gets.
Well said. The fat mans bubble has burst! A lot like his belt after a thanksgiving day meal (not with his family of course, they've since uninvited him to their thanksgiving dinners).
Hmm... what better use could an author have for all that writing -- defending, attacking, conspiring... if he simply closed the browser and got to work...?
He seems obsessed with forced sodomy; might as well start there. There's an audience for every niche, even the shitty ones.
Well said.
Once again thank you for another letters from the labyrinth. It's been my Sunday morning ritual for awhile now. In a few hours Dee Sniders house of hair will be on another part of my Sunday morning. Thank you for explaining about that guy. I've just started seeing some items from him on Instagram and while yes what has happened to him is terrible. He sounds kinda like he wants and enjoys the attention. Based on some of the samples of his written statements, replies,what have you - he sounds imo potentially dangerous and threatening. I could be wrong but you just don't say stuff like that and get a pass. Anyway moving forward. Thanks again for another informative "letters"
Take care.
Thanks for the update shipmate. I knew nothing of this situation and am glad for the clarification.
I'm still too much of a hotheaded, check-valvless squid to apply this to my own life in a moderately consistent manner...
But...
Some folks just can't be taught...
And...
You can lead the horse to water, but you can't force him to drink.
I do applaud the decision to NOT support him by having that non-support support a good cause.
Wish I woulda brought in a can Wednesday.
See ya next time M8
Thanks for the mention! Great newsletter:)
Nothing is more flattering than when Brian Keene compares you to Jack Ketchum.
This Patrick dude is insane!
Yup, Patrick would routinely post pictures of his guns on Twitter along with vague threats of violence. There are screenshots out there of all his threats on Twitter. Patrick is also litigious and has lost several frivolous restraining orders and a lawsuit (he owed the defendant $80,000). Currently Patrick is suing the Milwaukee PD in another dubious lawsuit. It’s clear Patrick is trying to use the legal system for a big payday.. Hopefully the Milwaukee PD’s legal team see Patrick’s arrest report, Twitter threats of violence and rape in addition to his past history of frivolous lawsuits. Also, hopefully publishers and the Sci Fi writers will stay away from this extremely disturbed guy.
Awesome newsletter today, and thank you so much for the comparison, it made my week
Hey Brian, I loved your write-up on the Rick situation. For the record, I was the one who FOIA'd the police report, and it is 100% real. The dude is not right in the thinking meats.
Enjoy prison, stalker writer child.
Is there anyway some of Pat’s most extreme documented behavior (the arrest, the violent Twitter gun/rape threats, the faked vandalism footage and fake bomb threat) can be sent to the lawyers who are working for the Milwaukee PD in the case Patrick has brought against them?
If the case isn't immediately thrown out in the next few weeks, I will be personally contacting the city of Milwaukee's law team.
Thank you Brian. I've followed Rick's online antics the past few years with increasing disgust and feel this is a very fair and even-handed summary of his sad case. Sure there's such a thing as victim blaming but there's also being a grown-ass man with a wife, family and friends and an obligation to not take them along with you on your endless, pointless hell-ride. (Not to mention not suing people over online bullshit and abusing the legal system in other petty ways, and savaging Leslie Varney online and off.) I used to wish someone cared enough about Rick to get him some real help; now I just wish someone would limit his ability to harm others. His online enablers aren't helping matters a bit; quite the opposite. I won't be surprised if once Rick has been studied a new disorder is named after him.
On a happier note thank you for the if you like / you'll probably like rundown. Definitely gives me some new authors to check out!
Rick doesn't have any children. He signed away rights at birth. From his tweets he doesn't seem to have much resect for his wife either. If you listen to the Josiah tapes he has had friends, family and lawyers try to talk him down but Rick knows best. His harm has now been somewhat limited by the fact that the SFWA isn't funding his legal battles (using members fees) and the fact that after SFWA ghosted him once he signed an NDA, his poor wife had to pay over $100k in legal costs including $83k of that going to the person Rick was targeting.
