For those of you who have read along with my journey towards getting accepted into a PhD program, I want to thank you for your sturdy company. I have been accepted into a PhD in Creative Writing program at a university in the UK. I will take a year off teaching to study starting in September.
For those of you who have stood shoulder to shoulder with me in the trenches in the battle against erotica censorship, I want to thank you for your brave and shining hearts. We have won, it seems, a small victory of sorts. PayPal has backed down and reformulated its TOS with regards to taboo erotic fiction. It is, sadly, only a small victory. Graphic novelists, game developers and comic book producers are still not being afforded the respect or freedoms they’re entitled to.
I’ve read a lot of post-game criticism of Mark Coker for his light-handed, politic way of doing battle. It might have not been my style of combat either, but I’d like to remind all of you that only he (Smashwords) and Selena Kitt (Excessica) put up any kind of a fight at all. That, regardless of his perennially mild tone to PayPal, he went a long way to getting you what you wanted – the freedom to write what you wanted and somewhere to sell it.
I want to thank the fabulous Rainey Reitmann at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. The EFF emerged as a passionately vocal advocate and a ferocious activist in her fight to defend legal fiction from commercial censorship. If you do anything on the web, they deserve your donation.
I also want to thank No Boundaries Press for stepping up to the plate and offering a haven to a lot of writers who suddenly felt abandoned and kicked to the wall when the PayPal fiasco went down, and to the Comic Book Defense Fund who decided that our fight was theirs as well. And we should reciprocate the support, because content with drawn images is particularly under threat.
It is our experiences that define us. This month has taught me more about what it means to be a writer than the previous ten years. I’ve learned to articulate and defend what I do academically, legally, economically and morally.
I’ve learned who my friends are.
I’ve learned who my enemies are, too.
To the writers who blithely stepped aside while their fellow erotica and romance writers went to the wall, who said nothing, who looked the other way, who felt it didn’t concern them and carried on with business as usual: SHAME ON YOU.
To the smug assholes and bitches with their lips pursed around self-righteous, moralistic, parsimonious, off the cuff reprimands: FUCK YOU. I sincerely hope you end up in loveless, lustless unions with partners who cheat on you out of mindnumbing boredom and in response to your staggering mediocrity, your lack of human decency, your sagging tits, your shriveling pudenda and your unruly, ungrateful children.
To the fatuous, pasty-faced eBook retailers who knuckled under, and did nothing but send blunt and dispassionate emails of rejection to the writers whose books have made you money: MAY YOU FIND YOURSELF RELEGATED to the selling of undesirable tupperware and unfashionable shades of low-quality lipstick. You don’t deserve to sell the written word. You’re nothing more than ‘product floggers’.
To the brave writers who continue to push at the boundaries of the comfortable, the acceptable, the saleable and the polite: you will have your place in history. The canon of literature is a long list of authors who took chances, caused controversy and pissed off the placid.
To the intrepid readers who brave the discomfort of challenging writing, who support and encourage writers to reach further and write bravely, who joined us on the battle lines and demanded the freedom to buy and read what they wanted: everything I write is for you. You complete the cycle. Without readers, I would be no writer.
Keep writing what you write and reading what you read. Write the truest thing you know. And celebrate the little victories.
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