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� and we all know what lives under bridges. Read any good fairy story worth its salt and it will tell you. Of course it helps if there are billy goats in the story. Little creatures. Living there, under the bridge.

Anyway, enough with the acrostic.

I am not in the habit, really, of feeding trolls. I get all sorts of mail and comments, and usually I really treasure them. The majority of it is wonderful, inspirational, and flattering. Every now and then an ill-wisher stops by to tell me how much they dislike my work, and I just file them away. No big deal. There isn’t a writer in print who hasn’t had their detractors. There isn’t a book, film, piece of music, political ideology, or painting that unites everyone. Someone always finds fault. Or doesn’t get it. Or doesn’tÌý·É²¹²Ô³ÙÌýto get it.

Fine.

No problem.

It takes allsorts to make a Bertie Bassett out ofÌýconfectionery.

But I was going through the mail to approve or reject comments (oh yeah, I’m that kind of a control freak; have to keep these internets clean and YA-friendly) and there was a particular troll comment that I have thought long and hard about, and decided it needed replying to. I didn’t approve it � too much poorly executed swearing, if you must know � but I wanted to.

I’ll tell you why.

The troll was enraged by my tribute to Ray Bradbury. It drove this particular troll crazy. So crazy that it was reduced to pouring spit and vinegar (well, diluted non-brewed condiment, it WAS pretty weak) about the terrible crime against Bradbury that I had committed in my heart-felt response to the great man’s passing. Rather than mention what a truly wonderful writer Bradbury was, or how they too felt his passing as a little bit of the lightness and beauty draining out of the world, they decided to take me to task for a ‘wrong� that I had done them.

Here is the crime that I committed, in the words of the troll:

“Ray Bradbury never wrote a story entitled The Veld. You obviously don’t know his work at all!�

It puzzled me. That sentence. It still does. I can’t show you any more of the message â€� it was rather sweary, and pretty poorly put together, to be honest, but the gist of it (between the obscenities) was because I mentioned ‘The Veldâ€� in the piece, my writing life is a ‘shamâ€�, is ‘hollowâ€�, ‘inarticulateâ€� Ìýand ‘semi-literateâ€� (coming from someone who later went on to use four (4) exclamation marks to make a point) because I didn’t use the variant spelling for the story (with a ‘tâ€� at the end of ‘Veldâ€�) Ìýthat troll obviously prefers.

But here’s the thing: if you read the piece you will see that I was talking about the first time I read that story, when I was 12 or 13. Here’s that copy of the book (I still have it!):

and here’s the page where the story starts:

It seems to be the title that the troll denied existed; indeed, insulted my entire life’s work on the basis of it. Because the title was anglicised to appear in a UK paperback version of ‘The Illustrated Manâ€�. And seeing as I was talking about my teen self reading the story, it seemed odd to reject the title it was printed under, in favour of one I didn’t discover for a few yearsÌý²¹´Ú³Ù±ð°ùÌýreading it.

That’s one of the things about the internet, I suppose.

People don’t have to be right, or think in perfect syllogisms, or even be able to type that well (to be fair, expletives and overuse of exclamation marks aside, the Veldgate message was mostly literate. Okay, it was poorly set out, poorly thought out and woefully written, but it was at least grammatically correct), to put their thoughts forward.

And many are the folk who think ‘criticism� means ‘attack�, when any ‘A� Level student understands that ‘criticism� is, actually, a way of evaluating both the faults AND strengths of something. It requires balance, understanding, and an ability to look beyond the surface of a work, issue or idea and put it into some kind of useful context. One can conclude that a particular work is not to the critic’s liking, but only after some reasoning and evaluation.

One thing, though.

It has to be right.

My troll was not.

In fact, the troll entirely ignored the fact that I was at least a littleÌýau faitÌýwith Bradbury as demonstrated in the rest of the piece. Better to home in on one trifling, petty detail and use it as a springboard for idiotic (and, I’m afraid, utterly incorrect) point scoring.

And, talking about points, it may be time for me to get around to mine: If you are going to post a comment about how someone has made a mistake, it might be a good idea to check if you’re actuallyÌýrightÌýbefore pressing ‘postâ€�.

In fact, why not take it a stage further? If your post offers nothing but insults and poorly thought out bile, how about NOT pressing ‘post� at all?

Constructive criticism is okay, it helps us all learn, grow, and look at a work in new and interesting ways. But it does need to be factually accurate. If your central premise is wrong, so are any conclusions that you draw from it.

Knee-jerk trolling is never going to change the way we feel about anything, except when we evaluate the content of the trolling message, and decide that 1) they are wrong; 2)they are bitter aboutÌýsomethingÌýand Ìýit’s easier to insult others, to take it out on the online community, than try to fix it themselves; and 3) the internet would be a better place without their trolling input.

So why not follow a simple guideline on the internet?

Play nice.

And if you can’t play nice then use why not use reason and analysis, not abuse?

It will serve to make the internet a better place.

And it will save me having to explain that trolls is trolls, but BradburyÌýdefinitelyÌýwrote ‘The Veldâ€�. He might have put a ‘tâ€� at the end, but Panther books didn’t, and the me who read that story didn’t either. And it was him we were talking about, not the idealised world of a hateful, spiteful troll.

You don’t see many trolls under bridges these days.

I wonder where they all moved to.

Oh, wait. They moved onto the internet.

NOTE:

This post was composed and then I thought better of it, and it has sat in my ‘drafts� file for ages. So what is it doing here, now? The same troll revisited, with another swiftly deleted AOL email address, attacking me because I ‘misspelled� the Bradbury title. This time they were more lucid, and included no swearing. They told me:

Ray Bradbury never wrote a story called The Veld. Why not check it out and see. Then you’ll have to change it, thereby showing: a) your ignorance, and: b) your inability to carry out basic research. It also reveals your rather limited knowledge of Ray Bradbury and his work.ÌýÌý

The same person being wrong twice � without checking their own facts � is celebrated today with the original reply coming out of ‘drafts� and into ‘publish�.