Writing Demons Beware

IN THE DARK TIMES WILL THERE ALSO BE SINGING? YES, THERE WILL ALSO BE SINGING. ABOUT THE DARK TIMES.

Where do I fucking start?

So, Thatcher was the bane of the working classes, and much of what she did still has repercussions to this day. So, in no particular order, just in the order I remember them, here are some things she did that pissed us off - 

•In 1989 she introduced this thing called the “Community Charge” but which everyone calls the “Poll Tax” which replaced an older system in which your tax payment was based on the rental value of your home. This new tax meant that people living in one bedroom flats would pay the same as a billionaire living in a mansion. Obviously, the rich loved it, everyone else… not so much. So there were riots (video of news about the riots) - There were lots of riots in the Thatcher years, and they were all notable for the extreme levels of police brutality.

(photo, poll tax protest in Trafalgar Square, 1990)

•Then there was her war on industry. There was a lot of inflation when she came to power, so she instituted anti-inflationary measures. All well and good… except not the way she did it. She closed many government controlled industries, most famously steel and coal. The amount spent on public industries dropped by 38% under Thatcher. The coal miners went on strike, for almost a year, but in the end, the pits were still closed, and 64,000 people lost their jobs. Unemployment rates soared in industrial areas, and inequality between these (generally northern or welsh) areas and the rest of the UK is still there. During the strike there were numerous violent clashes with the police at picket lines which were widely televised. As a memoir from one miner attests: “I saw a police officer with a fire extinguisher in his hand, bashing a lad in the back. I tried to get closer to note down the officer’s number but they were wearing black boilersuits with no numbers. The next thing I knew, a police officer struck me from behind. I was coming in and out of consciousness as I was dragged across the road into an alleyway. They blocked off the alley and beat another lad and me with sticks until I was unconscious.” (I can’t post the whole thing it’s too long, but read it in the Guardian) Images such as this swept the country, turning many people against Thatcher -

And after it was all over people felt Thatcher had lied, saying she wanted to close only 20 pits, when in the end, 75 were closed down.

• Inequality soared whilst she was prime minister. There is a thing called the gini coefficient, it is the most common method of measuring inequality. Under gini, a score of one would be a completely unequal society; zero would be completely equal. Britain’s gini score went up from 0.253 to 0.339 by the time Thatcher resigned.

•During her time as prime minister the notorious ‘Section 28′ was published. It stated: A local authority shall not (a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. - Section 28 wasn’t repealed until 2003.

• She introduced the Right To Buy scheme, which allowed people to buy their council houses for a very low price, which, at first glance, seems like a great idea, allowing people who normally wouldn’t be able to afford their own home to have one - however, loads of people have entered the scheme and now we have far too little social housing, meaning there has been a sharp rise in homelessness.

• The Battle of the Beanfield was a clash between hippies and police near Stonehenge in 1985. 1300 police officers converged on a convoy of 600 new age travellers who were heading to Stonehenge to set up a free festival in violation of a high court order. Again, there was an insane amount of police brutality, and 16 travellers were hospitalised, 573 people were arrested (one of the biggest mass arrests in UK history) - “Pregnant women were clubbed with truncheons, as were those holding babies. The journalist Nick Davies, then working for The Observer, saw the violence. ‘They were like flies around rotten meat,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no question of trying to make a lawful arrest. They crawled all over, truncheons flailing, hitting anybody they could reach. It was extremely violent and very sickening.’” (source) - Once everyone was arrested, the empty vehicles, which were in many cases the only homes the travellers had “were then systematically smashed to pieces and several were set on fire. Seven healthy dogs belonging to the Travellers were put down by officers from the RSPCA.” (source same as above)

Most of the charges were dismissed in court after Lord Cardigan, who had tagged along with them to see what would happen, testified on behalf of the travellers against the police. 

•Her removal of Irish dissidents right to be placed in a category that essentially made them political prisoners instead of merely criminals led to a hunger strike that ended in 10 deaths, including that of Bobby Sands, who was elected from his prison cell, reflecting the immense national, and international support for Irish nationalists. Thatchers lack of sympathy, or even empathy led to her becoming even more of a hate figure.

• She presided over a rapid deregulation of the banks, which ultimately led to much of the problems during britains 2007-2012 financial crash many years later.

• She took free milk from school children, which, though not as serious as anything else listed here, directly affected every child in the UK and was very unpopular, leading her to get the nickname “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”, which is still used today.

• Oh… and she supported Apartheid and called Mandela a terrorist.

