The Room Where It Happens (the pettiest blind item you’ll ever read, part 2)

This is part two of an ongoing series. Part one can be read here.

I mentioned before that I met Erika through a local RWA chapter. Erika didn’t have many nice things to say about the members of the group, and because I didn’t know better, I internalized every negative thing she said. After all, if we were required to like and dislike the same entertainment choices, the same obviously held true for people.

One of the biggest problems Erika had with the chapter was that the business portion of the meetings went on for far too long. In fairness to Erika, they absolutely did. For an hour we would sit and pour over every report from every committee, from the president of the group right on down to the woman who kept the chapter scrapbook. It was exhausting. When Erika said she planned to run for president at the next election, I felt such admiration for her. She saw a problem, had a solution for fixing it, and forged ahead with confidence. When she invited me to run for a board position as well, I jumped at the chance. I was the worst treasurer in history. So maybe all the Hamilton references in the titles of this story aren’t terribly apt. But we ended up with a board consisting of Erika, our president, Bronwyn, our vice president, Carol as secretary, and me, the worst treasurer of all time.

It was during our term on the board that Carol sold her book, and that Bronwyn and I received our revise and submit letters from Harlequin. It was also during that time that we realized that the RWA chapter we belonged to wasn’t a great fit for us. We were all from the Grand Rapids area, and the chapter moved from city to city, trying to cover as much area as possible for its membership. One month we’d be driving to Lansing for a meeting, the next we’d drive to Kalamazoo. Because one single member lived in Jackson–so far across the state that the member would have been better served just driving an hour to the Greater Detroit chapter–we held two meetings a year there. During our time on the board, that member never even attended the Jackson meetings, but we couldn’t get the membership to agree that the location was inconvenient and pointless. It was very frustrating. The only sensible solution, Erika decided, was for us to form our own RWA chapter.

This is possibly the second good thing that came out of my acquaintance with Erika. She took the reigns to create a group that, while not still RWA affiliated, is a fantastic resource for writers (if you live in Michigan, you should come out and see us sometime). We decided to name ourselves the Grand Rapids Region Romance Writers of America, or GRRWA for short. Erika would, of course, be the president. It only made sense. She’d already been president of our old chapter, and she was the one who’d done all the research into how to form a NFPO, how to run a meeting (Strunk & White had been replaced by Mr. Robert and his rules of order), and, as she often reminded all of us, she was by far the most organized and pulled together of our bunch. Bronwyn would stay vice president, and Carol and I would flip roles.

Our first meetings were very small, with only about five or six of us present. What shocked me, though, was the presence of Pam. It struck me as odd. While Erika had her strict rule about no one talking about her, she made free to gossip about anyone she liked.  She found Pam strange and unpleasant, thought she was a bad parent, disapproved of almost all of her life choices, mocked her appearance, and of course there was still the (very real) plagiarism incident. I couldn’t fathom why Erika would consider Pam a valuable asset to our fledgling group, but, as with so many other things that happened during my friendship with Erika, I didn’t question it deeply. Erika clearly knew better than I did what was going on.

We were just getting into our groove when Erika received an odd piece of mail. The Mudslingers met for our usual critique session, and she presented us with a hand-written letter. I wish I could remember what it said. Suffice it to say, it was vaguely threatening, with stuff about “knowing the truth”, etc. Erika called the police, and an officer came out to say there was nothing he could do about it. As it was the night before our regular chapter meeting, we opted to play it safe and not convene at our usual restaurant–a venue that Erika complained was too far from her house, anyway–and meet at her house instead. She told us all that she was sure Pam had sent the weird letter. She could tell from the handwriting. I was furious that Pam would try to sabotage us like that. We started holding our meetings at restaurants closer to Erika’s house.

It’s only now that I suspect the letter didn’t come from Pam at all, but from Erika herself. I can’t prove that’s the case, but I don’t know what to believe about it all. At that point, Erika could have said Mel Gibson sent the damn thing and I would have believed her.

Our new RWA chapter didn’t change much from the format of the old chapter. Even the interminably long business meetings returned. Erika would call us to order, then give her report, which often included talking directly to Bronwyn in hushed tones for long stretches of time while the rest of us waited. She would say something to Bronwyn or Carol, then glance at the rest of us with a knowing look, as if she were reveling in the fact that she held our attention.

In the interest of furthering our growth as writers, Erika proposed we have a writing “retreat”, a weekend at a nearby hotel where we booked their biggest suite and planned to sit around the table writing and talking and having a generally good time. We did it once, with great success. When we did it a second time, we showed up and found that Erika had decided to change the format. Instead of having a weekend to write and relax, she had planned an intensive seminar, which she would teach. We sat around the table for eight hours while she taught us the entirety of Chris Batty’s No Plot? No Problem! No one really wanted to do it, but everyone went along with it, either because we were brainwashed by Erika or, for some of the non-Mudslingers, just because everyone else went along with it.

