I was offline all weekend. I needed the sanity break and spent it playing the latest Call of Duty with my son.

George R.R. Martin has posted a series of blog posts about the Sad Puppies campaign. On the 9th I responded to the first 3. He posted a 4th while I was composing my response, and a couple more since, and of course, despite Mr. Martin being pretty civil, the narrative spewing attack dogs aren’t, so when I came back this morning I found people all over the internet calling me out, saying, ooooh, he got you! Why can’t you answer him? Why are you ignoring him? Where’s the Beef? Got you, Correia, GOT YOU!!!!

Sorry, my time machine was inoperable, so I’ll lump my answers to his 4th post in with the response to today’s letter directly to me. George R. R. Martin took the time to respond to my post from last week, and though we see things very differently, he was polite, and I would like to respond to a few things. Warning. This post is going to be HUGE. I’m responding to two great big blog posts here. If you just want to read the response to the response, skip down to that link.

Mr. Martin,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my letter. I too am worn out of this whole thing. It turns out being labeled the second coming of BushSatanHitler across the internet isn’t super fun, and is actually very time consuming.

In this post, http://grrm.livejournal.com/418285.html titled Where’s the Beef, you tried to demonstrate that my side’s arguments are spurious, and that there is in fact no political bias in the awards.

I’ve read Brad Torgensen’s statements on this point, and I’ve read Correia’s MONSTER HUNTER NATION, and I’ve read hundreds of comments from their supporters. As with any large group, there is a wide range of opinion. Some of the Puppies are relatively moderate and reasonable. Others, I fear, are beyond the pale, raging and ranting about SJWs and cliques and secret conspiracies.

If I am responsible for everyone that comments on my site, then you are responsible for yours. I think we can both agree that is absurd. I let everyone speak for themselves, debate, and I don’t remove comments just because I disagree with them. I don’t “massage” or “disemvowel”, and I hardly ever block anyone except for insane trolls and usually then only after they’ve become really repetitive and boring.

But for the rants, yes, there have been some among the 3000 comments, but I think you are being unfairly dismissive. Especially since most of those posts come from one man who has made a hobby of collecting racist quotes from Social Justice Warriors.

On SJWs, you have already told us that you don’t think SJWs don’t exist. However, half of America thinks they do, and it is a running joke to us. Did you use the term NeoCon to describe many republicans during the Bush years? Did they disagree? Irrelevant, because the term entered common usage.

So here is a question for you. What term would you use to describe the shared politics of the dozens of reporters, columnists, and bloggers who have run similar articles this week with obvious false accusations that Sad Puppies supporters ran an anti-diversity slate, motivated by racism, sexism, and homophobia?

Jerks? Yes, they are, but that is a bit too coordinated for mere jerkage. That was a political attempt to establish a political narrative.

So, what politics do those reporters share? The answer is glaringly obvious to most of us.

As for “secret conspiracies” for the last few years we talked about there being campaigns, cliques, and a dominate group culture in the award process. Keep in mind it wasn’t until last week that anyone of note on your side admitted that there were actually campaigns and cliques. And you yourself talked about the prevailing culture of WorldCon and how the Hugos belong to WorldCon.

A few weeks ago, all of that stuff would have gotten labeled secret conspiracies by people who don’t like us, so forgive some of my fans for kind of feeling like they are on a roll here.

In your Where’s the Beef post you attempted to dismiss our allegations that there is a political bias in the awards now, by going through the history of the awards and looking at the political diversity of winners from long ago. Nice, but we are talking about a relatively recent trend.

You do admit and recognize that, and then go through the last few years, trying to dismiss our complaints. You listed a bunch of names of various people and demanded to know if they should be there or not…

Nope. Not falling for that. Even assuming your attentions are pure, I’m not walking into that.

This entire time I’ve tried hard not to name other authors or talk negatively about their books. The times that I’ve screwed up and violated that (Ancillary Justice, Redshirts, Dinosaur Revenge) I’ve come to regret it later, because now I’ve made it personal between me and another author, which isn’t what I’m trying to accomplish.

I do like how you constantly rail against McCarthyism, and then demand I name names. You even cited some authors’ ethnicity, brought up their race specifically, and challenged us to say if we approved of their works or not (after you made it about race) so if we didn’t think the book was deserving, now it is about racism and we have no point, or to avoid that we say we do approve of the book, and now we have no point.

Since you set a trap and invited me to walk into it, I thought about how best to answer you over the weekend. Basically, there is no good way to answer. Point out specifics, be the bad guy, don’t point out specifics, still be the bad guy. That is a Kafka Trap.

The actual tastes of my people, or the idea that our supporters formed their own opinion on this, or that they could come to their own conclusions never enters into your argument, just an assumption that Brad and I were somehow able to sway all of these people without evidence… Trust me. This obstinate crowd of roughnecks and manatees made that decision themselves, and we just gave them a vehicle to get noisy about it.

I’m going to try hard to not insult any other author’s work I haven’t already insulted, because narrative to the contrary, I actually like some of the people you listed, and I hope they go on to have long fantastic careers.

I don’t think I ever said it was all a Social Justice conspiracy, and if I did, I was probably being flippant. I said it was politically biased. SJWs are just the loudest. The bias comes in a few forms, some of which you’ve already agreed with.

The author is popular with, or part of, some of the cliques. The book appeals to the cliques’ politics (which overwhelmingly skew left). The author has managed to not upset the angriest of all cliques which shall not be named.

Violate one of those rules and you are hosed.

But appeasing political bias and being a good book are not mutually exclusive. Something can satisfy A-C and still be a good book. There have been plenty of good works that still got onto the ballot. Yet you are trying to dismiss our argument that there is bias, by saying look at these good books that satisfy our bias! And meanwhile, we are all like, where are all the works that violated A, B, or C?

Let’s go to your list. Redshirts won that year, and you said:

Scalzi — look, I know Scalzi is liberal, and I know that the Puppies seem to hate him, though I can’t for the life of me understand why — but whatever you think of the writer’s politics, REDSHIRTS is a light, fun, amusing SF adventure, an affectionate riff off of STAR TREK, Ghu help us

No, I think he’s a fine of working a popularity contest. Redshirts was a light read, but I’m on record already disagreeing about amusing or fun and leave it at that. As for not understanding how my side could possibly dislike this man, here is him being gracious in victory the night last year’s final Hugo awards were announced:

John Scalzi @scalzi

I’m not going to lie. I’m going to be THRILLED to snarkread the whiny “I didn’t want it anyway” nonsense that will squirt forth tomorrow.

