Slash and Burn

by Valerie Bronwen

  “The best, though, was when she was outed as a straight woman.” Travis grinned. “It was so awesome. After using her website and her blog to trash people for years, like I said, and rip other people’s books to shreds as not being authentic—she said terrible stuff about how straight women couldn’t write authentic gay romance novels, and then she accused another author—who’d given an interview about how her teenaged son’s coming-out struggle had inspired her to write young adult fiction about gay teens—well, Antinous blasted her for ‘using her son’s experience for her own profit’ and things like that. The nastiest, most hateful stuff imaginable.”

  “Leslie MacKenzie,” Pat interjected. “And a lovelier woman you’ve never met. She’s a really good writer, too. She’s here this weekend.”

  Interesting.

  “So, one of Leslie’s fans was connected to Antinous’s first publisher somehow, I don’t really know how it all came about,” Mike picked up the story, “and the fan exposed her publicly—got a scan of her signature page on the book contract, which of course was in her real name—and then tracked down the model she’d been using for her author photos and author appearances, and got him to admit he wasn’t a writer.”

  “I imagine that must have been quite a scandal,” I replied slowly.

  “Oh, it was like someone had thrown a grenade into the Internet.” Pat shook her head sadly. “Everyone she’d been horrible to went after her with torches and pitchforks, and then other people tried to defend her, and it was just this big blow-up. And then she claimed that she used a male name because she was actually trans…”

  “Which really pissed me the fuck off because I am trans,” Pat snapped. “And how dare she appropriate the identity of transpeople? To give herself credibility? The fucking bitch.”

  “She told me she was bisexual,” I replied.

  All four of them looked at me.

  “We were on the same flight from Atlanta,” I explained. “She sat next to me in the gate area, and she kind of told me the story—not like this, of course. She told me she was actually bisexual, but just too lazy to ever try to be with another woman.”

  They exchanged glances. “I told you she wasn’t trans,” Demi said smugly, folding her arms and leaning back in her chair. “It was just her scurrying for cover, trying to excuse her lies.”

  “I don’t know why she felt the need to lie in the first place,” Mike said. “It’s not like the romance community isn’t full of straight women writing gay romances. It wasn’t a big deal that she was a straight woman—the problem was that she actively lied and perpetrated a fraud, and under the guise of that fraud, she attacked other writers.” He shook his head. “She claimed her publisher made her do it. But her publisher didn’t make her go after other writers. Her publisher didn’t make her act like a complete bitch online.”

  “Did this come out before or after she started publishing with Kyle Bennett?” I asked.

  “I think she went to Asgard after?” Demi shook her head. “I can’t remember.”

  I shook my head. “Funny how when J. T. LeRoy claimed to be a gay man, and hired actors to play the role in public to perpetuate the fraud, she got drummed out of publishing.”

  “Exactly!” Mike put his fist up so I could give him a bump with mine. “J. T. LeRoy was driven out of the business completely for lying about being a gay man. But not Antinous. That bitch was defiant and nasty to the very end.” He made a face. “Yeah, the world’s a better place without her.”

  “Christ, look at the time,” Travis interrupted. “We’re going to be late if we don’t go.”

  They all got up quickly, and there was a flurry of “see you at your workshop” and “it was so lovely to meet you” and so forth before they made their way out of the coffee shop.

  I sat there for a few minutes more, thinking.

  Chapter Four

  About an hour before my workshop was to start, I closed my laptop with a sigh and leaned back in the desk chair.

  I was really behind on my book, but somehow I just couldn’t make myself work on it. I just sat there staring at the screen and the goddamned blinking cursor. Three chapters more was all I needed, and I could turn the damned thing in and get paid. I’d never had this much trouble with a novel before—and the deadline for my next lesbian romance was looming; it was due in less than six months. It was driving me insane. I knew it was there in my subconscious, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it out and onto the page. I just stared at the screen, wishing I was one of those authors who had the discipline to do an outline and then stick to it. I used to outline in the very beginning, until around my third book, when I realized that there was such a huge difference between the outline and the final manuscript that a stranger wouldn’t recognize the finished book from reading the outline. After that, I’d stopped outlining my novels because it was clearly a waste of my time. And I’d never had any problem finishing a book, until now. For some reason, I had no idea how to get Laura out of the jam she was in, figure out who the killer was, and somehow kill off her latest love interest.

