Thomas Wictor

Today I began the reconstruction of my ruined literary career. I’m not doing it in the hopes of achieving success but rather to tie up loose ends and not leave Mike and Albee and Lura Dold with the last word. Mike and Lura of Sandpiper Publicity defrauded me of $40,000 by exploiting the suicides of my parents in 2013. Not only that, they crapped up my Website and whatever social media presence I had.

Sandpiper Publicity ran my Facebook and Twitter accounts, which they took down sometime after I confronted Mike on January 7, 2014. Why would an honest publicist remove my Facebook and Twitter accounts?

We all know the answer. So today I set up my own Facebook account. I have no blooming idea what I’m doing, of course. It looks totally insane. I’ll gradually figure it out, but it’ll be completely screwed up for the foreseeable future.

Next is Twitter.

Mike Albee said he’d hook my RSS feed up to Facebook so that each time I posted here, the post would automatically appear there. Did that happen? I have no clue. The person who helped me set up my Facebook account didn’t know how to do that.

In the process of trying to figure out how to find the RSS link, I discovered even more fraudulence-incompetence on the part of Mike Albee and Sandpiper Publicity.

My news page has an RSS symbol, the orange square with stylized white radio waves going up and to the right.

When you click that, it’s supposed to take you to my RSS feed. Instead, it goes to the Yahoo search results for “Thomas Wictor.”

Mike did that. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. But now I have to hire someone to un-crap-up my Website. So much for the notion that Mike is a programming expert. He’s as much an expert as this guy.

In seven months Mike Albee got me three radio interviews. The people who are helping me expose Mike and Sandpiper Publicity have lined up three radio interviews in a week. Tomorrow I have two.

Mike, I should hook you guys up. They can teach you how to be a publicist.

The interviews I’m going to be doing are strictly about the Mike Albee and Lura Dold scam. Of course a side effect will be publicity for my work, but the main goal is to make Mike and Lura famous. The more interviews I do, the less timid members of the media will become. Since I’ve documented everything on my Website, anyone who wants to check to see that I’m telling the truth will be able to confirm it with about twenty minutes of reading.

Though I offered Mike the chance to refund me, I knew he wouldn’t. For one thing he’d have to admit that he’d defrauded me. For another he and Lura have already spent the money, I’m sure. I heard a radio talk-show host chortling that the rule of thumb is to spend more than 5 percent of what you earn. Most of the people I know live like that. They don’t save for a rainy day.

Mike and Lura? The rainy season is here. I told you I’d do this if you didn’t refund me, so you have no one to blame but yourselves.

A review of the man instead of the book

On the Ghosts and Ballyhoo front, I just read a review that needs a response. Normally I don’t read reviews, but this morning when I found out that my RSS feed button actually leads to Yahoo search results, I was confused to the point of incapacity. As a woman named Monique and I struggled through the quagmire of my Website, I saw a review by Rhetta Akamatsu.

She likes the book, but she doesn’t like me, which is fine. We don’t know each other, so her opinion of me is worthless. But some women don’t like the way I write about women. One reviewer said that the female protagonists in Chasing the Last Whale were “preternaturally beautiful,” and Akamatsu says the following about the real-life women in Ghosts.

He has a series of failed relationships with small, dark-haired female musicians who start out as goddesses and then turn inexplicably cruel and evil.

Well…no. I certainly never said that Carmen was a goddess, and I never said she was evil. Her cruelty had a specific context. It’s explained in very straightforward language on pages 212 and 213. Her actions are the opposite of inexplicable.

Noreen was cruel and evil. No doubt about that. But I didn’t refer to her as a goddess either. Akamatsu missed the entire point of the book, that all dysfunction exists for a reason. I described my own issues as much as I could without getting into the territory of pornographic self-exploitation. I trust readers to not require that I spell everything out. Another statement Akamatsu makes that’s factually incorrect is this one.

Never does he stop to examine what he may have done to contribute to these experiences.

Right. I never did a thing. Except go to therapy for a year. And read every book by Alice Miller.

This following misperception is due to Akamatsu not knowing about music journalism.

When Wictor’s articles get rejected by the magazine he writes for, Bass Player, it seems from what he tells us here that he never sends them off to some other magazine. He just assumes that he is doomed to fail and takes it to heart forever as another example of how the world hates him.

Actually, I didn’t think anybody hated me, much less the entire world. I’m not a narcissist. The editor who destroyed my career in music journalism didn’t hate me. He just wanted to destroy my career because he could. The letter he wrote me about Anne Kadrovich—the Ghost in the Miniskirt—that I reproduced on page 140 of Ghosts says as much. Some people really like exercising power over others. It makes them feel good about themselves.

Bass Player was the premier bass publication back in the day. Artists wanted desperately to be in it. If I interviewed a bassist for Bass Player, he or she expected the piece to appear in the magazine. I was a Contributing Editor; it would’ve been impossible for me to sell Bass Player rejects to other publications. The bassists would’ve objected, and Miller Freeman—the publisher of Bass Player—would never have let me write for competitors.

Not only that, the competitors would’ve turned down the articles. The way to get an interview was to pitch it to a magazine. You wouldn’t call them up and say, “Hey, I have this piece that Bass Player threw in the garbage. Want it?”

No, the only solution was for me to quit, but I didn’t because I was too angry. The funny thing about Akamatsu’s negative review is that she perceives me exactly the way I wanted her to. My intent was to illustrate how massively unhappy I was and how my rage ruined my life. Ghosts and Ballyhoo is a cautionary tale. Akamatsu reacted to my art project precisely the way I’d intended, except she personalized it.

I’m also guessing that she didn’t finish the book. Here’s where I lost her.

He looks at people or meets them for just a few moments and immediately decides he does not like them. He writes cuttingly of their appearance or the sound of their voice and he writes them off in exceedingly insulting ways and seems to think that is all right since he doesn’t actually give their names in the book.

She’s talking about the short story “Unburdening,” on pages 232-234. It’s pretty clear that Akamatsu is angry because I said harsh things about a sexy woman. She thinks I can’t handle an “empowered woman” who “owns her sexuality.”

Actually, as I said in Ghosts, I love butch women. Jennifer, Nakamura, Carmen, and Abby were all very feminine in appearance, but they were loud, wore only jeans, swaggered, wrestled with me, and punched me on the arm. Or in the face. Carmen and Nakamura were the most sexually liberated women I’ve known.

I didn’t like the female bassist I describe on pages 232-234 of Ghosts and Ballyhoo because she was a creep. Sexy women can be creeps. Really! In ten years of interviewing, she was the only person I ever disliked on sight. However, disliking her doesn’t mean I dislike all wymyn. And as I keep having to say—for some reason only to wymyn—I get to write about my life. I was there with that creepy bassist. How come I can’t write about how creepy she was?

Besides, you should hear what Scott Thunes told me about her. Akamatsu’s head would’ve detonated if I’d included that.