As a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (a famously contentious organization that once took six months of vicious internal debate and a nonbinding poll of the membership to decide how to abbreviate its own name†), I’m watching the current explosions over at Romance Writers of America with a connoisseur’s eye.
The thing that boggles me is that the so-called “ethics complaint” that their ethics committee (or maybe — it’s confusing — not the official ethics committee, but some sort of double-secret private ethics committee) brought against Courtney Milan boiled down to “Courtney Milan made mean comments in public about another member’s book.” To which all I can say is, if that were an ethics-complainable offense in SFWA, there wouldn’t be more that three or four of us who weren’t thrown out of the club for it.
Back in the pre-Web days, when the romance writers and…
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And now The Guardian has noticed: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/romantic-fiction-awards-cancelled-after-racism-row-prompts-mass-boycott
Heck of a thing when the mainstream media notices what we’re doing out in genre land. Usually they pay attention to the kingdom of mainstream, where books win prestigious prizes, garner glowing reviews, and sell 3,000 copies.