  Of course, Laura couldn’t figure out who the killer was because I didn’t know. This was not a good thing. From the very beginning, I hadn’t the slightest idea who’d murdered New Orleans socialite Rebecca Stroud. I’d just plowed ahead, figuring I’d figure it out when I got there the way I always did. Only now I was there and I didn’t have a fucking clue who’d killed her. I’d reread the manuscript I don’t know how many times, to no avail. I’d pored over my character list and their bios, but every time I thought, Yes, he’s the killer, when I started to write it all out it didn’t make sense and seemed trite, boring, unoriginal—something I’d done before.

  Two months past deadline—something that had never happened to me before in my entire career. Not once had I turned in a manuscript late. I always turned everything in promptly, did my edits and revisions in a timely manner, and got the page proofs turned back in well ahead of time.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  I needed to get this book finished so I could start the next one or else I was going to be in the same situation again.

  Maybe you shouldn’t write two books a year anymore.

  It was a conundrum I’d found myself in before. I loved writing, but it was draining, both emotionally and physically exhausting. I started writing the romances as a break from the hard-boiled, somewhat depressing world of Laura Lassiter. Her world was bleak, she dealt with the dregs of humanity, and she’d become more and more cynical with every book. Who could blame her, though, the way her love interests always wound up dead by the last page? This current one was almost too hard for me to write because the subject matter was so dark that I’d found myself drinking too much to get my mind out of that horrible place. There were nights when I’d drown myself in wine, sit in the comfortable living room of my little place at Wilbourne College and could finally understand why Hemingway had shot himself.

  The romances weren’t angst-ridden, of course. I saw myself as writing lesbian chick-lit, romantic comedies with sparkling dialogue and wit and humor that ended happily ever after with my two heroines riding off into the sunset together. I modeled them after those wonderful Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn movies from the 30s and 40s, like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story. And readers responded to them. I didn’t get thousands of emails at my Winter Lovelace Gmail account or on her Facebook page the way Antinous had claimed to, but I got quite a few.

  Those books were about as different from the mysteries as humanly possible. The romances were the way I wanted the world to be; the mysteries were the world as I knew it to be.

  Little wonder I couldn’t make myself go into the mindset I needed to work on The Jade Tiger: A Laura Lassiter Mystery.

  Instead, I’d just spent the entire morning researching Antinous Renault online.

  And what a treasure trove of horror that had turned out to be!

  I rubbed my eyes and stood up, arching my back until it
cracked and the lower back muscles, which had tightened while I sat there, loosened up a bit.

  I got a can of Diet Coke out of the mini-fridge and walked over to the window of my suite’s little living room. I pulled back the curtains and looked out over the French Quarter. The sun was out in force now, and I could practically see the steam rising from the streets.

  When I’d gotten back to my room after running my errands, I’d sat down intending to work on the book. But I couldn’t shake the image of Antinous and her glassy eyes staring at me as the blood pooled around her cracked head. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to nose around online, see what I could find out about her for a little while before diving headfirst back into the book. I was relatively certain she couldn’t possibly be as bad as Jerry and the others had said she was in the coffee shop.

  No one could be that awful, right? They had to be exaggerating.

  Boy, was I wrong.

  The sad truth was they hadn’t even scratched the surface of the horror that had called itself Antinous Renault—and once I started, I got sucked into the Internet vortex completely and there was no coming back out.

  Excuses, excuses. You just don’t want to work on the book.

