Pot, meet the ugly kettle
Friday, June 12, 2015Posted in: Azteclady Speaks, E-publishers Behaving Very Badly
Tags:Jaid Black aka Tina Engler
For a number of years now, I have loosely followed the “poor me, I’m a victim of discrimination” act that is Jaid Black.
By this I mean, I notice when things reach my ears/eyes during my usual online rounds; I don’t spend a lot of time hunting comments down, I don’t follow her in any social media platform, and I don’t go looking for things said about her.
Frankly, I do have better things to do with my time.
Every so often, however, I’ll see commentary about how whenever there’s a dust up at or around Ellora’s Cave, Jaid Black has a health crisis.
Which is reminiscent of what has happened with any number of epublishers behaving badly, right around the time the implosions begin. (You are free to extrapolate at will, by the way.)
At any rate, recently Jaid Black had yet another health crisis to report on her blog:
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I am neither a lawyer nor a medical professional, and so I have no idea whether or not what she claims is possible or true–and again, I frankly don’t care much about the state of Jaid Black’s health.
I was saddened to see, though, some pretty callous commentary about this in #notchilled, and heartened to see people like Courtney Milan and Deirdre Saoirse Moen calling those ugly comments out:
@authrannjacobs This is kind of fat-shaming. There are plenty of reasons to criticize her without going there. @tejasjulia
— Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) June 2, 2015
Turns out I’m a lot less cynical than I believed.
Of course Jaid Black would take what ammunition she’d been given and use it:
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(As an aside: I find myself amused to think that, up to now, Jaid Black has “taken the high road”–but we all know I’m mean like that.)
That post immediately brought out Jaid Black defenders, notably Ann Rice’s puppy Kevin Weinberg, who had these classy tweets to share with the universe:
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Just as classy and wholesome as Jaid Black and company, ain’t he?
*
edited to add some more spewing but Kevin Weinberg:
Samtha
June 12
3:21 pm
Oh, Tina. Never change. One person tweeted something about her weight, and every single other person who commented in #notchilled shot that down fast, but of course that fact doesn’t fit Tina’s “I’m a victim” narrative.
That Kevin person isn’t worth commenting about.
Ann Jacobs
June 12
10:32 pm
Correction. My giving up on EC had nothing to do with the firing of my favorite cover artist/good friend, although I did complain a year or so ago about the hideous cover I got for my last EC title. No, the reason for me giving up on EC was strictly business–drastically reduced sales, delinquent royalty payments, and most of all, egregious errors in the company’s favor made on multiple ones of my royalty statements since mid-2013. In fairness, I eventually was reimbursed for at least some of those underpayments, but not in a timely manner. When EC fired most of its editors, its cover artists, and much of its administrative staff in August 2014, I decided it would be a wise choice to request reversion of rights on every eligible EC book. Trust is hard to earn, easy to destroy.
AztecLady
June 13
1:38 am
@Samtha: Agreed on both counts.
@Ann Jacobs: Interesting how TE/JB can blithely toss out accusations of theft and other unethical behaviour by others, but anyone calling attention to iffy things going on at EC is a liar, hmm?
Lil
June 14
4:41 am
I discovered Jaid Black’s writing a few months ago, and regret I bought the one. I am hesitant to even read an Ellora’s Cave book written by anyone else just because her writing sucked to the ninth level of hell. Yes, that’s unfair probably to the authors, but it is my money. Anyway, after learning she married a killer and claims to be an activist for inmates (see her Wikipedia page), little surprises me about this woman. If she can live with herself after the greedy stunts she’s pulled, she ought to be able to live with a little truthful discussion about her weight. That’s the least she has to be embarrassed about.
AztecLady
June 14
4:56 am
@Lil: Leaving aside her weight, which truly is her business and none of anyone else’s, or the (lack of) quality of her writing, it’s noteworthy that a number of Ellora’s Cave’s authors have asked readers not to buy their EC titles, and that a publisher is suing a blog for writing about its mistreatment of authors, editors and artists.
You can catch up on all that, starting here (beware: major time suck)
Karen Scott
June 20
3:55 pm
Wow…
A couple of things on the EC v DA suit (the Ann Jacobs update) | Her Hands, My Hands
August 22
2:24 pm
[…] all the happenings, Jaid Black has continued to maintain a fairly defiant social media presence, punctuated by occasional flounces. In the last few months, she deleted her twitter account, posted […]
Rhiannon
August 27
11:47 am
Hmmmm. Diabetes diagnosis is a blood test, in my experience (called A1c). Not sure why it would take a couple of weeks to find out. Unless her Dr’s office uses a lab with long turnaround times for results.