John Scalzi @scalzi

WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THE HUGO SLATE A REFERENDUM ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE FICTION (loses) THE HUGOS DON’T MATTER ANYWAY

John Scalzi @scalzi

SHUT UP I AM NOT CRYING IT’S THAT LITTLE FLECKS OF GUNPOWDER FELL INTO MY EYEBALLS SOMEONE GET ME A FLAMING SWORD SO I CAN FLICK THEM OUT

John Scalzi @scalzi

WHO IS CALLING ME PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE I AM ALL AGGRESSIVE DON’T YOU SEE THIS HUGE GUN I HAVE WITH ME AT ALL TIMES (breaks down, sobbing)

John Scalzi @scalzi

AND NOW I WILL IGNORE THE HUGOS AGAIN UNTIL NEXT YEAR WHEN MY FEELINGS OF PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE INADEQUACY ANGRILY WELL UP ONCE MORE

John Scalzi @scalzi

I’VE LEARNED MY LESSON AND MY LESSON IS THAT WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PATENT RACIST SHITBAGGERY ON OUR SLATE WHAT THAT WAS GOOD WRITING MAN

John Scalzi @scalzi

ITS PROOF THAT ALL THE FEMINISTS NEED TO DO TO WIN AWARDS IS WRITE BETTER STORIES ACCORDING TO THE JUDGEMENT OF THE FANS SHEEESH

John Scalzi @scalzi

I NEVER WANTED THE AWARD THAT’S WHY I’VE WHINED LIKE A KICKED DOG ABOUT IT FOR A COUPLE YEARS RUNNING.

Simply can’t imagine why my side doesn’t care for him… But anyways, we’ve got plenty more examples of him being classy if you’d like them.

As for the rest, I’m not going to stick my foot in those giant steel jaws you provided and talk trash about their work. They all satisfy A-C, and they can play the game.

Come to think of it, Bujold is actually liked on my side. She is also the only Baen author to get on the ballot in… Hell… I’m not actually sure. Decades? Ever? Has another Baen book ever been nominated pre Sad Puppies?

So moving past the quality of the work, let’s talk about this “social justice conspiracy”, which I suppose is your way of dismissing the competing cliques you already admitted exist and our claim of political bias. SJWs are just the loudest, angriest, poo throwing bunch who can be counted on to run all the articles calling their opponents racist. So the best novels that year as far as I can tell the politics wing left, left, left, left, and a question mark.

Then you move down the ballot, to where the presence of Brandon Sanderson, who is a political moderate and one of the most popular authors alive, got a nomination, but to you this proves there is no bias, and not that Brandon has worked within your culture for several years in order to be accepted and considered. As you’ve said, he’s paid his dues. But we’ll run with that… and then left, left, left. Okay. I’m convinced. No bias here!

You try to make the next category about the author’s sex, which is just being disingenuous. And I’m not sure of everyone’s politics, because I can’t remember, but looking at those names, I’m thinking among those 5, not a lot of Romney voters if you get my drift. You next cite shorts, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t all of those authors vocally on the left side of the spectrum too? Sorry, I didn’t check beforehand because I wasn’t aware there was going to be a quiz.

I don’t think movies and TV shows should count in this particular discussion, because they are products created by hundreds of people, but nobody has ever mistaken you or Joss Whedon for Rush Limbaugh listeners (last I checked, there are like 4 of those in Hollywood, and I’m friends with all of them). But hey, if you do want to include movies, last year’s HUGE WIN FOR DIVERSITY (92% white liberals with one Asian liberal) does get a slightly better ratio if you include Alfonso Cuaron, because in America he would check the same box on an EEOC form as I do.

You then went back to the year before, and skim through ChiCon, looking for something we never alleged to prove us wrong, but again, the same old thing. They satisfy A-C. I don’t know Corey’s politics, but other than that, where do the other 4 nominees fall on the spectrum? From communist to liberal? Wow.

Oh, I’m sure there are some broad philosophical differences in there… to you… But to my side we’re back to the fact you have a thousand words for snow, and all we see is snow.

So in all the writing categories, you’ve got a handful of nominees with unknown or moderate politics.

What could we possibly have against Charlie Jane Anders? I don’t know, why don’t you go over to the article she wrote last week on io9 about how Sad Puppies is all motivated by racism and woman hating, and take a wild guess?

Then Torgersen and Resnick… Wow. Yeah, you got me there. Out of three years you found a couple of people who could be described as conservative in the writing categories. Resnick, a living legend, managed to survive his witch burning from the SFWA bulletin, but I believe Torgersen was still in the closet then.

Again, not trying to bag on an author’s work, but if you can’t find dreary, preachy message fic in some of that stuff you listed above, it might be because you are part of their target audience. And you don’t see it as preaching, but rather you see it as obvious truth. Meanwhile, my people look at that list, and all we can do is shake our heads, and wonder if we outsiders even speak the same language as you guys.

But if you want to make this about the Social Justice “conspiracies”, let’s run with that and talk about C for a minute. I didn’t say they controlled the awards, they’re too inept for that. In fact, many times I’ve said the haters are outnumbered by regular WorldCon voters. I said that they would actively try to destroy any author with bad politics who got in. Of those authors you listed above, how many have ever said anything in public to disagree with the SJWs? What happened to them if they did? What percentage have agreed with them or remained silent?

By the way, some of the authors you listed above? I happen to know for a fact that a couple keep their politics quiet out of fear, because they know they have the wrong beliefs, and they don’t want to hurt their careers. And though I know you’ll demand proof, it isn’t my place to out them. Sorry.

There were like four other posts in there too, and I don’t have time to address them. I’ve already killed one week of productive writing time going back and forth on this subject, and I can’t afford to lose another.

So, on to the response letter directly to me. http://grrm.livejournal.com/420090.html

I am just about blogged out on the whole Puppygate thing, having devoted half a dozen posts and thousands of words to it over the past few days. However, Larry Correia responded to some of those posts on his own blog, MONSTER HUNTER NATION, as several dozen of his followers immediately emailed me to point out, and I promised to reply in turn. So here it is.

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

My original posts were long, and Mr. Correia’s reply was long, and if quoted them all, and then piled more on top of it, all of Live Journal might sink beneath the weight. So I am going to cut out the stuff by me that Correia quotes, since the originals are all available upstream, and edit down his own reply to just the point I want to answer.

