It's very convenient for Ian because he can make up basically anything, and when called out on it, he's "protecting his identity." He does this all the time, and as I think it's been pointed out the stories don't add up. Sure, a good-looking former NYT bestselling author former chef and popular scifi convention guest with 6 different independent fanbases who now writes porn for a living and makes six figures a year had his kid kidnapped by a teacher and the dumb liberal matrirarchal school board didn't do anything about it! I guarantee you no one fitting that description lives in North Carolina or anywhere else.
And, as par for the course with false allegations, there's no mention of going to the police.
A great opportunity to repost my favorite quote from him:
Ian Ironwood said:
Dude, I get paid over six figures a year by one of the largest adult products and entertainment corporations in the world for my knowledge and understanding of human sexuality and the science of relationships. My observations are the basis for literally tens of millions of dollars of business. And no, you don't get that sort of gig walking in off the street without a couple of very specific and useful degrees and a whole lotta publishing creds.
Now, why didn't I debate you in long drawn-out sciency talk to convince you that I have the authority to talk about what I'm talking about? Because this isn't a scientific forum and you are not my peer. I don't have to prove jack shit to you about my credentials to you. My purpose here is to instruct and inform in a manner which is useful to the common man. If you really knew who I was and what kind of credentials I had (which my NDA doesn't permit me to disclose) you would shit your pants.
So take your arrogant little attitude back to school and reconsider your position. There's a reason I got out of academia and into private enterprise. You're reminding me why.
Lol he has a NDA from a porn company... that keeps him from talking about his degrees and other work history.
Thinking that porn companies care at all about the science of attraction or relationships is beyond hilarious. It took like 30 years for porn directors to stop casting their fat friends, stop telling the girls to shriek like banshees, and stop having 10 minute long segments composed of half of a guys hairy ass crack while he repetitively slams a woman her in the butt. I almost forgot about 20 years of 100% jenna jameson look alikes.
Well lucky for us, we now know! I am pleased to announce that I have conclusive proof that Ian Ironwood's real identity is author Terry Mancour. Heard of him? No? Me neither.
Throughout this thread, we have asked a lot of questions. Is Ian really married? Is he really an author? For the most part, the answer is "yes," but all will become clear if you stick with me. This is going to be long.
Ian Ironwood/Terry Mancour
Ian is indeed an author, more or less. He is currently working on a series called Spellmonger, which is a digitally self-published fantasy series.
The infamous New York Times Bestseller is "Spartacus", a Star Trek TNG novel, written under the name T.L. Mancour:
Now, I will say that I can't find any evidence this book was actually on the NYT bestsellers list. This information is not on the Amazon page, Memory Alpha or Beta or anywhere else except Terry's various author profiles. But with books like this that have an eager pre-existing market, it's not implausible. IMO, a more interesting question is how did he get this gig? And why did he discontinue writing books like this? This is the only Star Trek novel he is responsible for.
Looking at the rest of his library, it's easy to see how this was the highlight of his career. Here is his main author page. Beyond Spartacus, most of the books are self-published, digital copies of his Spellmonger series.
The books actually seem to have something of a small fanbase, there's some action on their facebook page and they all have 100+ customer reviews on Amazon. I probably won't bother reading the books themselves, but will skim reviews for lulz. I have only looked at a handful so far and it's already clear he is an author unafraid to reply angrily to negative reviews.
Here's one Terry replied to:
Gee Terry, did you ever think that maybe if you have an entire forum full of people calling you sexist under one pseudonym, and under an entirely different unrelated pseudonym that writes different work, people are also calling you sexist, that you might, I don't know, be sexist?
Aside from being a fan of Star Trek, fantasy, and raging sexism, Terry is also an avid Firefly fan, and writes Firefly fanfiction under the moniker ScrewTheAlliance. You will all be pleased to learn that he's equally salty and trollable in the other areas of the internet that he frequents. Here he is sperging about Wicca on a Firefly forum:
A lot of people have asked throughout this thread about his wife and I can confirm that he does, in fact, have a wife. She's quite overweight, but overall not that bad looking.
I don't see much reason to delve into her history too much, but I will say that she is indeed very successful, far more successful than our pal Ian. She is owner/president of a clinical research consulting company, holds/has held a couple of a prestigious positions in the field of clinical research and is sometimes asked to speak as an expert for articles and the like. I see no reason to link her to this so I will not post her name and I kindly ask that others refrain from posting it as well.
As for kids, Ian does indeed have 3 young kids. His daughter is in middle school. Again I see no reason to post them and honestly didn't look into them beyond confirming that they all exist. I might investigate the "kidnapping" incident though.
Now, the clinical research bit is important because Ian has a medical condition which puts him in the hospital occasionally and is the likely explanation for his absence as of late. His wife is using her expertise to try and help him. What an amazing woman, right?
Here is his author's blog. For the most part, it's pretty boring.
terrymancour.blogspot.com
This is part 1, there is way too much to go through and much more I have not mentioned. I will say that I have painstakingly archived everything of note, in case he tries to delete fucking everything.
