Don’t Let Them Know What You’re Against Or What You’re For (The Pettiest Blind Item You’ll Ever Read, Part 3)

This is part three of an ongoing series. Part one can be read here. Part two can be read here.After her first sale, Erika continued to rake in contracts. She sold some titles to Total-E-Bound (now Totally Bound) and the infamous Ellora’s Cave. But they were M/F (male/female) titles, and they didn’t do as well as the M/M (male/male) titles that were popular at the time. So, Erika tried some other stuff. She wrote a series of polyamorous books featuring alpha male characters who doubled, sometimes tripled up on the heroine, who was almost always an accomplished career woman who later decided to give up all of her achievements to get spit roasted daily by guys who would grunt “You. Are. Mine.” while they were inside her.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of that kind of book. I always got the feeling from Erika that she fantasized about many men wanting her to quit her job so they could care for her and make her feel sexually desired, because of her addiction to control. She was so busy trying to dictate the lives of everyone around her–going so far as to do her kids’ homework and projects for them–that she had no time for herself. She often humble-bragged that submissive sex appealed to her specifically because she was so busy running everything in her perfect, perfect life.

The Mudslingers continued meeting on Friday nights, but we didn’t critique each other’s writing anymore. I was perfectly happy with that; one of the last times we did read our work, I’d written a passage about a heroine with an obnoxious coworker named something Erika perceived to be too close to her own name. Though she claimed it was a nickname that people called her all the time, I’d never once heard this happen and had no clue. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone refer to her by this nickname that “everyone calls me” to this very day. Instead of reviewing our chapters, we all hung out in Erika’s living room and wrote. Carol eventually stopped coming. “What’s the point?” she asked me. “I could stay at home and write and get more done.”

Carol no longer coming to the Friday night write-ins was seen as a horrible slight, as was my decision to move back to the town I’d grown up in. Although I was still driving an hour one-way every Friday for group, my lack of immediate availability appeared to be a problem. In 2006, Erika, Bronwyn, and Carol threw me a surprise wedding shower at Erika’s house. That was the last time I was ever in her home. In 2007, she got tickets for an advance screening of a movie I wanted to see, and she invited me. We weren’t “not friends” anymore, since we saw each other at GRRWG and were still friendly, but we weren’t as close. A part of this, I figured, was that we were moving in separate directions in our careers, and I was beginning to notice the patterns in her behavior toward me with regard to our individual successes. When something good happened to her, we were all expected to be ecstatic for her. When something good happened to us, she found a way to sow doubt and criticism, diminishing our accomplishments.

Erika was still disappointed in the performance of her books, because she while M/M/F was popular, the big “thing” of the moment was M/M . Readership of M/M books seemed to explode overnight, like a field of mushrooms, if the mushrooms were hungry for stories about cowboys fucking each other. M/M authors went from struggling to raking in cash hand-over-fist. So, naturally, Erika (who always cautioned us against following trends but constantly chased them herself) started writing M/M.

Now, I have no problem with this. In the course of my career, I’ve written all sorts of pairings, and I don’t think it’s necessary for an author to write just one type of pairing. But it did bother me that Erika was writing M/M. Because Erika was a full-on, raving homophobe.

Erika always had a problem with Bronwyn Green’s sister. We’ll call her Kate. Erika was very possessive of Bronwyn, who was her best friend and, being the benefactor of that best friendship, shouldn’t need anyone else in her life. Erika was deeply, weirdly jealous of the relationship Bronwyn had with her sister. Let that sink right in: Erika was jealous that Bronwyn cared for and enjoyed spending time with a member of her immediate family. Compounding the problem, in Erika’s mind, was that Kate is a lesbian. Because she was raised in a supportive and loving home, Kate came out while she was still in high school. In Catholic high school. Bronwyn was naturally proud of her sister for being so brave. But Erika was disgusted. She repeatedly lectured Bronwyn about how important it was to steer Kate away from being gay, as though that were possible. If Kate ever came up in conversation, Erika would roll her eyes and dismiss Kate’s sexuality as a phase or a plea for attention.

Erika recoiled from the very idea of homosexuality. She hated any suggestion that an entertainer whose work she enjoyed could be gay (my all-time favorite instances in which she defended her darlings from spurious accusations of homosexuality were Clay Aiken and Adam Lambert). Homosexuality, Erika explained to us one night, was a choice. And it was a choice between going to heaven like a good Christian or going to hell like a sinner.

When that “choice” meant she could make money off it, though, she suddenly became very publicly pro-gay. Which meant she had to work harder to hide her “secret identity”; if anyone at her stridently anti-gay church found out what she wrote, she would be ostracized, and if anyone at her publishers ever found out that she went to the stridently anti-gay church, she would probably lose her contracts. This was a point that was repeatedly hammered home to us: do not, under any circumstances, reveal her identity. Lots of authors feel this way about the pen names they use for various reasons, and I understand. People have been fired from their day jobs because nosey  coworkers discovered their secret romance careers. But Erika treated her pen name as though it were some all-consuming mystery that had gripped the public at large. She seemed to believe that everyone was trying to find out, as if in all the hallways of every publishing house, in every aisle of the bookstore, on every internet message board, people were desperate to uncover who she really was.