Going back and forth quoting each other in public gets complicated, but I’ll do my best to be clear. I will do the same, with Mr. Martin in italics and me in bold. I’m going to be cutting everything that I’m not responding to directly, so I’d encourage everyone reading this to click on that link above to read the original in context.



I would have responded earlier, but as you can see, I have been busy posting about other aspects of this thing. But I do appreciate the response, and even more so, the courtesy you have shown. It’s my hope and belief that people on different sides of an issue can disagree, even heatedly, without it turning into rancor and name calling. We are, after all, fighting about a literary award.

Agreed. We may see the world differently, but we’re both fans and professional writers (though you’ve got me beat by orders of magnitude worth of success) and we both want our genre to thrive and readers to be happy.

Mr. Martin said some nice things about my year’s Campbell ballot and his own loss. Cutting for space and sticking to the debate, but that was nice.

What did matter was that the Campbell launched my career, just as it launched yours.

Actually, I’m not sure if that’s the case anymore. It used to be that the awards were a huge part of launching a career, but in recent times they don’t seem to make that much of a difference anymore, economically speaking. You’d have to ask publishers, but from what I’ve heard a Hugo nomination is usually a negligible difference in sales and new fans, and a win isn’t a whole lot better, but everything I know on that topic is second hand.

You spoke about how WorldCon used to be the biggest thing in Fandom, and I think back then the Hugos really would make a profound impact, but I think we’ve lost that. Mostly because fandom has kept growing, but as you’ve said, the Hugos have stayed small.

Sure. Of course, we had no internet in 1973, no emails. I had to make do with a few passing comments in print fanzines, and the occasional encounter at a con with a fan who had actually read one of my stories. Egoboo (as we called it) was hard to come by in those days. I sold my first story in 1970, published it in 1971, went to my con that same year, lost the Campbell in 1973, lost my first Hugo and Nebula in 1974, won a Hugo in September 1975… but it was not until a couple of months later, at the 1975 Windycon, that I was finally deemed to be enough of a writer to be asked to sit on a convention panel. Paying our dues, we called it. Acclaim was hard to come by; it had to be earned, and earning it took YEARS.

I was born in 1975. Considering how much the typical WorldCon voter likes me, luckily for me I was able to go around them to get my acclaim. Sorry, I’m just being flippant again.

I don’t condone treating anyone like shit. And I have never been a Mormon or a conservative or a gun-shop owner, so I don’t know what that is like.

It is awesome.

But I do wonder… you say you were called a liar, that people were angry with you for being who you were, that they said not to read your books… well, no need to paraphrase, you just said it all. But WHO called you a liar?

Who? Jackasses I assume. 🙂

Serious answer, it wasn’t like I wrote the names down at first. I just put my head down and plodded on, mostly trying to avoid fights that might damage my career.

As time went on, I was making more money, I became more vocal, and more people like that showed up to pick fights, we started to collect them on the blog, and I mocked them right back. If you actually care I could probably get some of my fans to compile a list of names and links for you. This has been a spectator sport over here for the last few years.

How many people said this stuff, where, in what context?

One person, ten people, a hundred?

Leading up to Reno specifically, hard to tell, since it isn’t like most haters on the internet use their real name and post their business cards. Back then I didn’t know who they were. There were enough to scare the new guy. And since back then I wasn’t exactly planning on kicking over the table and stealing all your chairs, I didn’t think I’d need to catalog them for future evidence.

As time has gone on, you start to recognize the recurring haters, and realize that most of the slanderers are little no name writers, who’ve never had much success, or they are has beens, or almost weres, either way, they’re hoping that if they fling enough hate at people with the wrong politics to show that they are part of the tribe, that somebody important will notice them. Not being on that side, that’s my best guess anyway.

You have lived in a house made of gold bars since this has been a thing, so you might not be aware of how the Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance operate.

Their actual status in the publishing world is irrelevant, because the goal of slander is to toss out as much as possible to see what sticks. Throw out some racism there, sexism here, a little misogyny on top, complete strangers hear it, don’t think about it too hard, and then for the rest of your life your name is connected to these vile things in their minds.

If the attackers get called on it, or busted, they delete the embarrassing stuff, run away, then come back somewhere else, often under a different name, trying to stick narrative into whole new conversations. I’ve got a couple of guys who are so persistent at it, posting under dozens of pseudonyms, whenever my name shows up anywhere that I’m pretty sure they’ve got me on Google alerts.

If you are talking about more recent times, and the number of people like that, plug my name into your search engine for the last week. Now we are in the hundreds, if not thousands. Forums, blog comments, all over FB, and this time it is racist, sexist, blah blah blah… I wish they would mix the narrative up a little and accuse me of something interesting.

I don’t doubt you got some criticism, that people took shots (no pun intended) at you… but fandom is large, even worldcon fandom. There are always assholes. No doubt they were there in 1973 as well, in that first Campbell race. I mean, have there ever been two contenders as opposite as Pournelle and Effinger? That was a classic Old Wave/ New Wave showdown, with us other nominees just caught in the crossfire. However, the internet did not exist to magnify it all, and most of the sniping went on in room parties, with no permanent record of the drunken debates. I am not sure that what you suffered was any worse than what they did, way back when.

Mr. Martin, I’m afraid that you are comparing the behavior of a handful of assholes against organized slander for political ends. Your hypothetical asshole could try to defame somebody for having the wrong politics, but it took a whole lot of work to spread it to thousands of strangers unless you worked at a newspaper. Not anymore.

You keep conflating the history of WorldCon with now, before many of those involved in the current controversy were even born, but they’re not the same thing. The world has changed. I don’t think it is meaner, but it has made meanness convenient, and the ability to defame is just a click away.

You’ve not been the target of these people, because they don’t see you as an enemy. And even if they did, you sell all the books, they’re bugs to you. Most authors on my side aren’t in the financial position to weather a slander storm.

And regardless of what happened in Reno a few years ago—if you are trying to poke holes in the veracity of my story that I never suspected I would need to document—go search the internet and see how these people reacted last year when Sad Puppies got a handful of people on the ballot. Or look at the giant flaming shit storm of last week, where blatantly stupid lies were passed around to hundreds of thousands of readers with impunity.

