Candlelight Vigil for John Castle

So if JC has a mental illness does that mean it's no longer acceptable to call him a retard?

Joking aside, mental illness is a serious issue and he probably does need some help. He certainly comes across as 'off the reservation' at some points.

Retard doesn't imply mental illness just developmental disability.

If you call JC a retard you feed his paranoia. If you don't call him a retard you feed his delusion. Which is worse? Only his psychiatrist knows, and unfortunately for him he's not seeing a psychiatrist.

The best thing for him if he returns untreated would simply be for everyone to keep him on ignore.

He's claiming on Facebook once again that's it's "all a show" and that he's not "crazy". He also alleges that someone from here has used the donate button on his website to send him some money.

Nobody's responding.

CASTLE!!! STOP DICKING AROUND, AND WRITE!!!!!

For the love of all that's good and pure, NO!!! STOP ENCOURAGING HIM!!!

I've read some of his awful dreck. Just no.

And this is not a troll. This is the honest truth. Putting a bunch of words down on paper or typing letters on a computer screen does not make one a "writer".

John Castle is about as much a writer as I am an astrophysicist.

So now we reach Act V, where we start diagnosing the target of the primal horde with mental illness. Reading all this analysis from the junior freuds has been quite entertaining.

Honestly, though, the world's a big enough place, he can probably find some people to pay for his work. If he can do that, more power to him.

Truckers at rest stops?

Unless we're talking about his written work.

If he sticks to reviewing vaping equipment he might have a chance of net-positive cash flow from writing, but not if he insists on writing fiction. Sure, some people might pay for a Castle novel, but it takes time, effort, and expense to write the book in the first place. Castle simply doesn't have the creativity, facility with language, or ability to empathize with others needed to write interesting enough characters or conceive interesting enough stories to sell enough books for writing not to be a sinkhole for him.

If JC wants to write as a hobby, because he enjoys it, that's one thing, but there's no sense in encouraging him in his delusion that he is or can be a professional.

Apart from the inability to sell books or make money from it, you've just described Dan Brown or Jeffrey Archer.

Hope for Castle yet. You never know what kicks something off, and I do hope it happens for him, but I just hope he isn't banking on it.

If he expended as much energy in life as he does in being a prize prick on here, he'd probably have made something of himself by now.

I don't make that distinction. Anyone who puts the words on the page (as opposed to all those "Someday I'm gonna write this really great thing, yanno, only I gotta upgrade my computer and buy all this cool software first" types who talk about writing but never do a goddamn thing) is a writer.

It's the adjective you put before the noun "writer" that quantifies that noun.

!!!!

Nice to know that HIPPA is a suggestion to some people...

Still.... thank you for doing that. It was always an amazing surprise and did a lot to cheer me up during some miserable times. I realize you never said it was you until now because you didn't want attention for flowers you sent from the whole board, but I really loved and appreciated the gesture.

Have you read any of his work since the horrific short stories and homeless report he wrote back around 2003? Because there really has been improvement since then. Certainly enough that Storm has encouraged him to continue with his novel and given him advice about it.

You really should try to separate the person from the writing, if you do you might be surprised.

Honestly, I don't think Castle's imaginative or creative enough to pull off even mindless action fluff. You need to at least be able to tell a bad story to do that, and you need to be able to write something that other people will find exciting, at least if they don't think about it too much.

Frankly, far-and-away the most likely result of a JC fiction novel is a wish fulfillment exercise with him as the hero, and the pathetic awfulness of the version of John Castle that lives in his head that he'd be putting on paper isn't particularly salable, even to Dan Brown fans. I suppose Castle could do a paint-by-the-numbers novel where he doesn't even try to create characters of his own and hope for the best, but the market is flooded with those and if he's looking to turn a profit he'd be better off buying lottery tickets.

I tried that with Just in Time, but it just came off as infantile fantasy, the sort of thing a 14 year old might write. I admire his long-term dedication, but I think he has wasted so much time spamming up places like Wordforge, that he neglected to practice the craft. His writing comes off as rushed and incomplete, the sort of thing you'd expect from somebody who can't adequately keep focused.

It certainly wouldn't hurt if he spent more time on his craft.

Of course, with writing you can't really force it, either. Writer's block really can be an issue...but I don't know. It's like trolling has become such a habit it's hard for him to stop...like me biting my nails.

One wonders what Mrs. Anc thinks about this sending flowers across the country "from Wordforge."

I feel he should do the same. There is a reason his vaping reviews and writings are the only thing to make him money. Unfortunately he is own worst enemy there as he keeps putting himself into it. He needs to separate himself (or his persona if you wish) from his writings. And I don't just mean physically (creating a vaping blog instead of posting his stuff on his personal one) but also in the way he writes. He keeps trying to force his character into his non-fiction writing when instead he needs to do the opposite.

The number of non-vaping libertarians who are going to read his vaping stuff b/c they are libertarian and he puts that spin into his stuff are near enough to be zero as to be inconsequential. However the number of non-libertarian vapers who aren't going to read his stuff b/c he is libertarian are significant.

But as others have pointed out, Castle is too arrogant to listen to good advice. But what do I know, I only get paid to write non-fiction for a half decent living, and then also do it as a side gig (where I have been picked up by general local media [Seattle Times and Seattle Met] and national niche media [Streetsblog USA and The Atlantic Cities])... Heck I even offered to buy him the best resource on doing it, On Writing Well, and what does he do? After I buy his book and donate to his blog he tells me to fuck off? Fuck that.

Sorry, got no sympathy that he can't manage to sell his fiction and has failed to exploit the one thing he made a relative splash in (vaping). People have reached out time and time to the loser and time and time again he rejects the actual good advice they give.

Only thing she said to me is 'Hail to the King.'

I go away for a week....

There's always hope. I mean, some years back Diacanu was whining about not knowing how to contact a publisher despite Garamet all but mailing the manuscrpits for him. But lo and behold, he finally got off his ass, quit blaming the world for his problems and did something. He even worked at Walmart during one of his breaks from here.

If Dicky could take steps from the broken man child he was, there's hope for anyone. Including Castle.

He'll be back. Calling us suckers for getting tricked by his fake meltdown.

Yes, he is a tedious bore, utterly predictable and totally ineffective at setting up any sort of drama or surprise.

As I said, he's better off investing in megamillions tickets than in writing. He really should invest in a shrink, but he'd have to stop cursing Obamacare to be able to afford one.

With Castle gone who get's the dogpile now?

Volunteering?

John Castle will become the new Charles Bukowski.

IF he takes Diacanus advice. Go Castle! Write! (I was a big fan of Bukowski in my youth, and John Castle definititely has a Bukowskian vibe.)

Charles Bukowski was an incompetent drunk who petulantly refused to acknowledge the existence of the conditional sense and who was incapable of imagining himself in his own shoes, much less the shoes of another?