Here’s an Itemized List of Thirty Years of Disagreements (the pettiest blind item you’ll ever read, part 1)

This weekend, I burned a bridge that I’d been too busy to bother torching for the past few years. That’s right, this post is about a friendship that became a non-friendship. And while it wasn’t actually thirty years long, at least thirty years worth of “what in the actual real goddamn verifiable fuck” got packed into a single decade.


When I first started writing, I had a wonderful support group. A circle of women who all had the same dream: to become published romance authors. Like an elite team of assassins a la Kill Bill, we each had our own specialty. Some of us wrote romantic comedy. Some of us wrote romantic fantasy. Some of us wrote romantic suspense, or paranormal romance. You get the picture. There were five of us. To protect people, I’ll change their names, except for Bronwyn Green. Because Bronwyn Green is pretty much how this entire story began.



I fell in with this group of women that called themselves The Friday Night Mudslingers after attending one of my first RWA chapter meetings. As I walked past one table, a woman dressed like a forest spirit trying to blend in with the humans caught my eye. “I love your shirt!” she enthused. “If I had your boobs, I would wear stuff like that all the time.”


I’d never met this person, but it turned out to be Bronwyn Green. She sat at a table with two other women. We’ll call one Pam, and the other…we’ll call her Erika. I call her that because she looks very much like another famous writer named Erika.


Erika was as friendly and as engaging as Bron was, though slightly more reserved. When they learned that we lived in the same city, they invited me to join the Mudslingers. Beside them, Pam sat sullenly, interjecting into the conversation that “some” of them were in the group. Not her, I gathered.


I learned early on that there were some unspoken rules Erika expected all of the Mudslingers to adhere to, whether or not we were aware of them. Once, Bronwyn told me a cute story about Erika’s children. It was an innocuous anecdote that couldn’t have harmed anyone, but when I mentioned it in front of Erika, she gave Bron a look that said, “we’ll discuss this later.” Bronwyn told me that Erika had considered this “talking about her”, which was her number one “don’t” of friendships. I could only wonder, if it was so important to her, why hadn’t she mentioned it? Anything from simply telling someone else what you got Erika for Christmas could be construed as malicious backstabbing, so we were constantly on guard.


There was a hierarchy to our clique, and Erika was firmly at the head. She was our leader. She knew The Elements of Style the way some people know the Bible. For an industry outsider, she always seemed to be in on all the latest publishing gossip (being pre-Twitter, this was very impressive). Our meetings were usually held in her home, where she would make elaborate appetizers and we would stay up until “stupid o’clock” in the morning, reading our chapters aloud and working through grammar problems, inconsistencies, and head-hopping. We always printed enough copies for everyone, so they could read along, and at the top of each first page we wrote our names and the date. Why? “Because we had a problem with plagiarism before,” Erika informed me. “Pam stole something from Bronwyn’s story. That’s why she’s not a part of the group anymore. That’s why she acted so weird when we first met you.” Later, she would insist that a mysterious threat mailed to her house had come from Pam, who’d sent it out of jealousy.


Being a Mud Slinger was one of the best times of my life. Without their help, I would have never gotten published. When I joined, Erika was well into the submission process on several of her books. In those days, romance authors sent out query letters, three chapters, and a synopsis, all printed out and stuck in a real envelope and sent through the mail. It was truly an archaic world back then. I envied how professional and calm Erika was about all of it. She received rejections from Harlequin, from Dorchester, from Berkley, and even though they were rejections, they sounded so glamorous. She was a real writer. She made it all seem possible.


Over time, I noticed a few more odd, unspoken rules of behavior required to remain in her good graces. Disliking a book or a television show or a movie that she liked was a personal slight against her. I learned this rule harshly when I said I didn’t like a Sherrilyn Kenyon book I’d tried to read; to this day, I’m not sure if I actually did end up liking Sherrilyn Kenyon’s books, or if I enjoyed them out of fear of being rejected by Erika. This rule had a matching clause wherein if you enjoyed a book or a television show or a movie that she didn’t like, it was also a personal slight. Bronwyn and I loved Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Erika did not. Just a mention of the show in Erika’s presence was unacceptable. If Erika found a new book about writing or a new diet, we were pressured to follow those techniques, too. Only someone who didn’t want to be successful in life would go against Erika’s advice.


