How To Ruin Your Writing Career (Step 2)

The first step toward destroying a perfectly good or even somewhat mediocre writing career was discussed in my post about the teenaged author who met her tremendous deadline and earned a whopping and undeserved advance by plagiarizing the work of another author and then excusing her crime by saying she had a photographic memory and ‘unintentionally’ copied whole paragraphs time and time again from someone else’s book. Kudos to her for providing a perfect example of how to royally screw up.

Here’s another one:

Step Two of How to Ruin Your Writing Career comes from a lesser known author [she has one book published so far] who wrote a scathing letter that was published in this month’s Romance Writer’s Report [the newsletter of Romance Writers of America.]

I won’t name the author here, because I feel mentioning her name will only give her publicity she doesn’t deserve, but for anyone who is interested, her name and the text of her ignorant and ill-informed missive can be found in the following places:

This post at Smart B*tches.

This post by HelenKay Dimon

This post by Kate Rothwell


Kudos to this author for providing yet another sterling example of a writer behaving badly. Not only has she spewed bigotry and hatred and impugned the very morality of other writers, she’s set up her own code of acceptance into RWA, listing the target demographic of the ENTIRE romance industry as: college-educated, married, middle-class, monogamous and moral.

Ain’t she just a peach? I have half a mind to post on her blog and ask her to define more specifically her definition of moral, since I’m college-educated, married, middle-class and monogamous – I just want to make sure I comply entirely with all her high and mighty standards before I go out and buy another romance novel, or write one for that matter, or pay my yearly dues to RWA.

Like tons of other authors today, I’m penning a response to RWR, not only taking this author to task for her vitriolic assault on the rest of us, but taking RWR to task for printing such garbage and fueling a fire within the organization that we thought had died down to a small ember.

So, once more congratulations to the author in question for letting her friends, fans and fellow authors know how narrow-minded, mean-spirited and completely ignorant she is. I’m sure this will help her sales tremendously. Good job!