  And you know the real reason why you started writing two books a year, you can just stop lying to yourself. You started writing two books a year because you needed to keep busy so you wouldn’t think about—

  Determinedly I stopped that train of thought in its tracks, as I did every time my mind tried to go there.

  Antinous’s murder was a fine distraction from those treacherous thoughts.

  The first link in the web search I did took me to her blog, which she’d called Erased from History. I smiled to myself—I’d used that very phrase with her myself at the airport. What could it hurt, I asked myself, to read a few entries? The most recent one had been posted just a few days earlier, and in it she talked about how excited she was to be coming to America for the first time, and how thrilled she was to be on two panels at Angels and Demons—which she referred to as “the TOP GLBT writers’ conference in the world.” I did roll my eyes a little—hasn’t the battle over the order of the letters been over for a while, with the agreement that the L goes first? Typical straight woman, I thought with a shake of my head.

  I read about her having to board her cats (all named after Midnight characters, of course), and what should she pack, and what should she see and where should she eat in New Orleans. It was poignant, and I felt sympathy for the poor deluded thing. I could remember the first time I’d ever gone to something similar as a published author—Bouchercon, right after my first Laura mystery had come out—and how nervous and excited I was. No one, of course, had the slightest idea of who I was there, and it was a bit unnerving to sit at the mass signing and sign two copies of my book while other authors had enormous lines that snaked out the door. The fact that she was so excited about the trip just three days ago, a trip where she was getting to be, in her own words, “an author in public for the first time” was just so sad, given that she’d been killed and never gotten to experience it. She might have been the most horrible person who’d ever lived, but every author should get to experience that at least once in their life.

  That feeling faded rather quickly when I got to her next entry.

  But awful as her blog entries were, I couldn’t stop reading them. It was like eating potato chips or smoking crack. And for a crime writer, they were fascinating.

  Her blog was one of the most fascinating examples of narcissism and self-delusion I’d ever seen—so much so that I bookmarked it so I could go back and reference it whenever I needed to. There were instances when I was so amazed at her utter lack of self-awareness that I had to reread what she’d written several times. It was a fascinating view into a particular mindset that I might be able to use for a future Laura novel. There were times when I found myself thinking, It’s not shocking that someone killed her—the shocking part is it TOOK THIS LONG. I kept reading, going further and further back in time, unable to tear myself away from her psychosis.

  I used to blog on my website, but my entries had gotten fewer and further between as the years went by—it was incredibly hard to find safe topics to write about. I didn’t want to use my blog solely for self-promotion, something I was never completely comfortable with—there was an element of sideshow freak hawking snake oil to it that made me squeamish. Antinous’s blog was the perfect example of what I didn’t want to do. I couldn’t see how this encouraged people to go out and buy her books, or even like her. She came across as a smug know-it-all, and whiny—the posts she made in response to bad reviews were basically public pity parties: feel sorry for me, if you love my books please go defend me and attack the reviewer, poor, poor pitiful me. It made me wince for her. It was pretty clear that outside of her cats, she really didn’t have any real-life friends. There was no one to go have lunch with or have over for tea. The Internet was the extent of her contact with the outside world, which made me rather sad for her. Occasionally she would mention her late parents, but no siblings, no neighbors, no real-life people she interacted with other than her doctor—whom she raged against because he always told her she needed to lose weight.

  It made me really happy I’d never blogged regularly.

  Of course, now the “experts” on publishing said blogging was over and the best way to promote your books was on social media. I had an author page on Facebook where I made announcements about signings and appearances and good reviews and so forth—all the things the publicist at my publisher said I needed to post—but I tried not to engage with people on there. I heard so many horror stories from other authors…and reading this woman’s blog just confirmed that my decision to limit my exposure to social media was the right one for me. I decided it was probably a good idea not to check out Antinous’s Facebook page or her Twitter account.

  Her vitriolic entries about other writers were the worst.

  And her “friends” always rose to the occasion, giving her the praise she so desperately craved whenever she posted about some reviewer or other author being nasty to her. It was also, I noted, always the same group of about four or five people—which kind of gave the lie to her claim that she had thousands of fans.