Also, all these things that people said about you… are those direct quotes, or are you paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing primarily, because I’d have to start huffing paint to kill enough brain cells to pass for some of these folks. I’m not that good of a writer.

Because it seems to me that the Sad Puppies love to paraphrase, taking any challenge or criticism and tweaking it around to make it more offensive and insulting.

Okay. Then don’t accept our version. Go read reporter Damien Walter’s account in the Guardian about my sexist homophobic campaign to steal the Hugos last year. (by the way, how did he know about my nomination before it was announced?) Or go read his account in the Guardian where he libeled Toni Weisskopf. Or go read Entertainment Weekly, the Telegraph, Salon, Slate or the many other places where I’m a racist white guy from earlier this week.

Of course we tweak their words around to mock them, because bullies hate that. You have to have fun with this stuff, or it’ll drive you nuts.

Take this “Wrongfan” moniker I now see popping up on Puppy sites. Neither I nor any of the other SMOFs or trufans or worldconners that I know have ever called you or your friends “wrongfans.” You guys made that up and applied it to yourself.

Damn right we did. I’m pretty sure I invented the word Wrongfun to describe how the perpetually outraged crowd on Twitter was perpetually offended that somebody somewhere was having fun wrong.

Let me give you an example of wrongfun. After my last letter to you went public I had three or four people concern trolling me on Twitter because I used the term “Twitter Lynch Mob” to describe a well-known type of behavior. They’re perched like falcons, waiting for somebody to transgress, so that they can swoop in and feel superior. If you use the wrong words, play the wrong games, read the wrong books, wear the wrong shirt, they’ll be there. These people are always looking for an excuse to shake their fingers at you for having fun wrong, hence the term, Wrongfun.

So when Teresa Nielsen Hayden (who somehow knew that SP3 had 3/5 of the best novel nominations before they were announced) started going off about us, and how we were outsiders, my people took Wrongfun and turned it into Wrongfan. I don’t recall who did that, but it was funny, and it made my people laugh, so it stuck.

Words are awesome like that. I do find it ironic that you don’t approve of my people making up words to describe the world as they see it, in the same sentence that you speak of SMOFs, Trufans, and Worldconners.

I wish that would stop. People are saying enough hurtful shit in this debate already without making up new insults and suggesting that the other side was throwing them at you.

We don’t take it as an insult. It is more of a badge. We don’t need to make up new insults. There are plenty already. Did you read the thread on Making Light? Have you been on Twitter? Have you seen the hundreds of Facebook threads? Have you seen the many blog posts and newspaper articles?

I really have no idea what you mean by a “whisper campaign.” You make it sound so sinister.

It was easier than typing out Bunch of Political Assholes Talking Shit In An Attempt To Discredit And Defame Someone They Did Not Like.

Do people talk about books and writers? Sure they do. (They used to do it more. These days, con suite debates are more likely to be about movies than novels). But nobody is whispering. Fans don’t whisper. Fans are loud-mouthed and opinionated.

Oh no, they do both. If you think they are only open and honest about their opinions, you’ve missed the backstabby, gossipy side of the equation. That’s there too, but since they don’t write it down, I can’t copy it over to my webpage to make fun of it, and when we talk about that stuff you guys just assume we are paraphrasing.

You’d win that bet. Nobody said much of anything about me before my first Worldcon, because no one had any idea who I was. I was pretty much an invisible person at that con. I had been to one earlier con, and I knew maybe half a dozen people. I spent much of that con standing quietly in corners, trying to look interesting so people would talk to me. Oh, yes, there were a few people who were terrific, friendly, welcoming — Gardner Dozois, Terry Carr, Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein –but you could count them on the fingers on one hand. Nobody rolled out the red carpet for me. Nobody gave two shits that I was a Campbell Award finalist. So we all have our traumas, Mr. Correia.

Trauma is a strong word, Mr. Martin. I save trauma for things like blunt force, or running out of Coke Zero right before a deadline with a bunch of writing still to do.

How many belligerent drunks? One? Two? Ten?

One that I can recall. Most people aren’t stupid enough to start shit with the 6’5” 300 pound guy who grew up punching cows.

I think it matters.

Having removed rowdy drunks from establishments, I’d say!

You say that you were “berated” by other panelists… but panels at SF cons do often become loud and heated, it is not at all unusual. I doubt any special malice was directed at you. WHat was the panel topic? Who was on it? Who berated you? With what words? Is it possible that you were berating the other panelists back?

I’m supposed to remember all the details of a few panels I was on, like 200 panels ago? Well, answering your questions in order, I don’t remember. I have no flipping idea. Some jackass? I don’t remember what words. It is possible I berated them back, I do that sort of thing. Beats me. I’m going off of a memory of being pissed off and surly. Kind of wrote it off and moved on.

I am not trying to call you a liar, Mr. Correia, but…

I feel like you are, but that’s fine. I’ve already had people digging through my blog history to find my con report to say “He sounds too cheerful!” (no shit, because all this writing stuff beats milking cows). This exchange is a good example of why I refused my nomination. This shouldn’t be about just me. Now I regret sharing my personal experience, because it just turns into another angle to dismiss the whole thing.

Tell you what, Mr. Martin, go ahead, in your mind, erase all references to my personal experiences, because yours were different and better. For this current debate, it’s as if my experiences never happened, everything was wonderful and inclusive, and joy and butterflies… Strike that personal testimony from the record and just say that I’m a malicious dick of unknown motivation who decided to prove a point for an unknown reason.

Instead, let’s focus on the stuff we have been paying attention to, and what we have documented over the last two years when we were actively looking for this stuff.

Some people love to argue, some don’t. Some take disagreement to mean disrespect. Some are thin-skinned. I don’t know you well enough to know where you fall in respect of all that.

I spend my free time arguing politics on the internet for fun. To prove a point I picked a fight with half of publishing, and now in between reading articles about what a racist I am, I’m having a public debate with one of the most famous authors in the world with lots of angry people waiting to jump on any mistake. I must be incredibly thin skinned.

I don’t know who the Barflies are. Do you just mean you hung out in the bar? Lots of people hang out in the bar at a con, I was not aware there was a specific group. You can always find lots of writers in the bar, usually around some editor who is buying the drinks.

Barflies… Capital B, as in Baen Barflies, from Baen’s Bar, one of the oldest scifi forums dating back to the dawn of the internet. Great folks, and there is always a small contingent of them at any con. I’m kind of surprised you don’t get the reference.