A feminist? Pah! She actually said, “The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.” (and if for some reason you don’t trust that article, just google that quote). She also said that “the battle for women’s rights has largely been won. I owe nothing to women’s lib”, and whilst being PM for 11 years, she only ever appointed one woman, Baroness Young. As this article says, she basically “refused to accept that the majority of women do not have the privilege she had, in other words a rich partner, and lots of childcare provision.” In terms of feminism, she hated any woman who wasn’t financially well off, able-bodied, cishet, white, neurotypical (as you can see in this article), and basically, like her. Great feminism.

She also played a huge part in making Rupert Murdoch the hugely powerful man he is today (and consequently, making the British press so unreliable, ridiculous, and downright dangerous), and it seems she also used this connection to help giver herself more “sunshine headlines” (read: favourable).

I could go on but I feel like I’ve been at this for a while. OP has done a great job in summarising most of the main reasons she’s so hated. I’ve added a number of other important ones here too, but to be honest, just look at any reasonably credible article about her. If it seems positive, then google the topics at hand, and I guarantee there will be the flip side, often explained with a more socially conscious approach.

“The witch is dead but the spell remains.”

However, the real reason people hate Thatcher is because she tried to break working class class consciousness in the UK, and arguably destroyed the UK’s social democratic ‘Post war consensus’.

The destruction of nationalised industries, selling off of council housing, breaking the power of the unions - all of this aimed to break the idea of a working class which were ‘looked after’ by the state.

And the thing is she succeeded-she dragged Britain drastically to the right, and everything that has come after, from the Iraq war to austerity to asylum seekers dying in the back of lorries to Boris fucking Johnson can be blamed on that.

I think this is the right petition though but I can’t find the links for anything else:

If my information is wrong PLEASE CORRECT!

Here’s the amnesty.org link

Here’s the second change.org link

Inkitt

Dreame

They have the same cheap tactic, write you out of nowhere from a random, unaffiliated account and “praise” something you have posted online, then ask you to join their super-special site. If you ignore them the first time, a “different” representative will message you word-for-word the same message again a few months later.

I was contacted about 2 years ago (via Wattpad) about a story I’d posted several years before then, at age 12. I would like to point out that at the time of the original contract, and my dealings with them since, I was under 18. The company was aware of this.

They wanted me first to sign a contract with them for a parent company called ‘Ficfun’, but soon moved me over to Dreame. The terms of the contract (condensed) were:

1. I would take the original story down from Wattpad, save for the first 5 chapters and a link to my account on Dreame

2. I would post a new chapter every day (this gathers readers better than just posting ti in one go, apparently)

3. I would get an advance of $100 US, and then, if my story did well, it would be moved onto a pay-to-read system, and I would get 30% of the profits earnt from that.

On all those accounts, Dreame delivered. I was paid the advance, and have since made approximately $200, though I didn’t keep track (I have no way of knowing whether Dreame actually made more money off my story than they said).

At that point, my opinion was that Dreame wasn’t good for anyone looking to become a full-time writer, but if you were young or just wanted a little extra income with minimal work, then it was fine.

Later, I wrote a second story solely for Dreame, with the intention to get a second contract. I also tried to ‘withdraw’ the $180 I made between June and May last year but had never received. That’s when my opinion changed.

First of all, after nearly 2 months, the $180 still hasn’t been sent.

Second, I was sent an updated contract with far more legal jargon, and it broke down like this:

1. Dreame would have all rights to my work, which included rights to get it made into a movie or have another writer finish it/write a sequel if they didn’t like my ending. (Disturbing, no? They didn’t even have to tell me if they did this, and I would get much more limited royalties)

2. Dreame would publicize my book and keep a record of all money they spent. If, after a 36 month period, they didn’t turn enough of a profit (it wasn’t specified how much ‘enough’ was) I would be required to pay back all the money they’d spent.

3. I was not allowed to ask how much money they spent on publicizing.

This is disturbing for a number of reasons. It means that, in theory, they could have spent $0 on advertising, made $100-$1000 off my story (given how much my other story would have likely made them) and then turned round and made me pay them an extra $100-$1000. Legally, I would have had to. 

This is beyond predatory. It gives Dreame a way to lie about expenses and gives the author no way to check what they’re doing. Bad enough as that is, it’s made worse by the fact that they knew I was a child, and were likely trying to take advantage of that. If I hadn’t read through the contract, seen something fishy (there was A LOT of confusing legal jargon), and given it to a relative who knows law to look at, then I would have just trusted it to be the same as my first contract and signed away my rights and profits.

Personally, I reckon that was the plan all along—rope me in with a decent contract, then screw me over if I ever tried to publish with them again. My advice is to steer clear, unless they give you a contract like my first one and you’re happy with it (though, even then, maybe don’t).