In the romance industry, the biggest event of the year is the Romantic Times Convention. In 2008, Bronwyn and Erika and Carol attended. I was super excited. I was going to be there with Mr.Jen and my BFF Jill, as well as another friend I’d met at the convention the previous year. I couldn’t wait to hang out with everyone and have a good time. I saw Bronwyn and Erika a couple of times, very briefly, during the five days of the conference. We met by chance on one of those days. Bronwyn and Erika introduced me to a woman I’ll call Maya. Maya wrote for some of the same publishers as Bronwyn and Erika; I believe that’s how they met. We chatted a bit, I introduced Jill and Mr.Jen to Maya, and then Erika said, “Well…see you later.” I had been dismissed.

Ellora’s Cave held a lavish party one night during the conference. They put on a laughably cheesy stage production starring their cover models, who ended their performance by gyrating to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA” and somberly folding an American flag like a bed sheet. The theme of the party was something to do with Hollywood, so when you entered, it was on a red carpet lined with Walk of Fame-style stars with their authors’ names on them. And in case you didn’t catch their names the first time, the authors paraded across the stage one at a time, accompanied by the models. There was even a velvet-rope VIP section in which only Ellora’s Cave authors were allowed. Erika made sure that Bronwyn and Maya stayed in that area at all times, and when I tried to talk to Bronwyn over the velvet rope, Erika quickly called her back because, “We need you!” I can’t fault Bronwyn for going; an editor was sitting at her table and it was a networking opportunity. We were at an industry conference, after all, so we were on the clock. But it seemed too convenient to me that Bronwyn was only “needed” if she was talking to me. At another party, Erika made sure to save seats for Bronwyn and Carol, but when we showed up she informed us that the table “filled up too quickly.” I suspect she didn’t even try.

Bronwyn and Erika left RT on Saturday afternoon, so Erika could be home in time to go to church on Sunday. She’d spent all week flirting with cover models and celebrating the erotic romance she wrote. She’d spent all week pretending to support the LGBTQA+ community. Then ran home in time to tithe to a church who hated us.

When we returned from RT, we no longer met as a critique group, or a writing group. My second book series debuted the next year to critical panning and dismal sales. Erika continued to attend her church while reaping the rewards of a successful career writing erotica. But Erika’s time as GRRWG president was almost up. Although our membership had tripled, the group was still small. Finding volunteers to fill board vacancies had become difficult, so the membership voted to stagger the elections. The president and treasurer elections would take place on odd years, the veep and secretary would be decided on even years. This wasn’t a bad idea, but it did mean that Bronwyn would be tied up for an extra year and wouldn’t be eligible for the upcoming election. I resigned my post as secretary, and Carol (who had been serving as treasurer and had just ended her term) stepped into my shoes until the next election. Erika was succeeded by a soft-spoken woman we’ll call Ruth, but our former president still found a way to keep her fingers in the pie. She appointed herself “board advisor”. Past presidents would stay on the board for the entirety of the next presidency, break tie votes, and oversee the board operations, just to make sure everything was going smoothly. In this case, “smoothly” meant “going the way Erika wanted it to.”

It was only a few months into her presidency that Ruth discovered she was pregnant with twins, and wisely decided to resign. As vice president, Bronwyn should have stepped in to fill the vacancy until the next election. Most members of the group would have been happy to let her continue on as president for the rest of Ruth’s term. Erika advised Bronwyn not to accept the position, as she wasn’t “organized” enough, but it was more likely that Erika just couldn’t stand the thought of the woman that she was best friends with to have some kind of perceived power over her. Because Erika wasn’t just jealous of Bronwyn’s relationship with Kate (or anyone else); Erika was jealous of Bronwyn full-stop.

Once, Bronwyn complained about an argument she had with her husband, the way people occasionally complain to their friends about their partners. Erika’s response was to say, gleefully, “I’m so glad you guys fight.” She had been deeply bothered by the fact that Bronwyn has a good marriage. Erika’s wasn’t always the happiest, and the fact that Bronwyn’s was meant that Erika was somehow losing a competition that Bronwyn wasn’t even aware of. Most of their friendship was like that, with Erika desperately needing Bronwyn to engage in any hobby or writing-related activity she came up with, so that Erika could prove she was better. She often told Bronwyn what she could and couldn’t write, presenting these edicts as helpful advice. “You can’t write BDSM,” she told Bronwyn. “You’re not very good at it and I don’t want you to embarrass yourself,” and other blanket statements that every member of the Mudslingers had been the target of. For me, it was “You can’t write romance. Too many people die in your books, and they don’t have a happily ever after.” But her need to compete with me wasn’t nearly as insidious as her need to control and “win” with Bronwyn. So it didn’t come as a shock to me that Erika didn’t want Bronwyn to take over running GRRWG. And she definitely didn’t like it when Carol volunteered to be nominated in a special election. Carol won, and became president over GRRWG, which had grown into a much larger group than we had ever anticipated.

Meanwhile, my feelings toward Erika had slowly begun to change. Carol and I were beginning to doubt our friendship with Erika, and for that, we deserved to be punished.

To Be Continued…