Yet even if you did take her suggestions, you were doing her wrong. The moment you became “better” at something than she was, you became a threat. You were now unwilling competition, locked in a contest you never wanted to take part in. When she and Bronwyn and I signed up for Weight Watchers together, she would ask us our weight loss for the week to compare. Always, hers would be more impressive, and always this led to more sage advice about what we were doing wrong.


At this point, you might be thinking, “Why did you stay friends with this person?” Because she was genuinely fun and magnetic. She had a way of making sure you knew that was more experienced than you. That you needed her. That without her help, you wouldn’t make it.


That’s why it’s no surprise to me, looking back, that everything started to unravel after the first of us sold a book. It was Carol, our quiet friend with a quick tongue and a belief in signs from the universe. She sold a paranormal romantic comedy to Dorchester. We were all shocked. I don’t think any of us really believed that one day, our hard work would pay off.


Or maybe we did, but we all just believed that it would be Erika, by default.


During our Friday night critique sessions, things began to feel weird. Erika would constantly allude to “secret projects” she had in the works. Though she never said it outright, she heavily implied that she couldn’t share the details with us because her ideas were so good, we might copy them. This led to a bizarre confrontation in which she scolded me for changing my email address without her okay. I’d used the name of a Celtic goddess in the address, and she’d planned to use that same name for one of the characters in a “secret project” she’d never even spoken of to me. “Now I can’t even write it,” she spat, “because all I can think of is you!” She became convinced that the publishing houses she submitted to were plagiarizing her query letters as back cover copy for other books. She was furious when a common phrase she used as the title of one of her manuscripts was used as the title of another book, insisting that they’d gotten the idea from her.


On my second try submitting to a major publishing house, I received a revise and resubmit letter. Bronwyn Green received one for one of her books, as well. Erika decided that it was no longer worth anyone’s time to submit to publishing houses, and we were all being very foolish. She would look for an agent, instead. She also created a new format for our reading order during critique group. We would draw numbers from a basket, and go in that order. For five weeks in a row, I drew the last spot. For five weeks in a row, she announced that it was far too late in the evening to read my pages. I was hurt and confused, and I didn’t even know why I was. It wasn’t as though she could have fixed a random number draw. It never occurred to me to think it strange that it had never been too late at night to finish everyone’s chapters before, and certainly not for a whole month.


Around this time, Erika invited someone new into our group. Maggie was a very friendly, very Christian woman who carried a handgun in her fashionable purse, and had a handsome family in a Dutch Reform town nearby. Her house was beautiful, and much larger than any of ours. It looked like someone had professionally decorated it and staged it for a magazine every time we saw it. She wore just the right clothes and her hair was just so. She wanted to learn how to write, and we were all happy to have her. Shortly after she joined our group, Erika bought new couches and a coffee table, and painted her living room a trendy color. She started criticizing Bronwyn’s parenting, almost as if to impress Maggie. “My kids only watch two hours of TV a week,” Erika insisted one night, though we’d been at her house for four hours already that evening and her children had been glued to television in their bedroom for most of that time. During one heated scolding, Erika told Bronwyn that she was abusing her children by not getting rid of her cats and keeping a perfectly dust-free house; we all sat stunned while Bronwyn wiped away tears of shame.


Why didn’t we speak up? I have no idea. I don’t know why anyone didn’t speak up for me when Erika took me to task for the email thing. Or why no one said, “But it’s not fair, we haven’t read Jen’s pages in over a month.” The only thing I can think is that we were all so used to marching to the tune Erika played, we didn’t realize we could fall out of rhythm. And we couldn’t, if we wanted to stay in the group. Because once you left the Mudslingers, it was over. You had no more friends. You were an outsider. We had all watched Pam cling to the fringes, desperate for a way back in. We didn’t want to be her, so we kept putting up with it.


Carol’s book was published. I got a three-book contract from Harlequin. Erika told Bronwyn, “I knew it would either go me, you, Jenny, then Carol, or Carol, then Jenny, then you, then me.” I sympathized with Erika. It had to be difficult to see your friends get something you wanted so badly. It was okay, I figured, that Erika couldn’t seem to be genuinely happy for us. Someday she would be. She would get a contract, and then everything would be back to normal. In my prayers (because I prayed back then), I would ask God to please, please let Erika sell a book, so we could all go back to the way things were before.


It would have saved me a lot of time if I’d just realized that things would never, ever be the same again.


To be continued…

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 12, 2016 07:00
No comments have been added yet.


Abigail Barnette's Blog

Abigail Barnette
Abigail Barnette isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
Follow Abigail Barnette's blog with rss.