This is why Rick is so quick to conflate the people who were swatting him, with the comedy forum that have been making fun of him for 6 years. He is still looking for revenge for being humiliated by a fake huff post reporter. If you read the entire Apostlegate files it even proves rick frabricated evidence and either him or his lawyer committed a felony to gather 'evidence'.
https://apostlegate.net
https://payquasi.lol
Have you seen the home security video Patrick sent out which he said was one of his “stalkers” vandalizing his motorcycle? In this video, the person walking on to the property is clearly Patrick. In other words, he staged a criminal event. He is a very odd man who seeks out any attention even if it is negative.
And to add to this, the video was only released b/c the fake huff post reporter asked for evidence so that's the only way it came into existence. He would never have posted it publicly b/c its obviously him walking through his backyard. He used temporary marker that washed away easily as well since he didn't want to actually vandalize his bike. We know its him simply b/c he 1) Looks exactly like him and he has a very unique shape to his head and body and 2) when the motion lights activated in the dead of night, the 'stalker' didn't even flinch and just did his business as usual. That person would have had no idea it was a motion activated light. It could have been someone switching a light on to see what was going on and the person didn't even flinch. He clearly didn't think that tape would have been seen by anyone.
No, child. ThaT did noT oCCur. Those are your delusions again. Enjoy prison. We. Will.
Love the article Brian. Patrick is a pain in the rear.
That picture is amusing, he takes some very odd pictures.
I recommend the Josiah tapes but really No 5, for a giggle maybe.
Dr Jekyl turns into Mr Hyde with his potions, but in Tape 5 ( say at 1 min in ) Patrick
creepily suddenly turns into his own belittling mother, as a result of his self stitching lies.
That picture is from a live stream he did the day he was suspended on Twitter during one of his book releases years ago. He was in a very foul mood and the entire stream was very awkward for that reason.
Great list. Thank you for this. And as for “Rick,” it’s a shame. When he’s on his “meds” he has some good things to say. Shame that ain’t too often.
Patrick is perfectly polite and cordial providing you agree with everything he says unquestionably, has time to 'craft' his reply and it's beneficial to him.
There's also serious evidence that Pat murdered Bernell Trammell. LOOK IT UP.
I've been following this Patrick fellow for a while - it ironically started with him blocking me for an innocuous tweet innocently disagreeing with him on something silly, politically, I then looked him up and was astounded - and while I don't have anything else to add, I do have a question about a word you used in your description of him.
Specifically, you call him a "midlist" author. As an avid reader of science and fantasy fiction novels that amusingly had never heard of Patrick before... for obvious reasons... I've always used this term differently, so hopefully you can clarify for me.
My definition has always been the following:
1) You must earn out the advance your publisher gives you, and go beyond. - Pat does not qualify.
2) You must consistently sell books. Not on the levels of Rowling or King, obviously, but every novel should at least crack four to five digits. - Pat does not qualify.
3) You must be able to make a living off of writing. - If you squint really hard, Pat qualified for this for a span of three years, over half a decade ago. He got that 100,000 USD advance from TOR Books for three novels. Conceivably you could live off of 33,000 USD a year in places of the US, though personally I doubt Milwaukee is one of them.
Is your definition different? If so, what is it?
Good question. In truth, the term is sorta outdated today, but still in use. I suspect it will fall out of use over the next decade/15 years-ish.
Easiest way to understand the midlist is to picture yourself walking into a chain bookstore like B&N, BAM, Waterstones, etc. Ignore all the toys and calendars and shit they have at the front of the store. We're going to the book section.
In front of you, you see the best-sellers -- James Patterson, Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Glenn Beck, Danielle Steele, Chicken Soup For the Soul, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, celebrity bios and cookbooks and shit, etc all. The stuff that the publishers have invested a SIGNIFICANT amount of money in and have paid enormous advances and provided big marketing budgets for. Probably showcased in endcap displays or special stand-ups, etc. Beyond those, you see the bookshelves and the section labels -- Horror, Sci-Fi, Western, Romance, Poetry, etc. In those sections, you'll see stuff that is forever in print: Orwell, HG Wells, Poe, Tolkien, Bradbury, HST, Bukowski, and so on and so on.