So I will admit to being a Firefly fan myself, and figured I try reading his stuff just to see how terrible it was. I especially cannot picture him writing Zoe and Wash with any sort of skill, given his other stuff. However, when I opened his first fic, I noticed it looked like this:
Sophia was just another pissant backwater world on the Rim whose only distinction from the four other pissant terraformed moons around it was that it was about two light years closer to anyplace even remotely civilized than its neighbors. By default, that made it a transit crossroads and distribution point for goods coming in from the Core and a few meager commodities that the colonies might export. But it was still a pissant world, the capital of which was known as Wisdom City (Population 7,521) which boasted three bars, all of which were clustered around the sorry excuse for a “starport”. It was saying something that Serenity was the third largest ship to come through in a year. But the beer was good, plentiful, and affordable, and it beat the “reactor squeezins” Kaylee made for the crew. Kaylee thought so herself, and was already on her third beer. Jayne and Shepherd Book were also at the table, Jayne foregoing good beer for decent whiskey, and Book still nursing his first brew. “How long we got to wait here? I was considering finding me a whore.” Kaylee didn’t even bother to blush around Jayne’s frankly crude manner anymore. Book likewise didn’t even blink. He knew Jayne was a walking phallus. “They said it would be a while,” Book commented. “Well, how long is that?” Jayne asked, mystified. “A while.” “That ain’t much help.” “Noticed that?” “How long is a while? Long enough for me to dip my wick?” “Long enough for you to catch somethin’ nasty.” “Not enough life on this rock for there to be anything nasty around. ‘Sides, any bug what ever bit me, died.” “Well, then, by all means. Considering how long I hear you take to . . . well, we probably got that long. Go ahead.” Book looked more than half amused.
Notice what's missing? Paragraph breaks. It's a giant wall of text, making it completely unreadable. I know uploading sites sometimes fuck up paragraphs and stuff, but my eyes are bleeding just trying to process it. From what little I can determine, it seems to so far center around whether or not one of the characters is going to go to a prostitute; it's not out of character for the show or Jayne himself, but it's not a good sign considering who we're talking about. I also spotted the phrase "cowbweb crotch" at some point, so he couldn't even be bothered to spellcheck the damn thing.
Yeah, this seems to be a common theme. In his Alpha Moves book, one of the chapter titles is mispelled. Also one reader's comment somewhere mentioned that part of someones speech was missing in one of the Spellmonger books.
So, I did a quick Google search on Spellmonger. Unsurprisingly, self-published generic medieval fantasy tripe doesn't even get its own Wikipedia page.
There was the TV Tropes page, which you can painfully, painfully tell was written by him, as melty said. Skimming over the summary there, it's some tale about some former mage warrior dude who gets brought out of retirement when some generic evil force comes along and tries to take over the world or something. Name fantasy tropes. They're all there. Inept ruling factions, distrust of magic, some girl inexplicably in love with the protagonist, everything.
I'm writing this for the first book - but I have read them all. The author does a fairly good job of telling a good adolescent hero story - but he is not a writer. All of the books are replete with very distracting printing and spelling errors. It is clear that there has been no attempt at even cursory editing. The following errors occur consistently: bare/bear, passed/past, road/rode, reed/read, ever/every, to/too, "could care less" vs could not care less, past conditional after if, think vs. feel (feel refers to feeling/emotion) and so on and so on. There are sentences that end in the middle and make no sense. Clearly the author did not edit the books and did not use the services of an adequate editor. I edited hundreds of manuscripts over the past 40 years - books, articles, dissertations and theses) and I read many books where it is clear that the author ran spell check and nothing else, not even grammar check (which is readily available). It should always be kept in mind that, with fiction, a "movie" plays in the head of the reader. It is extremely distracting to have to interrupt the flow of the story in order to figure out what the author is trying to say.
In my review for the second part of this series, I mentioned the urgent need for an editor. This book is the worst so far. Incomplete sentences, incorrect spellings and incorrect usage of words. Strange, because there is an editor listed. What was she doing?
How's this for bad editing...at one point in this book, the following text appears "Min should have an internal dialog that 1. she's right and 2. he's being told something he should have known by someone he dislikes"
This is a note the author made to remind himself how to frame the conversation! It's included in the released book!
That's certainly some impressive detective work, @melty. I think you should try to find out more about the "kidnapping" incident, though--as I said earlier, that's a pretty grave accusation, and if Ironwood/Mancour is making it up, it certainly makes his claim to be a fighter of "false accusations" quite hypocritical.
Sorry for taking so long guys, I was busy this weekend and also I lose interest in projects really quickly. Okay here's a video of Ian in case you wondered what he sounds like.
Otherwise it's unremarkable, basically one of his friends owns (?) something called Geek Box which makes display cases for action figures and he went to New York Comic Con to help out with the booth. Some of you may remember in his Alpha Moves book he briefly mentioned some science fiction convention where he supposedly met adoring young female fans who wet their panties over him. Could this be the convention? I am still investigating; it is not out of the realm of possibility that he went to a different scifi convention as a guest because of his Star Trek book or even Spellmonger. Having gone to many conventions, they are full of random guests who did something barely notable like 20 years ago.
Awkwardly, I actually attended NYCC 2011 and it is very likely I saw him there. However this isn't a booth I would have spent much time at.
Holy shit, that "throwaway" account posting about the "super hot migtow" guy just screams undercover trolling by some MGTOW reject with too much time on his hands.