Come on, Larry. The cool kids? Surely you have been around fandom long enough to realize that there are no cool kids. We’re all the fat kids, the nerds, the computer geeks, the guys who always had their nose in a book, who loved comics and played chess and couldn’t get a date for a prom. And the girls are the geek girls, our female counterparts.

Cool is relative, I’ll give you that. I meant in terms of the In Crowd. You know, like how you established your WorldCon cred with the giant list of things you’ve been to and people you’ve known since the 70s.

Did you go to the Hugo Losers Party? That’s become an offical con thing now, and the SMOFs have taken it over and made it stuffy and semi-formal, with door dragons deciding who gets in (but as a Campbell loser, you would certainly have been on the list. Gardner Dozois and I founded that party in 1976, the night after I’d lost two Hugos. The whole point was to get drunk and bitter and bitch and tell each other we’d been robbed. We had a little contest, each of us insisting “I am a bigger loser, because… ” It was all in good fun. People who get honestly for real pissed off about losing Hugos… no, man, really, that’s no good. Fake bitter takes the sting out of losing. Real bitter poisons everything.

I did. I recall it being boring and sad, with lots of complaining and crying from people. I remember I hung out for a bit until I saw the spreadsheet printout, then I bailed. I’m an auditor, the numbers were way more interesting. Especially how this whole damned thing was determined by like .001% of fandom.

It’s history that gives the Hugos their prestige, not statistics. I believe I made that point at some length in my first post, so I won’t repeat myself.

You did. You were very clear. I was also clear that I thought they were supposed to be a prestigious big deal, and not just a popularity contest for a couple little groups of insiders.

Okay, these are some strong statements, and I have to ask once again, is it possible that some of this is wounded feelings and hyperbole?

Very possibly. Wounded feelings? I’m not a machine. I was bummed and annoyed. Hyperbole? No Portuguese person has ever been accused of subtlety. I ran a campaign with a spokesmanatee riffing off of Sarah McLachlan animal shelter videos. I wasn’t giving testimony in court. But if you think I’m exaggerating about the venom, I’d invite you to go read the internet right now. Same nonsense, only louder now.

Were you actually called “a liar,”

Yes. Repeatedly.

or did someone just claim your statement was untrue? Big difference there.

Both. But again, pretend that I’m just a crank with a faulty memory and look at what is going on right in front of your face from the last week. You’ve got an editor from one of the biggest publishing houses saying that Larry Correia is a lying liar who lies, and that’s not a paraphrase. That’s still getting retweeted today.

Were you “attacked,” or did people just disagree with you?

Both. For example, right now I’d say that George R. R. Martin or Mary Robinette Kowal disagree. I’d say that Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Arthur Chu, and a bunch of reporters attacked.

Did someone actually use the words “shit writer” and “shit product?”

That is accurate. I’ve gotten that one a lot. It is a constant favorite on Facebook.

Or is this just more “wrongfan” stuff, where someone says something critical, and it gets turned all the way up to eleven on the offensiveness scale?

Nope. Wrongfan is us having fun and showing these assholes that they can’t drag us down. And shitty writer is only like a four or five on the scale. Seven or eight is the white supremacist, angry white male, racist, woman hater stuff. I don’t think these little wimps have the imagination to hit a nine or ten and the EW article attempt at the gold just made them look stupid. But just in case, I’m ready for the eleven, and I’ve warned my local sheriff’s department what’s going on. Luckily they were already familiar with the tactic of SWATing, and I live in a sensible rural area, so I’m not worried about it.

You didn’t, though. (speaking of proving my point) At least I do not believe you did.

I said that people with the wrong politics who got on the ballot would be campaigned against and actively slandered. -Check.

I said that WorldCon was really a small group that did not represent all of fandom. -Check.

I said there was campaigning. – Check.

I am not calling you a liar, I am just saying that I believe that statement to be false. In fact, I think my own “Where’s the Beef?” blog post pretty well demolished the Sad Puppy claims.

See above. I think demolished might be a stretch. More like there is a severe difference in perception between our respective sides.

Your supporters may not think so. Does that mean they are calling me a liar? My supporters think I was totally convincing, so…

Which is why ultimately internet debate is a spectator sport. I am under no illusion that I will sway you. I present my arguments to convince the undecided and give support to my side.

However, your posts have been absolutely wonderful for me and my people, because you’ve been honest and come out and said many things we’ve been saying too. Plus, you shot down that whole stupid narrative with people yelling at Brad Torgersen for failing to contact everybody we put on our suggested slate, by pointing out how stupid and hypocritical that is. So on the contrary, if any of my people are calling you a liar, point them out and I’ll gladly tell them to shut up.

I wish I could disagree with that, but I won’t. I am not dishonest either. You’re right, Mr. Correia. You will never win a Hugo. Whether you could have won one before the Sad Puppies, well, I don’t know,

No, trust me. I couldn’t. I’m not good enough at ass kissing to ever overcome my politics.

but now, it is true, you have pissed way too many people off. On the other hand, you know, there are many terrific writers in the history of our genre who have never won a Hugo. Your friend Brad Torgersen has his little list, and I have my own, and the names on his list and the names on mine are very different. Doesn’t mean there is a secret conspiracy. All it means is that tastes differ.

Again, not a secret conspiracy. If I said that academia or Hollywood was overwhelmingly liberal, would that be a secret conspiracy? No, it would be pointing out that culturally they are overwhelmingly going to swing one way. Keep in mind, up until you and TNH last week, nobody important would come out and admit there was campaigning or cliques.

Has your career been sabotaged? From reading Monster Hunter Nation, it seems as if your career is going rather well.

I said they would try. I didn’t say they were good at it.

You’re on the TIMES bestseller list, are you not? I know a hundred writers in this field, damn good writers, hard-working and talented, who would love to have their careers sabotaged so that they could be on bestseller lists too.

I made the NYT list before I got my Campbell nomination (how often has that happened?) In the last 6 years I’ve written 13 novels and 23 paying short stories. The reason these people haven’t been able to mess me up is that I work too hard, and my core fan base is made up of a bunch of normal people who don’t like being preached at and scolded either.

You said above you don’t know me well, so I’ll give you an idea. A few years ago I started taking what the perpetually offended wrote and having fun with it. I’d post up their articles in their entirety and then Fisk them, line by line. The fans loved it. So for every sale I lost because the slander stuck with some stranger and they wrote me off as a sexist homophobe, I figure I gained two who were also sick of this crap.

