Playing with FIRE!

I am so tired.

So right now I am wading through a large amount of applicants and submissions for Lamentations of the Flame Princess that are a response to the call for such that I made here.

It’s taking longer than expected, which I sure will shock (shock, I say) anyone familiar with how LotFP operates.

I don’t know who most of these applicants are beyond what they’ve written to me in their pitches and submissions.

Against all pressure, it will remain that way.

I am not doing any internet searches on any of their names.

I am not looking up any of their social media.

I am not even looking at any CVs being submitted. (CVs for RPG jobs… jesus christ.)

I know it is all the rage to make sure one only works with The Good People with The Right Opinions. Awhile back I saw the attitude summed up as such:

I think this attitude is more disgusting than any action or statement that anyone’s ever committed to trigger this reaction.

I made my peace with what I call the Roman Polansky problem decades ago. People can do both great and terrible things. That’s the world. It just is. I don’t like the assumption that we should deprive the world of great things (and though almost no one is great, we all do get to try), that we should deny individuals the choice to decide to engage with the work or not, just because someone is also defective in ways we’re uncomfortable with.

And… look at me. I’m going through pitches and my concern is not the quality of the ideas, not judging someone’s writing ability by the samples they’ve sent me…

My concern is whether any of these people who I don’t know has a “toxic” reputation that will cause me trouble, assuming that one or more of these good people wanting to work with me for our mutual benefit has something very wrong with them, and feeling pressured to peer into their lives so I can police and judge their humanity in terms of my public relations, creative capacity be damned.

Fuck.

Off.

With.

That.

Shit.

How can someone possibly do anything productive if this irrelevant shit is what they’re worried about?

It is not my job to be in step with the public consensus, to promote or uphold values that are not my own, or to hold myself as a moral judge over others. Working with someone does not make me responsible for who that person is or their actions beyond what we do working together.

And if you think it should be… well… I think I have more murderers, racists, rapists, and other ne’er-do-wells represented in the CDs, books, and videos lining my walls than I do moral scolds. When I find out that a book or other piece of media has been banned somewhere or another, if there is a protest or boycott campaign against it, my policy is if I have the money, I buy it.

Perhaps there is a moral price to pay for financially supporting a person of certain proclivities or attitudes, but that price absolutely pales in comparison to the moral stain of attempting to have a book (or movie etc.) banned, or a person restricted from expressing their creativity.

So here are my priorities, as a publisher, as a professional, as a human being.

1. I don’t care about peoples’ personal lives or drama.

2. I don’t care about peoples’ politics or social views.

3. I don’t care about peoples’ social media use.

4. I do care about cool shit.

When you insist that I need to care about something I don’t care about to the point where it interferes with what I do care about… you don’t make me care about that thing more, you make me care less about you.

Your values and your preferences are your own. Mine are my own.

And my values have led me to delete my personal Twitter account, to remove myself from the rage machine. To block or hide or unfollow every single social media account associated with my industry (including everyone I work with) because it’s pretty much all irrelevant to the stuff or the making of the stuff. To basically not even read the news anymore because reading the news doesn’t make me feel informed so much as agitated.

In order to function at all, not only professionally but as a human being, I need to care a great deal less about a great many things.

So here’s what’s going to happen. However may of these pitches I approve, whoever I end up working with… I’m not going to publicize the work until the final books are printed and in hand.

And maybe one these new books turns out to be “problematic” once their creators’ names are released to the world and people start looking for dirt. I’m not as strong as I thought I was, so maybe once again I’ll be forced to bend the knee by those that think coercion and intimidation are proper ways of controlling the distribution of books. Maybe, just maybe, someone will be of a sort that actually disgusts me (I do have my limits) and I won’t want to work with that person again.

But even so, there will be the one new cool thing in the world that cannot be unmade. Something that I will have to market and sell, because the LotFP margins are not such that I can simply scuttle a print run and survive.

The thing will exist.

And that’s the most important thing in the world.