We interrupt this RWA memoir to vent

I saw an article today that seriously torqued me up. I'm employing great restraint by not placing the link in this blog entry in order to protect the innocent--or should I say ignorant?

First, the article was written by a man--a girly man--who is a reporter for a Florida newspaper. He was sent to cover the RT conference in Daytona. Now, instead of writing an article about the positive things that happened at the conference, like readers connecting with writers and other fans, or charity auctions for the children of Sri Lanka, or supporting the military spouses, the article focused on the racier aspects of the conference.

The writer--and I use that term loosely--went on and on about the sexually titilating panels and the cover model contests and didn't once mention any of the positive things RT did.

To make matters worse, he found a "Historical fiction author, not a romance author" and her mother who were at the conference and the three of them had a great time at the bar picking on the people who paid to attend the conference.

Since I didn't know who the author was, I looked her up on Amazon. She happened to have an RT REVIEW POSTED ON THE AMAZON PAGE!!!
So, she was too good to be considered a romance author, but she was more than willing to glom off the success of romance authors at their ROMANTIC TIMES BOOKLOVERS CONFERENCE.

If she is so much better than we are, why wasn't she going to a Historical writers conference?

Now I understand that my writing won't please everyone. Heck, I know my genre won't please half the people I know, but I don't look down upon fans of other genres. And I especially don't look down upon authors of other genres. It's very hard to write a book. It's even harder to get one published. Anyone who can do that deserves my respect, if not necessarily my hard earned cash. This author, whom I'm very carefully not naming, should be ashamed of herself.

Maybe her words got taken out of context, I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, hence my restraint in not flaming her in a public forum or in a private email. Regardless, she was at RT as an author, she sat down and spoke to a reporter and dissed the conference and the conference attendees, employees, and genre. Maybe she didn't mean to sound elitest but she should have been smart enough to be careful what she said around a member of the press.

Tomorrow morning I'll have forgotten not only the author's name, but most of the anger I had at the article. (I have a house full of company so it's not hard for me to forget everything) I'm not ashamed of what I write and I love, love, love the RT conference. I'm proud to be a part of it, and I welcome the opportunity to talk to a PROFESSIONAL journalist who is there to report on the conference, not vent his personal insecurities by lampooning an event that brought many people and dollars into his state.

By the way, I'm not just talking the talk, I'm walking the walk too. I wrote a letter to the editor and gave them permission to print it. We'll see what happens.