My child warned me years ago that chatrooms and message boards were toxic spaces.

But my physical disability does not allow me to get out much. Two years ago I was reading an article on Swords and Sorcery written by Poul Anderson that is up at sfwa.org and I found a few things that I felt were outdated and no longer true, especially concerning the average strength differential of males and females of our species. I emailed them about it and ended up talking through first a series of emails and then on ICQ with their webmaster who is a very nice New Zealander. He could tell I was lonely and suggested that I stop by a chatroom at sff.net.

I did so. It swiftly became clear that I didn't fit in and one woman in particular made it her business to make me miserable. I ended up moving my account from sff.net to go-daddy for my domain hosting. She was stalking me while accusing me of stalking her.

I got that settled out, but then after persevering for a few more months and exploring message boards (they seemed such fun and I had a new collection slated to come out that I wanted to proclaim to the world), I encountered Nickolaus Pacione.

He approached me at gothic.net, saying that since we were both writers we should get together. He asked for an opinion of his work and I suggested he needed to work on his sentence structure as politely as I could and referred him to Strunk and White.

Now, since I have dial up, my computer is very slow to pull up gothic.net so I did not go daily and had not yet discovered that I could ask to be alerted to postings on certain threads. Then a friend came into my invitation only chatroom and said there was a flamewar in progress at gothic and that I needed to take a look.

He had started bashing on me. He was also screaming about gays and so forth. I've been out of the closet for years. I'm a bi-sexual, transgenderist. He had never read anything by me since I had nothing online at the time (I will shortly have the story from Amazons! up at my website, Wolves of Nakesht), yet he felt free to condemn me. We got into a flamewar, my first really serious one.

My son was right, the internet is a very toxic, ugly place because there are people like Pacione on it.

Gothic banned him. For a time I felt safe there. My normal life resumed. I only visited a few boards because I'm only going places I feel safe at, and mostly I spent my time writing or editing since I also work part time for an ebook company in addition to my disability check. I posted mainly at hwa's boards, lost my temper a few times, but i did not make any enemies for it.

Then in April, still not knowing the nature of the beast, I went to gothic and discovered that the Pacione thread had become active again. I posted that I was surprised about it. Suddenly I'm deluged with ugly email from Pacione. I fired back a couple of hard-ass replies, put him on block sender and went on about my business. But I limited my message board reading and posting to hwa.

On June 17th, Pacione joined hwa and started in on me again.

To Be Continued.