But most authors aren’t like me. They don’t like confrontation. Good people tend to freak out when you call them racist for no reason. And when they find themselves the victim of a Twitter Mob, they apologize, and retreat, afraid to sin again.

But apparently you’ve never seen this, and don’t think it can happen. My side lives it. They’ve watched all this unfold live for years. I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that.

I try to assist other authors (and artists, and filmmakers, and fan writers) as well, by recommending their works on my Not A Blog. Sometimes it works. More often it does not. If you do the same thing, I doubt anyone will have a problem with it.

They sure minded when I did that last year.

The backlash you are getting now is because you went way beyond that. Yes, all completely legal… but your campaign, your slate tactics, did not just get some authors you overlooked onto the ballot, it pretty much drove everyone else off the ballot. In the three short fiction categories, there are no choices but your choices (well, yours, and Brad Torgersen’s, and Vox Day’s). You say you just wanted a seat at the table. But you kicked over the table, and took ALL the seats.

So we obeyed all the rules, but violated the secret gentleman’s agreement you guys had in place.

You know that we didn’t expect to sweep the categories. Some of the categories that were swept weren’t even because of Sad Puppies, but by Vox Day’s separate campaign that I had absolutely zero control over.

And please, please, don’t say that was what was done to your side in prior years. I think I demonstrated in “Where’s the Beef?” that that claim is simply not true. There have always been plenty of writers and stories that the Puppies should have liked on the ballot every year. If you think that’s untrue, please give me chapter and verse, with specific references to the ballots for Reno, Chicon, and LoneStarCon. Let’s at least see where we disagree.

Hey, stick your head into this hear bear trap, Correia… Nope, and I explained why above. Even if you were being completely honest there, Mr. Martin, I’m not stupid enough to give that kind of ammunition to the people who hate me by insulting other authors who aren’t currently pissed off at me. Bagging on individual author’s works accomplishes nothing for me, I regret the few times that I have. We made a case to the fans and they agreed. These fans didn’t just spring fully formed into being, just to mess with the Hugos overnight. You can use my refusal to dismiss the whole thing if you want, but again, I’m doing this for the undecided. They can look at the books and see if I have a point or not themselves.

Worldcon is a community. FIAWOL. I don’t regard that as trivial. We welcome newcomers, but yes, the hope is that they will embrace our history and traditions and culture, not just our awards. It’s a proud history and a rich culture. Some of it is silly, sure, but we even love that silliness. Some of it, like the Hugo awards, we take very seriously.

I asked you a very specific question last time on that topic, and I notice that you did not answer it in this letter. You did write a whole lot of posts last week, and I’ve been very frazzled, so I admit that I may have just missed it. So speaking of taking this stuff seriously, are the Hugos 1. an award that represents the likes of one small con, or are the Hugos 2. the award that represents all of fandom? Can’t have both. It has to be one or the other.

So far as I’m concerned, the Hugos are the Big Deal still. There’s no other award in the field with half as distinguished a list of previous winners. The Nebulas challenged for a time, but now they are a distant second.

Then if that is the case, if they are the Big Deal still, and not just coasting on history, shouldn’t everybody in fandom have a say? Or should WorldCon stay small, and have a smaller, more elite voting pool?

Perhaps. Maybe there is altogether too much “lumping together” on both sides. From over here, on the other side, it seems as though the “moderate, rational, normal” conservatives rarely seem to condemn the Vox Days and Rabid Puppies on your side, so we take your silence and lack of condemnation against the hate mongers as tacit approval.

Ah, but I have repeatedly, on Sad Puppies related posts, both last year and this year said that I don’t agree with Vox Day, I don’t condone what he says, I don’t speak for him, control him, or have any sway over him. Do you think Rapid Puppies has somehow made my life easier?

As for Rabid Puppies, there is absolutely nothing for me to condemn. They are fans too, who obeyed the rules, and bought their memberships to participate. Just because you don’t like them or what they want to vote for doesn’t make them bad people. Right now Mary Robinette Kowal is putting together “scholarships” buying memberships for people. I think they’re up to 70. I figure they’re going to disagree with me. FANTASTIC. Contrary to what you might think, I think that’s awesome. The more people voting the better. And whether you like them or not, Rabid Puppies are fans too.

Vox Day wasn’t on our slate. Things from his company were on our slate. But if he’d not put himself up for editor on his own slate, directly to his fans, and gotten himself nominated, I doubt anybody would have ever noticed that he published them. Now, whether you hate Vox or not, I’d still ask people to read Wright’s work and vote according to whether they think it is worthy or not.

But I see your Vox Day and match you with Requires Hate. And then I raise you a few hundred others. If you want to match unseemly quote to unseemly quote, you’ll run out of Vox’s before we get through NK Jemisen’s. Only one is the devil, and the other gets a pass. And I find that hypocritical, because both say inflammatory things, and have hurled insults at each other, but one has good politics and the other bad. Yes, I’ve seen his top five dumbest quotes and I don’t like them, but people keep posting them on my blog over and over and over again, and I keep saying the same thing. I don’t like them, don’t own them, and hey, I thought you guys were always saying to separate the art from artist… Oh, wait. That only counts for the child molesters your side showers with awards.

So, if we can bring you say, a hundred quotes from Hugo and Nebula nominated authors that are inflammatory and racist would you go through and specifically condemn each one? Would you demand a witch hunt? Try to drive them out of the industry? Publically distance yourself from them when they show up on the ballot? No? Why? They’re not your problem? Well, that’s what you guys keep asking me to do.

For this next one, I am going to leave in my original bit that you responded to, Mr. Martin, because I believe it illustrates a point.

[[CORREIA: Hypothetical question, if Robert Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in 2014, could he get on the Hugo ballot now? Or would he be labeled a fascist with troubling ideas, and a product of the neo-colonial patriarchy? And before you dismiss that question, maybe you should read up on what the voting clique that shall not be named says about Heinlein now. Sadly, I suspect the only way Heinlein could get on the ballot today would be if my horde of uncouth barbarian outsiders got involved and put him on our suggested slate.]]

