Book Of The Year
/I woke up today to a few emails telling me that all references to my book, Magic For Young Lovers—which had apparently been the leading vote getter to this point for the 2019 Book of the Year award at the Magic Cafe—had been removed by Cafe staff from the thread tallying those votes.
Obviously there is no better email I could receive. Yes, it’s very nice to hear that a book that was released over a year ago, as a limited edition, with no advertising or marketing, that was not even allowed to be discussed on the Cafe, had more votes than any other book released this year. That’s very flattering.
But what’s more flattering is that the Cafe staff, notably Tom Cutts, Dave Scribner, and Steve Brooks are so helpful in going out of their way to carry on with the fiction that my thoughts and opinions make me such a troublemaker that they need to muzzle people from spreading the word about this site.
This is the dream team.
I know what you’re thinking…, “Those guys have the power to remove posts from the Cafe, AND, on top of that, they look like a bunch of friggin’ magazine models?!” It’s true. Some guys have it all. However, while you may just see three guys with superstar good looks, I see what is essentially my guerilla marketing team.
For example, if you ask Tom Cutts why you can’t mention my site on the Magic Cafe, he will give you some line about how I’ve done things in the past that show me to be a dangerous guy with an incredibly dark temperament. What does he base this on? Beats the fuck out of me! I think he’s just a sweetie who’s intent on keeping my reputation as magic’s unstable, iconoclast, rebel intact. Thanks, Tom!
The fact is, I haven’t been very good at maintaining that image. I’m the most prolific writer in magic and while my material may have an “edge” compared to the standard magic writing, that doesn’t change the fact that my output is primarily about using magic in a manner that takes the focus off yourself and brings joy to others. That’s pretty uncool, I know. But thankfully my boys at the Cafe got my back and are doing what they can to maintain my bad-boy cred.
New readers here are likely confused as to why mentioning this is site is banned on the Cafe. It goes back to 2003 and my old blog. That blog started as a response to the Cafe and the weird way it operated back when people still used that site. Steve Brooks would wield his “power” in what many felt were questionable ways and then I would go on my site and call him fat. Not because I have any issue with fat people. All the best people I know have a tendency to put on weight. I just did it because it got under his (considerable) skin.
It really made him angry. Maybe—and this seems unlikely—but maybe he wasn’t aware he was fat? Is that possible? I would have thought he had a clue simply based on the increased frequency with which he found himself holding up a pair of ruined underpants, saying, “They just don’t make elastic waistbands like they used to.” Or from that interaction with the stewardess where she said, “Shall I make it a double?” And he said, “The gin and tonic?” And she said, “No, the seatbelt extender.” He’s seen his body, right? Surely he must have caught his reflection in a mirror; or in the cracked surface of a particularly glossy glazed doughnut as he raised it to his lips; or—at the very least—in his wife’s sad eyes.
Here’s the thing, the one innate gift god graced me with was an unsettling proficiency for shit-talk. And while it’s maybe annoying to have some dude making fun of your weight, it’s a whole other situation when he does it with such panache and unabashed glee.
And I pretty much garnered folk-hero status because I was pissing off Steve and his cohorts. It’s not that people liked me making fun of someone just for the hell of it. They felt that Steve wasn’t listening to them. Even valid concerns about the site would be met with a response from Steve along these lines: “Well, this is MY Cafe, and I make the rules. And just like any other cafe, if you don’t like the rules, you don’t need to come.” That attitude annoyed and frustrated people so they gravitated towards what I was doing even if it was immature or vulgar because at least I was getting the Cafe to pay attention.
Things went from bad to worse between us when a whistle-blower inside the Cafe started leaking the staff’s private messages to me. In those messages they talked about contacting the blog host to get my site shut down. I would have loved to see that attempt:
Dear Blogspot,
Please take this site down because we don’t like it.
Signed,
A group of fucking morons who has no idea how anything in the world works.
When they figured out they couldn’t just have a site taken down because they didn’t like it, one of them suggested reporting me to the authorities for child porn. Seriously. I think the idea was maybe they could accuse me of that and maybe that would be a heinous enough accusation to get the site taken down even if it was based on absolutely nothing. And not a single person in that Cafe staff discussion was like, “Wait, what? That’s fucking insane.”
Ah, but I’m the dangerous one with the dark temperament.
Now, I never had any real animosity towards Steve. I wrote my old blog when I was bored at my day job. It was just a way to pass the time. I didn’t think Steve was an evil person, he was just someone who stumbled into some power for the first time in his life and he got off on using it. Unfortunately for him, the success of the Cafe was more a matter of timing than skill. And when the only thing you have to offer on your site is other people’s content, you need to do a better job of listening to the people who provide that content. Steve’s attitude was, “This is my Cafe.” And to continue that metaphor, it was his Cafe, but the people there were responsible for cooking and serving their own food. And if you take them for granted, they’re going to find somewhere else to go. Which is exactly what happened.
At any rate, I forgive Brooks for the sketchy shit he tried with me all those years ago. But if he gets something out of holding a grudge, I don’t want to deny him that.
The truth is, I prefer people find this site because a friend tells them about it or because of a fortuitous google search. Not because of a post in a public magic forum. So I’m happy you can’t talk about this site there.
And here’s the thing, if they hadn’t interfered, and MFYL had won book of the year, what good would that do me? The book sold out in January 2018. I have no more copies to sell. I guess there’s some degree of pride I could take in winning the magic book of the year, but I’m not really wired that way. In fact, I take much more pride knowing they were willing to invalidate their whole contest to keep me from winning again.
I just feel bad for the authors of the other books. They’re denied the full sense of achievement they could take if their book wins because it will have an implied asterisk next to it from anyone who’s paying attention. It would be like if you were taking part in a 500m sprint and halfway through a sniper took out the guy in the lead. You’d feel like a bit of a fraud saying, “I won!”
Just so the Cafe management doesn’t go and botch this again next year, I am officially removing anything I write from awards contention in perpetuity. Okay? You’re welcome. Problem solved.