The paperbacks BETWEEN those two types of books used to make up the mid-list: new releases or popular reprints by various dependable genre authors. In Horror, it was folks like Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Ed Gorman, Bentley Little, Charles L. Grant, etc. This is the place where most working writers (regardless of genre) used to make their living, and in truth, it could be a decent living. It was essentially the blue-collar of the writing world -- if you were professional, prolific, and fast, you could make in a year about the same amount you'd make working at the foundry or driving truck or on the loading docks (I say that as someone who has had all four of those jobs). The advances weren't the million-dollar ones the bestsellers were getting. More likely, they ranged from $2,500 to $10,000. But if you built up a fan base over time, it was pretty common to earn that out. And if you were someone like Richard Laymon (one of my mentors and a great guy) and you'd been prolific for years and had a lot of books in print (what they call your backlist) then yes, you could indeed earn a very decent living without ever hitting the bestseller list.
The Great Recession hit publishing HARD, culminating around 2009-2010, when you saw most publishers drastically cut back the number of mid-list books they kept in print. And a lot of those dependable, blue-collar mid-listers moved to indie houses or to Kindle or began self-publishing. Or oftentimes, a mix of all three.
In Ricky's case, he had a handful of paperbacks published, I think? Three or four? I can't speak to advances or sales numbers, and I don't know if they set the charts on fire or not, but if he began earning out the advance, if sales were steady and the books remained in print, and if he stayed prolific and focused on the job, it could have probably been a pretty decent little mid-list career.
The key to being a full-time writer, of course, is to treat it like a fucking job. Be it a foundry or writing a book, you gotta show up for work. You gotta write the book, rather than write Tweet. In doing my research, I've gotten the sense that it's not about being a writer, for him. It's about fame and notoriety, and maybe he thought writing was an easy path to those things? But it's been my experience that folks with that mindset don't last too long in this field.
I think his best book sold around 25k copies lifetime and everything else dropped off heavily after that once they saw how dogshit his writing was. His last book I think sold around 2k copies, give or take which is why no one will touch his stuff these days. TOR books gave him a shot and he shit all over it b/c his books were just political commentary IN SPACE essentially with all of the same jokes with characters like (and I'm not joking) Fonald Plump, something something Kamala Harris etc. We've seen his book sales numbers and they are abysmal and of course Rick claims they are fake numbers but they're not. He's a pathological liar so of course he wasn't going to tell the truth. To be fair, I'd be embarrassed if those were my sales numbers as well.
Thank you for the (very relatable) explanation of midlist. I’ve seen Rick on record somewhere from back in his brief salad days quipping he didn’t think it was right he wasn’t rich and famous so he started writing novels to fix that. I think he was serious, though. It did apparently give him the excuse to day drink with his laptop in bars. Nice work if you can get it; I’m a compulsive reader who’s been online since early ‘93. I’ve contributed to too many fundraisers for ailing creatives to associate writing with wealth and fame.
I believe Rick had a trilogy published by Angry Robot and then a three-book deal with Tor. He also has some ‘wererat’ novel set in someone else’s kinky sounding fantasy world. I give him full credit for all that, accomplishing what many only dream about. His heart seems to lie in posting on X and broadcasting revenge fantasies, though.
Truth be told, he doesn’t even seem to enjoy the craft of writing. Pat constantly talks about how many words left he has on a project (as if it is a paint by numbers drawing rather than a creative endeavor). Back when he was published, he’d continually brag and sneer about how much money he made as a way to mock others. To Pat, it was all about fame and bragging. He also had such a high opinion of himself that he could not accept any criticism and this is a lot of the reason he has spent years and thousands of dollars in an attempt to “beat” anonymous online “trolls, pranksters and funsters. Finally, as you indicate, Pat spends hours upon hours a day on social media. He gets off on being picking fights and being nasty to his perceived “enemies” on the internet. Apart from the handful of Swattings (he wasn’t Swatted 50 times), Pat deserves everything he gets.
Well said. The fat mans bubble has burst! A lot like his belt after a thanksgiving day meal (not with his family of course, they've since uninvited him to their thanksgiving dinners).