….if one email from a publisher tells you every single author they have on their books has their cheques sent out on the exact same day then why am I still waiting weeks afterwards? When I question the ‘exact day’ thing, I get an email saying they ‘stagger’ the payments in batches. Right. A sceptical person would murmur ‘money problems’ because if you have the funds in you pay the funds out to the people who made you those funds. Pretty damn simple but then I get emails from authors in a certain publisher's loop that tell me I missed out on a fairy story about the cancellation of a hotel for the annual convention because someone supposedly saw the manager of the hotel apparently slap his wife/partner/woman so the someone apparently turned on their heel in disgust and said something like ‘we will no longer use this hotel because he’s an evil doer and we will tell all our minions.’

Two thoughts come to mind – anyone who watches another being assaulted should report it or try to stop it unless it was an mythical slap that was made up to explain to less than smart authors the reason a hotel was no longer being used. Saying ‘we can't afford it’ is not as dramatic as picking up your skirts and dramatically leaving – though it saying that I would have added to the story a sword, maybe a buxom heroine, who loves ménage sex, bondage, Daddy/incest themed sex, dressed in skimpy clothing and a hero, who can do all that including the skimpy clothing, who rushes in to help her as she avenges the wife/woman/partner who allegedly got slapped. My other thought? Authors know more bad plot lines than anyone else so it seems crazy trying to spin one as an excuse because less than happy authors like to share stuff like that.