Troll La La La La Laaaaaa

When I first joined the old interweb I was pure as the driven snow. Well…. Maybe not so much, but my eyeballs hadn’t encountered as many unexpected, flaming burns as they have these days. My first experiences with a couple of the various breeds of troll were quite traumatic. Mainly for the trolls I think. These days I just ignore the idiots.

I had a Facebook troll who was incredibly abusive about one of my short stories on my timeline. I don’t mind critique, but even the white space around the words enraged this fella. I made the mistake of politely responding to him. I was a newbie scribbler back then, and his nasty remarks pretty much broke my heart. As the conversation continued, it became clear that the guy hadn’t read much more than Archie comics, and he was just having a blast being a mean prat. Unfortunately, instead of just deleting and banning him, I lost my temper and pretty much squished him like a bug. I immediately felt bad though. Troll or not, us writers have a lot more ammunition in our verbal toolboxes than they do, if we slip into the dark zone.

My second troll was a pervert who had the ability to make the Marquis de Sade blush. Again I made the wrong move by sending a polite message asking him to please stop sending porn to my message box. Boy, did he let rip! After I got a couple of massively foul, and threatening rants I blocked and reported him. Easy peasy. Should have done that in the first place.

Trolls don’t get to take up any of my time at all these days though. Other than laughing at their desperate tries for the wrong kind of attention, I’m not interested in responding to ignorant psychos in any way, and wasting too many seconds of my time. The only way to deal with these people is to ignore them or block, ban, or report them depending on the level of their abuse.

Being an indie author means connecting with loads of new people on line every day on all our various sites. Meeting up with these ooglies now and then goes with the territory, and we should make sure that they are never allowed to insert themselves in our nostrils for long, or give them the satisfaction of knowing that they succeeded in inflicting pain, because that’s what these bottom feeders need for sustenance. I suggest the following course of action if one pops up on one of your sites.

1. Raise brow, and curl lip derisively.
2. Allow yourself one second to be appalled that such a creature actually exists.
3. Snort.
4. Ignore – block – report.
5. Forget that tool
6. Sip some champers, and write on.

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