Kind of ironic that you should bring up Heinlein, since it was the Puppy slate that knocked William Patterson’s Heinlein biography off the Related Works shortlist this year. But to answer your question, I don’t think Heinlein would write STARSHIP TROOPERS in 2014. If you know Heinlein, you know that he was a man who changed with the times throughout his career. He was always trying new things, new techniques, new challenges… and his political views changed HUGELY over his lifetime. He wrote much of STARSHIP TROOPERS and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND at the same time, yet one book is beloved of conservative military buffs while the other became a hippie bible. I have no idea what he would be writing in 2014… but if he were still at the top of his form, I would love to read it.

You didn’t actually answer the question. I didn’t say, if Heinlein evolved into something hypothetically suitable to you guys today, or if Heinlein wrote a novel today, I flat out asked, could Starship Troopers get nominated today?

And to me, I find it more ironic that the first volume of Heinlein’s biography lost to Chicks Dig Timelords.

There is no excuse for any of that. I tried to speak to some of these issues in my blog post called “Hatespeech.” Too much of this kind of shit is flying across the internet in both directions, and I don’t think any good whatsoever is served by debates about who flung the first shit, or who flung the most shit, or who flung the smelliest shit.

It doesn’t matter who did it first, or who did it more, or who did it in 20 international publications, says the person not being slandered… It is remarkable how people unbloodied can stay so above the fray and pronounce how it is all morally equivalent to them. Fantastic. Congratulations, sir, you have claimed the moral high ground. I’m going to head over to Facebook and read about how I eat babies.

(That was hyperbole… Maybe)

Look, I know I’m very testy on this subject, but when the blogs, newspapers, and authors pushing the narrative that Brad and I are white supremacists outnumber the moderate and leftwing professional authors public calls for not being lying, threatening, douchebags, then maybe I’ll be more receptive. But right now, it looks like the people calling for more honest debate and less lies are drastically outnumbered.

More and more, I grow convinced that the internet is toxic. Every controversy brings out the trolls and toads, of every political, religious, and literary persuasion, most of them anonymous, all of them venomous. You can’t control the assholes on your side and I can’t control the assholes on my side. I fear we will both just have to live with that.

Excellent. So why do you guys keep bringing up the right wing answer to Harlan Ellison to try and pin him on me? Turnabout is actually fair play, and if I have to answer for Vox’s sins, then your side should have to answer for the Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance.

Nice, sure. Basic human decency, really. It is grotesque how you cannot have any sort of discussion on the internet without rape threats and death threats coming into it. Makes me despair for our civilization. Hell, I ever see these things on sports blogs.

Agreed.

(this bit is in response to the Locus list having zero Baen books on it)

Do you think that makes Baen unique?

For its size and success? Yes.

It does amuse that so many of your Sad Puppies seem to revere Baen Books and despise Tor Books, which reveals an astonishing ignorance of publishing.

Nope. http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/11/last-sp-post-for-the-week-to-my-people-dont-yell-tor/ When I saw that popping up in the comments, I posted this.

Both Baen and Tor were financed by the same guy, Tom Doherty. You know who the first editor was at Tor? Jim Baen.

Yep. Knew that.

Tor publishes your Puppy favorite, John C. Wright. Kevin Anderson too,

Knew that too.

I believe. And Baen published liberals… me, for instance.

Yep. I’m a fan of Misty Lackey and Eric Flint. Because just like I said in the post, Baen doesn’t care about an author’s politics as long as they can entertain their readers and sell books. I’m waiting for the astonishing ignorance part.

But hey, since you are saying this, maybe you should clarify to the haters that Baen isn’t the home of right wing misogynist sci-fi? Because apparently a whole bunch of reporters and bloggers have an astonishing ignorance of publishing.

Come on. Really? Look at the LoneStarCon ballot, the last before the Sad Puppies really began to have an impact. John Scalzi and Lois McMaster Bujold. Indistinguishable from one another? Can’t tell Brandon Sanderson from Saladin Ahmed? Jake Lake and Kim Stanley Robinson? Ken Liu and Pat Cadigan, identical snowflakes? How about the editors? Stanley Schmidt of ANALOG and Sheila Williams of ASIMOV’s, do you imagine they had the same taste, published the same stories? In long form editor, you had Toni Weisskopf, a Puppy favorite, against Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who your Puppies love to hate, with Sheila Gilbert of DAW thrown in as well, plus Lou Anders and Liza Gorinsky. All just snow? I mean, if you say so… but I see a feast there, a table laid out with all sorts of different meats and fruits and cheeses.

Went over this above, but let me point out a couple of things. Who on there went against my A-C above? I see a couple… That’s it.

Sadly, Stanley Schmidt had to retire before he could win after two decades of losing to somebody with a bigger clique, which is bull crap. Toni Weisskopf was on the ballot that year because of Sad Puppies 1. Yep, Toni’s only nominations in her career have been from Sad Puppies, so I think it is kind of funny you are tossing that at me as evidence of how unbiased you are, since we got her there.

When you guys ignore somebody like Toni Weisskopf for decades, and give Patrick Nielsen Hayden a dozen nominations, yeah, that’s a regular fruits and cheese tray right there.

Diversity all over the place.

Yeah, a white liberal beats the Jewish single mom. I’m sure Kameron Hurley will call it a triumph of diversity.

That made me laugh, I admit. Very funny… but it’s all hyperbole and sweeping generalization. I don’t recognize any of those characterizations. Which book was “bigots are stupid?” Which one was “capitalists are stupid bigots?” Can you slap name tags on these straw men?

It would be faster for you to tell me which books featured capitalism as a positive thing. 🙂

I think that once again you are paraphrasing and turning the insult dial up to eleven. I will agree that there was a backlash.

It is interesting how you just dismiss lying defamation campaigns so easily.

Permit me to suggest that much of the negative press you got derived from the fact that one of the stories you placed on the ballot was that novelette by Vox Day, who was already infamous by that point because of his attack on Nora Jemison, his run for SFWA president, and his expulsion from that organization. Here we are back again to the “lumping together” we discussed earlier. Had Vox Day not been on your ticket, I suspect the backlash would not have been a tenth as vociferous as it was.

Yep, I put one story from Vox Day on the ballot for SP2. I read it earlier that year, and personally, I enjoyed it, but then again, my perceptions weren’t colored by all of you guy’s hatey-hate and judging books by their covers. I also had it on my sidebar for a month, so many of my fans read it.