  It also blew my mind how she frequently played “victim” in some entries when in others she was absolutely vile and hateful about another writer—the kind of thing we always think about writers we don’t like, but never say publicly.

  Clearly, she’d never taken the course on how not to burn bridges in publishing.

  She was also pretty scathing about some publishers she’d worked with—again giving the lie to her claims of enormous success; if she sold as many books as she’d claimed, would these small presses I’d never heard of have folded?

  And then there were her entries about the “gay male experience”—the “Cause,” as she called it, which reminded me of how the Southerners in Gone with the Wind referred to the Confederacy—which was fine. I didn’t have a problem with straight women as allies—we’d never get anywhere as queers without our straight allies. But she never talked about anyone other than gay men—never the transgendered (which she had, according to one entry, claimed to be at one time) or bisexuals (which she also claimed to be) or lesbians. Gay men, in their privilege as male, often neglected the other letters in the alphabet soup of the queer community, which was of course wrong but could be expected because of being born with a penis in a sexist world.

  But she wasn’t a gay man.

  She was very clear, on multiple occasions, about being too lazy to pursue attractions with women although the attractions were enough for her to claim bisexual status. I say I am, so therefore I am despite everything to the contrary.

  And no one ever called her on it—no one questioned it.

  So, I thought, I could, despite the fact that I’ve never had sex with a man and have only been in relationships with women, claim to be straight and people just have to accept it? That�
�s fucking crazy.

  I kept reading, going backward through time, until I finally reach this tearful entry:

  15 January

  I want to thank everyone for their well-wishes and kind emails and messages over the last week or so. After the initial depression—and all of the attendant nastiness that came with the HORRIBLE, vile personal attack on me and my work last week, you’ve all bloody well made me feel like I can go on living. I cannot express my gratitude enough about the way you, my wonderful wonderful fans, have rallied around me in this, my time of tribulation. All I have done, it seems, for the past few days is cry. Just when I think all of my tears have dried up, that I couldn’t possibly cry any more, the horrible cruelty of this vicious personal attack on me overwhelms me again and I collapse back onto my sofa and sob until my sides ache.

  I rolled my eyes—if her fiction was only half as melodramatic as her blog, it would be unreadable.

  Yes, I am a biological woman and not a gay man. Yes, it is true that I hired an actor to do signings and readings for me in the States as well as to pose for my author photos. My original publisher insisted that no one would read m / m if it was written by a woman, and when he came up with the idea of hiring Dirk Mantooth to play Antinous Renault in public, I foolishly went along with it.

  Yes, it was a deception but it was done in the PUREST sense with the PUREST of hearts—

  Right, I thought, rolling my eyes so hard they almost popped out of my head as I read it.

  —and there was no malicious intent, despite all the horrible accusations that have been hurled at me since that horrible Anne Howard and her friends TARGETED me for abuse last week. Once the deception was started, I could not think how to bring it to a logical close. I couldn’t think of how to respond to any of these vicious attacks without adding fuel to the fire. I kept hoping that having collected their pound of flesh, they would be satisfied to finally end their gloating and find someone else to try to destroy emotionally and professionally, as they have done to me so horribly and relentlessly. This is why I allowed the torture to go on unchecked, without giving any of it the dignity of a measured response, which is more than this witch hunt deserves. But I have come to realize, when I am not so horribly depressed that all I can do is cry, is that my silence gives credence to their vicious accusations. That in not standing up to these horrible bullies, I am allowing them to win, and I will NOT surrender to such people. Not when poor gay teenagers are killing themselves out of despair from the bullying they endure from their homophobic peers. I realized that I MUST speak out, that I MUST stand up for them, that I cannot allow such indecent and horrible conduct to get the best of me, just as gay men cannot allow the vicious attacks of the fundamentalist Christians and their minions in positions of political power to silence them and push them back into the closet after all the years of hard work. I will not be silenced.