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.

If there’s one thing I hope you’ve learned from this channel, it’s that a writer’s main job is to write a compelling story. If there’s another thing I hope you learned from this channel, it’s that writing really isn’t all that important and you shouldn’t get so caught up in your writing that you neglect being a good father or husband or boss or citizen or motorist.

And a truly compelling story isn’t just one story, but several stories that overlap, intertwine and culminate in a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts.

A subplot is a secondary storyline that runs beside the main one. A good subplot should do some of the following things:

• deepen characterization

• add nuance
• activate your themes
• enhance your worldbuilding
• get other writers in your writing group to stop laughing at your stories behind your back
• remove the need for you to follow literary agents to their house
• get you good reviews on Amazon more reliably than the Chinese company you paid to post fake positive reviews.

Readers get bored with just focusing on one narrative. Even this video series exemplifies this. Fans of the channel will know that while the main thrust of my videos is to teach you good writing techniques, I try to keep things interesting by adding several subplots: for example, my office being burned down by my business partner’s reckless disregard for fire codes, and my ongoing feud with Tabitha Cartwright who acquired the rights to most of my backlog after she got me out of some child support payments. And fans will know my biggest subplot is about my desire to get back with my second and favorite wife. In today’s video, I will illustrate why subplots are essential by adding a story about how I got her back.

Now Let’s look at some key tips to writing good subplots.

Step 1: Know the type of subplot

This is going to be a longer than usual step, so if you want to go get a snack or double check that you locked your gun safe, now might be a good time. The first kind of subplot is the mirror subplot. Here, a secondary character faces a similar conflict to the main character in the main story, but often with a different outcome.  In my story, Jane Donovan, both the main protagonist and her husband have to grapple with sexual feelings toward others. Jane, however, is able to control her urges and realizes her family needs her. Her husband, on the other hand, rawdogs fourteen different yoga classmates, sex workers and school teachers and ends up dying of syphilis.

The foil subplot depicts a character who is actively working against the main protagonist. It doesn’t always have to be the main anttagonist. In the Lord of the Rings, both Boromir’s and Gollum’s subplots serve as foils. The foil can even be accidental. In Son of Sam I Am, a side character is also chasing after the serial killer, but he disrupts the police’s search by visiting the crime scenes, getting sexually excited and contaminating the scene with his DNA.

Then there are flashback subplots. These stories often give us insight into the motivations or the backgrounds of the main character or the villain. The flashback in A Man Called Ove leads to a heartbreaking realization about the main character’s wife. The flashback in my time-travel thriller There’s No Place Reich Home reveals that character doesn’t want to kill Hitler to save the Jews or prevent World War II, but rather because his name is Douglas Hitler and he’s tired of being ridiculed and attacked.

And then we have the romantic subplot, which was invented to sell more movie tickets to women and men who don’t get erections from large explosions. The romantic subplot should ideally complicate things for your main character, just as my obsession with my second wife delayed several of my book releases and got me hit with a restraining order so for many years I had to rent a car if I wanted to drive by her house.

Step 2: Write character driven subplots

In all of those examples, the subplots are driven by character motivation. Subplots are all about introducing new goals and obstacles, either for the main character, their allies or their opponents. A subplot should also flesh your thinner characters out. When I first wrote, the coming-of-age drama House on Pain Avenue, Daniel’s brother Derrick wasn’t much of a character. I mostly had him laugh at Daniel’s jokes so the reader would understand that he was funny in case my jokes didn’t always land. But he lacked motivation, so I gave him a side plot about him and his fraternity poisoning the dean.

When I talk about my second wife on here, you mostly here about her from my perspective: how great I thought her tits were, how she opened me up sexually, how she was the first woman who ever made me laugh. But if I were treating this video like a novel, I’d mention how she ran away from home at seventeen, not from abuse but to start her own gambling business.

Step 3: Make sure your subplot has its own arc

A subplot is not just filler like you might put into your second wife’s new boyfriends gas tank. It needs to be resolved in some way, possibly in connection with the main story, or even as a side note in your epilogue. If you can take the reader by surprise, all the better.

So to finish my subplot, I’ll bet most of you assumed I became a better person, apologized for my indiscretions and got my wife to leave her boyfriend and take me back. But that would break the other essential rule of fiction writing: don’t be a cliche.

Luckily, that’s not what happened. Instead, I used today’s sponsor, Eros Escorts, to hire someone with a vague resemblance to my wife. After some hair treatments and other cosmetic procedures, the resemblance was uncanny. Over a period of a few months, I trained her to act the part and talk the part, giving her speech lessons and a script from which to recite her lines. And after this process, we both decided we were meant for each other. It’s been a terrible drain on my writing and this channel, but, well, this is one subplot that I’m pretty sure is going to have a happy ending.