Just like everyone went along with Erika’s idea to publish a how-to writing guide. It sounded like a great idea: the five founding members would write sections of a comprehensive guide that we would self-publish as an e-book and print-on-demand title. In order to get the word out (both about our own writing and our new chapter), we would create a CD version of the book and send it with Carol to the RWA National Conference to sell it. I don’t know if they had a vendor room or what, I wasn’t in on that part of the planning. What I was a part of was the production of the CD. I designed a label and would burn every copy. I think we were making fifty. Erika outlined the book herself, and divided up the essays we would each write according to our strengths. She took on the bulk of the writing herself, because, she told us, she worked faster.

There was a very specific time frame we were working under to get this project done. This was back in the olden days, when burning data to a CD could take anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes, depending on how fast your computer could creak along, so even once everything was arranged to go on the disk, I still needed enough time to burn them all. I couldn’t start until everyone finished their articles. Carol’s essays were done. Bronwyn’s were done. Mine were done. We were just waiting on Erika. She swore she would have them to me in time to send them to the conference with Carol, but the day came and Carol had to leave Michigan without them. We would have to ship them, and were down to the wire. When Bronwyn called Erika to ask about the progress of the articles Erika hadn’t finished, she either wouldn’t answer the phone or would answer only to bark at Bronwyn for daring to call. Didn’t She know that Erika was working? Didn’t Bronwyn trust Erika to pull it off? When Bronwyn suggested we could divide up the remaining essays between the three of us just to get them done, Erika stopped communicating with us altogether.

At around noon the day before the last possible day we could ship the CDs to the conference, Bronwyn called me and we faced the music. There would be no further essays from Erika. After taking on double the responsibility, Erika had managed to produce less than half of what she’d promised. Bronwyn and I split up Erika’s missing essays and wrote them ourselves, all the while sick to our stomachs at what her reaction would be when she found out that we’d taken what was rightfully hers. We stayed up for twenty-four hours straight to get the project finished and sent out to Carol, and braced ourselves for the retribution we’d receive for stealing Erika’s spotlight.

It never came. After Carol returned from the conference (where we sold a whopping six copies of the CD, so maybe fifty was overkill), Erika asked us all to meet her at a local restaurant so we could talk about how the project fell through. I assumed she would apologize for letting us down. I don’t know now why I thought that. I couldn’t remember a time Erika had ever apologized for anything. We all crowded into a booth and, instead of an apology, Erika explained to us that some truly horrible family issues had arisen for her, and that’s why she’d dropped the ball and not finished the project. I understood how a person could feel like things were out of control, but what I couldn’t understand was why she’d rejected Bronwyn’s offer of help. Why she hadn’t talked to us at all, or just stepped down from the project? I asked these questions as gently as I could, because I was still very put out at this lack of professionalism from the one person in our group who insisted that she was perfect. Erika’s mother (who was a member of the group and who had worked on the CD, as well), put on her most patronizing voice and told me, “Well, we’re always hearing about how you’re so busy with your revisions.”

At this point, I’d been offered a three book contract from Harlequin, but I’d been shuffled from their Bombshell line to the Luna, then Mira lines, as well as bounced between three editors within the space of about five months. With each change came a new set of revisions to my already twice-revised manuscript. It was frustrating to keep working on the same book over and over when what I really wanted was to write something new. I guess I’d been complaining about that a little too much, and it had come across as humble-bragging. I was mortified. I hadn’t meant to be such a jerk. I went home wishing I’d never sold my book. It was obviously turning me into an egomaniacal monster, and it was hurting Erika.

Nobody ever brought up the CD debacle again.

Now, a term on GRRWA’s board of directors lasted for two years, and you could hold one office for two terms. Basically, like the U.S. House of Representatives, but with term limits. Erika had been president for about two years when she sold her first book. It was to Ellora’s Cave, a company that specialized in e-book erotica. At this time, RWA National had a sketchy attitude toward both e-books and erotic romance.  Because of this, Erika couldn’t be considered “PAN eligible”; that is, she wouldn’t be allowed into the organization’s Published Authors Network because she didn’t receive an advance and her book wasn’t “in print.” She’d finally sold a book, but she wasn’t considered “published” yet by RWA. Suddenly, it became imperative that we dissolve GRRWA and create a new group.

I’m glad with all my heart that we dissolved GRRWA. At the time, in addition to the attitude that e-books weren’t “real” books, gay and poly romance was also being discouraged by RWA’s national board. I wanted to leave RWA, but I couldn’t do that and remain a member of a local chapter. And although I did recently rejoin RWA, dissolving our chapter turned out to be a great move. After a grueling four hour meeting to change our name, we became The Grand Rapids Region Writers Group.

The name was really the only thing membership had any input on. With one term on the board up, we began to discuss who would take over when Erika had to step down. That wasn’t a problem, because Erika had no plan to step down. She informed us that as GRRWG was a new group, she had never been president of it before, and therefore she had two terms ahead of her. There wasn’t even a question of having  an election; it was a “fledgling organization” she explained, and any change in leadership could be ruinous. As president, she spruced up our policies and bylaws, including adding a definition of “published”, much like RWA’s PAN requirements. But unlike PAN, you didn’t get anything out of being an official published author in GRRWG. There were no extra perks, no access to specialized resources, hell, there wasn’t even a lapel pin. There was no need to have a delineation between published and unpublished writers in our group, except to satisfy Erika’s ego.

It didn’t take me long to realize that Erika’s ego was the entire reason our chapter left the RWA in the first place.

To Be Continued…