Today’s article is the first in our Platinum Club Series, which will cover topics targeting the more successful subscribers of channel, established writers who are starting to see some solid book sales. We’ll cover topics from investing your book revenue in high-yield bonds to what to do with a dead hooker to what to do with an alive hooker.

Authors who’ve sold 1,000 copies of their book will gain immediate membership in our Platinum Club. But for those who know their big break is right around the corner and want to plan ahead, you can also gain membership by purchasing five D&E Publishing titles and submitting the receipts to my sister’s son Bradley, at this email.

totallyrealemailaddress@notafake.com

And we’ll kick off the series with one of the first markers of writing success: being followed by a dangerous, unstable stranger. Having a stalker can be a terrifying and flattering experience, and it can be tough to balance your fear of being gunned down in your doorway with your need to be constantly praised. We’ll keep our eyes open and move to an undisclosed location, on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, the first question you might have is, John, haven’t the internet, Covid, the obesity epidemic and rising gas prices moved stalking online now? Excellent question but you’re getting ahead of me. We’ll talk about online stalking in a bit, but for the sake of this video, we’ll assume you’re popular enough (or at least have a hot enough mouth) to get another human to overcome all of those obstacles (and the increasingly inclement weather produced by climate change) to follow you to your home.

Today’s video will be broken into four parts:

• Identifying if you’re being stalked
• Distancing yourself
• Collecting evidence
• Asking for help

What is stalking?

According to the judge at my second wife and my custody hearing, stalking is repeated and unwanted contact. But that can be vague. After all, if that were true, I’d never legally be able to hire anyone.

And when I first made it big, I often confused my postal carrier and the local census worker as a stalker. But unlike those guys, a stalker needs to be someone who follows you even after you’ve put up some resistance.

Types of stalkers

Most stalkers want the same thing the rest of us do: love. If you’re a man like me, with an incredible sex drive, it can be difficult to know you’re being stalked by a pretty woman.

Let me share a story: I knew this woman once, a large breasted college student named Daphne who also happened to be double-jointed. Daphne was a big fan and introduced herself to me after I gave a reading on campus. We ended up having sex that night, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, that’s when the stalking began.

She’d make me take her to restaurants and movies, and she’d complain if we didn’t talk for at least thirty minutes every day. She’d come over to my house after work and even suggested moving in with me and paying her share of the rent. I kept having sex with her obviously. But if I had realized how much danger I was putting myself in, I might have acted differently. My advice: Don’t let the people you are intimate with try to be a part of your life.

Though less common, there are other types of stalkers. Death obsessives who wanted to involve you in their murder-suicide, cannibals, who just want a taste of greatness, and child stalkers, who will claim you impregnated their mom 15 years ago before you switched towns.

Avoid Unintentional Signs or Messages

So, once you realize you’re being stalked, it’s important you don’t escalate the situation. When I came on Daphne’s face or did other things I can’t mention on this channel, I was symbolically suggesting that I didn’t mind being stalked.

The best thing to do is just stay completely silent, otherwise you might erroneously send mixed messages. A simple phrase like “Go away” might seem straightforward enough, but to a stalker only proficient in Choctaw, they might assume that you meant “Explore my body.”

Hide Your Personal Information

When I was a hungry young writer, I put my phone number and email address on the front cover of all my books. At the time, it seemed like the easiest way to get the attention of literary agents and publishers. I stopped doing that once I started selling my books at actual bookstores, but unfortunately, a few enterprising fans found the few copies of those early books that weren’t incinerated. And while I don’t think I would’ve minded receiving daily locks of Daphne’s hair in the mail, you might not know where that hair is coming from. But speaking of…

Collecting evidence

If a stalking case gets really out of hand, you might need to do a little stalking back at them. Keep any messages they send you. Record any phone calls. Follow them to their home. Turn it into a descriptive writing exercise, if you don’t want to waste precious writing time.

In Daphne’s case, I memorized the locations of all the moles on her body, the location of her parents’ summer house, and I even collected a sizeable amount of her urine. (Which is something I do for all my female companions, stalker or otherwise, just so I can get a third-party pregnancy test.)

Contact the authorities

If you have a dog you don’t particularly like, you could consider calling the police. While they’ll most likely ignore you, especially if you’re a woman, it will at least be nice to get all your frustrations off your chest. And it’s certainly cheaper than therapy.

Notify your friends, family and co-workers

This one comes with a caveat. If you are being cyberstalked, it’s very likely that you actually know the person who is doing it. It could be a family member who’s upset you didn’t include their ideas in your latest novel, or a coworker who doesn’t understand why you used a phony cancer GoFundMe to fund your marketing campaign.

If you are that rare type of writer with a loving family and supportive friends, you could enlist them to help you scare the stalker away. If you don’t have that, and YouTube analytics tells me it’s likely, you could also post about it on social media.

Of course, your followers could help you, but this could also lead to a multitude of copycat stalkers. If you are very lucky, it may even lead to some sort of battle royale situation, where, after days of unspeakable bloodshed, one final stalker reigns supreme, and sickened by the senseless violence, your champion stalker realizes the error of their ways and decides to walk the Earth to in search of meaning.