In the beginning of 2016, I was offered a paid job out of the blue at Inkitt (I was an active community member at the time, but had never applied). Eager after a few interviews, I took a position as community manager. Dream job, right? The internals of Inkitt seemed to match the external goals, but as the curtain lifted, I read through enough Slack logs to learn a few things:

1. Inkitt’s leadership viewed authors poorly, and often pitted authors against each other behind the scenes, either by causing drama from within the site or by stirring the pot in contests.

2. Any critique levied at the company, publicly or privately, was silenced and dismissed. Authors that were critical of the young company were made targets by the staff, behind the scenes.

3. Most of the early contests (I’m not privy to anything after 2017) were a framework for a winner that had been eyed and chosen months before any contest was ever run. This was made public on accident more than once.

4.  Most of their content, contrary to the direction of their community, was leaning after a “bestseller” of some kind, and they did not want to stay an author’s community alone: they wanted to become a publisher.

5. They directly target younger authors and new indie authors, and like Dreame, and this is on purpose. I’ll keep my time with Inkitt as an employee as brief as possible, because it was an incredibly damaging experience.  Posts about other employee experiences can be seen here, as reviews are frequently scrubbed from the internet (you wonder why). The short and clean bit was that the company leaders often abused my time and earnest desire to help authors, all while I was love-bombed about my writing, my role as a community leader, and my value to the site. I believed this- despite the commonplace verbal abuse at 5am, despite the frequent and inappropriate outbursts from team leaders, particularly the CEO. I believed this so much that I traveled to Berlin to work there for several weeks in the summer of 2016, to meet the team in person. I’m not the first or the last person they invited to do this. My experience mirrors those reviews: I was tempted by free travel and found myself working in their cramped office from 10am to 10pm in an area of Germany where I had little access to English. They dressed up my hotel stay as an “AirBnB” and then placed me in a shady student dorm that the CEO illegally rented out. From the first week on, I was told to not speak to people at this dorm. I was told to lessen my contact with my friends and family back home- outside of where I could be monitored, at work. I was told to cut back on FB posts about my location by the CEO, who in turn wanted me to use my personal social media to begin spamming authors in company fashion. I realized then that I had allowed this company to buy my return tickets to the US, as the CEO suggested “adjusting” their dates further into the summer, if I was not comfortable working under these exact conditions. Then came the suggestion that I should move to Berlin this summer, or transfer my college credits to their local university to better work in Germany. These things obviously set off warnings in my head. I did not feel safe at all, and began to distance myself from the company. There were a lot of ugly fights before I left Berlin. I was refused a substantial paycheck and repeatedly threatened, and then directly demoted for refusing to stay in Germany and permanently work for Inkitt. I quit my job two weeks after I arrived home again, scared of retaliation. But Inkitt didn’t stop there. I continued to receive emails and recognition from their social media long after I’d requested it stop. They began to “love-bomb” me all over again, eager to win back my approval and community leadership. My attempts at engaging with other authors about my negative experience were met with scornful messages from the CEO, trying to silence criticism, who still stalked me on social media for some time after. I removed my stories and reviews from the website after a great deal of conflict with the team, though I know many authors who cannot get their content (reviews/stories/etc) removed despite increased requests. As recently as last year, I received alerts from friends, who hear from the CEO, trying to clarify anything I ‘lied’ about. The situation was and remains horrific. This was four years ago, but I cannot sum up enough how much these stories have been repeated and echoed well into recent years. Nightmarish stories from authors and workers alike on just how toxic Inkitt is. I do not highlight these events to sound alarmist, but to warn young authors of the exact trap I fell into and how truly damaging it was. I lost 20 pounds during this experience, I was diagnosed with C-PTSD. This experience took four years to recover from, and I won’t even get into the damage done to my writing. Do not walk away from Inkitt’s offers, run away from them. Much of what they offer sounds too good to be true, and that’s because it is.

Other author experiences (including those published with Inkitt) can be read here, here, here, and here for one of their first published authors.

Hey yall! First I’d like to say thank you SO SO much for preordering the @supercorpzine ! I’m continuously blown away by the support yall continue to show this charity effort. I know this year has been wacky and downright gross, so I thought I’d try to help spread some good vibes and give away

10 PDFs of the Zine

Here are the rules!

Reblog this post ONCE. (If you reblog it more than once I will only count ONE reblog, sorry last year got a little bonkers!)

If you are only boosting this post, please try to say so in the tags so I don’t accidentally count your reblog as an entry!

You have until May 24 2020 MIDNIGHT EASTERN TIME. 

That’s it.

I’ll tally up each reblog (excluding people simply boosting/my own reblogs) and will randomly choose ten (10) winners. If you are chosen, I’ll just need a viable email to send you the link to download the zine later this summer. If winners don’t respond within a week (7 full days, or MAY 31), I will choose someone new.

I will contact winners on MAY 25. So make sure you keep your ask box open.

Good luck!

Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England