Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Are people doing a double take at the name tag or at the big giant belly? Hmmm.

Problem with me is that when I sit down, I don’t get up easily. But I picked a session on the behind the scenes life of editors with Heather Osbourn and Melissa Singer and Anna Genoese and Monique Patterson - and it is hilarious.

Aside from the bananas hours, they don’t tell anyone what they do because “everyone in New York has written a book.” Heh.

Here are my thoughts on the Hyatt. The only accessible outlet suitable for charging computers and phones is powered by a lightswitch that also powers the ceiling lights. Charging my phone and laptop in the bathroom? Not cool!

Also, $4 for a bottle of water? I should have brought a Nalgene. Ooops.

But! The food has not been bad. Although some women have it worse than me - there was a fire drill at 1230am and sleeping attendees were running all over the place while folks still in the bar heard nothing and watched. These women needed extra caffeine today. Poor things.

Random thoughts and notes from the RWA thus far:

1. HOLY SHIT navigating to the Hyatt Regency is two bitches and a half. I’m lucky I have friends in the area I could call and to whom I could wail “Halp halp I’m lost and on some crazy street called Zang!” (Sounds kind of like a tentacled alien--like Kodos and Kang’s incompetent younger brother.)

2. Nobody has shrunk away from me in horror, yet. But that’s probably because I haven’t met anyone I gave a bad grade to, or any former Triskelion authors. Or RITA winners, for that matter. Gotta remember to wear my Kevlar breastplate tomorrow....

3. I finally met Sarah. Happy arm flailing ensued. It was exciting, but y’know, we’ve been talking every day for a couple of years, so we were amazingly comfortable and low-key in a relatively short amount of time.

4. People look different in real life than how I pictured them on-line, though Victoria Dahl and Jennifer Echols looked pretty much exactly as I pictured them.

5. Holy crap, Jane of Dear Author is a hot piece of ass, y’all. Seriously.

6. Some really interesting conversations ensued with Victoria Dahl and Jennifer Echols about bisexuality in romance novel heroes, and common perceptions of bisexuality in general. I’ll see if I can marshall those thoughts into something resembling coherency in a bit.

7. Favorite exchange of the night:

“What do they call that deep-tissue massage?”

“Don’t they just call it ‘deep-tissue massage’?”

“No, no. Rolfing! That’s it. It’s called rolfing.”

“Y’know, that sounds dirtybadwrong. Like, an incredibly perverse sex act that involves bodily excretions that have no business being excreted during sex.”

“I think it sounds more like one step up from fisting.”

“Oh, so, like, a foot.”

“Inserted up the ass.”

“And ‘ROLF’ is the sound they make when the foot is inserted.”

“Nononono--they say ‘Rolf’ because they wear dog suits while they’re doing this.”

“Oooh yes! Furry sex!”

From Angie James' blog, and from multiple forwards to me, the official statement from Samhain:

Yes, Samhain will lose recognition after conference. It doesn't change anything for our business or with the deal with Kensington, nor our IPS print program. We'll still pay royalties on time and do business as usual ;) For us, it means we can't do publisher type things at nationals next year. Perhaps someday things will change and we'll be back at RWA, doing editor appointments and so forth, but until that time, we continue on as always. RWA is an organization for authors to network and learn from one another. As the guidelines have been set up, removing our recognition doesn't take away your ability to utilize it as such and the benefits of RWA remain for those authors who wish to enjoy them.

Of course it's disappointing to us that RWA is unable to accommodate small presses at this time, but it's understandable that they must do what they believe is best for the authors and the organization.

However, it's my belief that the allure of epublishing is our ability to sign a wide variety of books and genres without a huge monetary risk. Offering even 1000 dollars advance would remove our ability to do that. Our gain from being approved is not as significant as our gain from being free to take on books because we love them, not because they'll earn out their advance. Once we enter into the world of larger dollar amount advances, we become a publisher who can't take the publishing risks that we do now, never knowing what will hit and what will not so much.

I know it's important to some authors that their publisher be recognized and that there will be some who are disappointed by the way things have gone and choose to seek publication elsewhere, and that saddens me because at the heart of things, I think we're a pretty damn good publisher. We'll move forward from here just as we would have had we been able to keep "recognition". Nothing changes. Samhain will remain the same publisher next week, when the policy goes into effect and we're no longer "recognized" as we are this week.

Permission to forward granted

Angela James, Executive Editor http://www.samhainpublishing.com

I went to the RWA Online chapter hoe-down (thanks for the invitation Mel!) tonight and heard all about this decision from several very upset and hurt e-published authors who feel like their legitimacy as authors in this organization has been stripped away. They are of the opinion that the real reason was to shut out erotica, because the RWA doesn't like it. I don't think that's the actual reason, but they were feeling the slap from both a business and a genre perspective.

However, other folks could see what RWA was trying to do - if your advance is less than 1k, are you a "professional author" or are you a hobbyist? If the RWA is positioning itself to be a professional writer's organization, is excluding based on a minimum balance of advance necessarily the right step? Or has RWA done itself some damage with the 'you were in but now you're not' policy change?

More importantly, as a writer, does this policy affect your decision of who you'd like to publish with? And if you're an ePub, does this policy change stand in your way? Or, like Samhain, is it business as usual?