When it came time to put my SP2 slate together (which was such a nefarious master plan that it consisted of me saying, hmmm… what did I like this year, and then posting it on my blog) I remembered that story. I was also trying to get people motivated to get involved in the Hugo process, and I knew he had a lot of blog traffic. Not to mention that one of my stated goals was to demonstrate that SJWs would have a massive freak out if somebody with the wrong politics got on. So on the slate it went. I nominated Vox Day because Satan didn’t have any eligible works that period.

Not to mention that in my nefarious lockstep slate voting, I think Vox had like half as many nominations as I did, because my fans are just going to do whatever the hell they feel like. Maybe if you guys hadn’t kept WorldCon so tiny, a handful of people wouldn’t be able to violate your secret gentlemen’s agreements and get bad people on the ballot.

Imagine, for example, that there had been a “SJW” slate the same year, and that they had gotten half a dozen stories on the ballot,

We don’t have to imagine.

but one of those had been by Requires Hate? (Actually, of course, Hate was nominated for the Campbell, but under a pseudonym).The lashback would have been just as nasty. In your case, it did not help that the Day story was terrible.

Really? So where was this nasty lashback when one of your cliques nominated somebody for having a racist blog? Oh, wait… There wasn’t any. Sheesh, at least Vox Day actually wrote some fiction.

Your public platform was all about restoring “quality” to the Hugos, and yet one of your standard bearers was the worst piece of writing on the ballot. (In my opinion, of course. All of this is opinion).

So, I let something you don’t like get onto the ballot, and that destroys every other work on the ballot, and it also destroys every other work on the ballot the next year, and I’m assuming it destroys every work on the ballot forever. Those are some harsh double standards you’ve got there.

But it doesn’t really matter, because Vox is off doing his own thing. You tried to shun a man who is incapable of being shunned. He got kicked out of the market, so went and built his own market. The more you go after him, the stronger he gets. I don’t think you guys realize that most of me and Brad’s communication with Vox consists of us asking him to be nice and not burn it all down out of spite.

Got it. Politics, race, religion, and sexual orientation, OUT. Damned good stories, IN. And for this year’s Damned Good Story standard bearer, you chose… John C. Wright SIX TIMES!!! John C. Wright, a writer famed far and wide for having no opinions on politics, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and would never dream of injecting such messages into his Damned Good Stories.

No, I actually chose Jim Butcher in novel, which is the flagship big deal award. Wright is in the other categories.

Were you upset when Mira Grant got 5 nominations in one year? (only unlike Wright, she had nominations for several years before that too), and I do believe that she can be rather politically outspoken herself (but for the record, I think she’s a damned good writer).

Because, after all, the Puppies get sad when they are made to read Message Fiction.

Why, Mr. Martin, I do believe you are paraphrasing or using hyperbole! Or you’re just putting words into my mouth, couldn’t tell. Our problem isn’t that message in fiction exists. It is when message overshadows story, or in many cases in recent years, message replaces story. Or message kills the story, and sodomizes the corpse.

Besides, Wright wasn’t on Sad Puppies ballot six times. We had him in for novella, short story, and I believe related work, all for things which frankly, we thought were excellent. That was it. The other nominations came in from Vox’s rival Rabid Puppies slate. And it probably helped that when I Book Bombed Wright’s suggested work in our Book Bombs leading up to the close of nominations, while people were on Amazon they bought his other eligible stuff too and found they liked it.

Also, the ones on our slate aren’t preachy message fiction. From your description I’m assuming that you haven’t read it yet, because I don’t think Wright’s story will bother you with his Catholic cooties. I can’t speak for the Rabid Puppies selections because I’ve not read all of them yet, but the SP ones were good.

So Wright is in, and who is out? James S.A. Corey. Emily St. John Mandel. John Scalzi (of course). THREE BODY PROBLEM. Joe Abercrombie. Larry Niven. Greg Bear. Daniel Abraham. John Varley. William Gibson. Joe Haldeman. Greg Benford. Lev Grossman. Stephen King. No damned good stories there. I guess. No real science fiction, no exciting fantasy, nothing entertaining or commercial, just pretentious left-wing literary crap, right?

I’m not sure how Wright’s nominations in short story, novella, and related works bumped a bunch of novels out. Apparently hyperbole is only a sin when I do it.

But you would probably find it amusing to know that at least one of the people you listed quietly support Sad Puppies, but sadly, judging by their tweets, another one I’m a fan of now believes that I’m a white supremacist.

I think everybody you listed there had a novel, so Wright bumped none of them. The SP nominations for best novel were from Jim Butcher, Marko Kloos, and Kevin J. Anderson (speaking of paying his dues, this is his 125th novel). I’m curious what makes any of the novelists you listed such a profoundly better choice than the three from Sad Puppies? Couldn’t you just as easily have said Leckie is in, and who is out, and then wrote the same list?

I have already posted about my opposition to the various NO AWARD strategies.

Thank you.

I hope that NO AWARD will not sweep the board top to bottom. My best guess right now is that it won’t, but there is a good chance that NO AWARD will take all the “All Puppy” categories, the three short fiction categories and Best Related Book. No one really knows, of course. We are all in uncharted territory here.

And if they do that, it will send a very, very clear message. My people will proceed accordingly.

If I could clap my hands and make everybody play nice, I would, but I do not have that superpower.

You are one of the most famous authors in the world. I’m a pulp writing hack nobody. If I can change the entire Hugo process just by posting about it on my blog, I don’t think you give yourself enough credit.

But it is interesting that you talk about “scaring the hell out of authors” on your side. Fear is a big part of this. People on the other side of the fence are scared as well, and when people are afraid, they lash out.

My side has had a few years head start. It has been something of a slow burn.

Both sides here feel they are being attacked, and the war of words just seems to keep escalating, and all that can come of that is mutually assured destruction.

I don’t want to see that either, but the ball is no longer in my court. Again, like I closed with last time, you guys need to decide what the Hugos really are, an award for just one small part of fandom, or an award that represents all of fandom. Can’t have both. You guys decide. If it’s just for you guys, and we’re not welcome, fine. We’ll take it from there.

Anyways, thank you for taking the time to respond to me. We see things very differently, but it is nice to be able to discuss it. I do apologize in advance if anything I said came across as cranky, because that wasn’t my intent. It has been a long week.

Honestly, I figure we’ve said about everything we can say and should move. I spent half the day writing this and need to get back to work. If I keep you from writing your next book, YOUR FANS WILL MURDER ME.

Okay, that’s hyperbole… Maybe… A little.

Thanks

-Larry Correia