I'd almost call it professional, if it weren't for his earlier behavior.

The Minneapolis trip derailed me from posting in a more timely fashion about William Sanders of Helix, who made offensively racist comments in a rejection letter (thus sparking ickiness elsewhere), and subsequently responded rudely to yhlee when she asked for her story to be removed from the Helix archives -- but if you've missed the storm about this one, follow those links and you'll get the gist.

The purpose of this post is to spread the word that Sanders will be accepting requests for removal from the archives for a limited time only. I can actually understand that -- though it would be nice if he specified an actual time limit -- because it's annoying to have to field those kinds of things, and technically the Helix contract (I am told) grants him the right to keep it non-exclusively in the archives.

On the other hand, any tiny modicum of professionalism exhibited in that message (and it was small to begin with) was obliterated when he replaced yhlee's story with the message "Story deleted at author's pantiwadulous request."

So. Y'know. Helix apparently was invitation-only anyway, but it's officially a place I don't want to be invited to.


ETA: Nevermind. Scratch anything positive I said or even implied about his decision to confine deletion requests to a narrow window. He's apparently decided to charge forty bucks to any author asking for their story to be pulled down on account of his recent behavior.

a funny thought

So I'm reading Neil Gaiman's journal, and he mentions that he's friends with Jane Yolen, and I think oh my god, he's friends with JANE YOLEN. Which is more or less the reaction I get any time I see/hear somebody mentioning their friendship with someone I consider to be a Big Name. (It still takes a while to sink in that Big Names are ordinary people, too.)

Sometimes we dream of striking up a friendship -- a real, honest-to-god, going to their place for dinner kind of friendship -- with the luminaries of our fields. But out of nowhere, my brain pointed out to me that what's really boggling is, thirty years from now, we will have those friendships . . . because some of the people who are real, honest-to-god, going to their place for dinner kinds of friends of ours right now will have become the Big Names of the field.

And for some reason that really made my head spin around for a moment.

Which is to say, all y'all newbies and neopros I call friends these days? I'm TOTALLY name-dropping you once you're famous.

(no subject)

Dangit -- I forgot to post a last reminder about livelongnmarry before bidding closed. But thank you to everybody who offered or bid for something, or just spread the word; turns out it raised over ten thousand dollars, all told.

Not bad for a little online fandom effort.

dude, it's still light out.

It isn't even 8 p.m., and I've already done my writing for the day. Because I just felt like doing it, instead of reading or whatever.

That's a nice feeling, and not one I've had much of lately.

(Mind you, the desire was born of pure sadism. Last night I started an Antony scene that I've been dying to write, because it's just so mean.)


Word count: 48090
LBR tally: Blood, of the metaphysical kind.
Authorial sadism: I've had enough time to think through the consequences of some of the things I've established in this and the previous book. Much to Antony's detriment.