I guess the majority of you will have heard about AAR Sandy’s slightly hypocritical blog post by now?

To be fair, I agreed with the majority of her post. That is, until I read the following:

» I am sick of all the 50 Shades of Grey bashing. This is especially ironic when it’s clear that the bashers haven’t read the book. I am certainly not saying that the book is great, but it’s at least a B- to me. And, as I wrote before, there is something fresh there that I haven’t read in a while. Bashing the book makes other authors look small and I am tired of reading it on Twitter

» I am sick of all the bashing of 50 Shades of Grey readers. What gives anyone the right to judge a reader for a book she likes? I am sick of the vicious remarks I’ve read on Twitter, but the casual swipes are also getting to me. And on that subject…

» I have moved past the Harlequin love and I am mystified by serious readers who haven’t. I get that there are some good and maybe even great authors working in that genre, but, for the most part, they are formulaic novels that are, in fact, written to formula. I understand how they could be a guilty pleasure and a comfort, but to wank on and on about how great they are as literature? Here’s what I think: If all the Harlequin lovers were subjected to the stuff that is regularly aimed at 50 readers, the sputtering outrage would be off the charts. But, you know what it comes down to for me? I liked, but didn’t love 50. I once liked, but now don’t love Harlequins. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could respect each other and coexist peacefully? I won’t read the Harlequin reviews or the message board threads and it would be nice if the anti-50 people would do the same.

What I don’t get is how she thought she could write about being tired of Fifty readers getting bashed, and then turn around and bash category readers?

Of course, I expect that deep down she knows that she totally contradicted herself, she just doesn’t want to admit it.

It’s not like I care whether or not category readers or Fifty readers get bashed, as far as I’m concerned, it’s all fair game, but it strikes me as a tad disingenuous to have a go at people having a go at Fifty, then turn around and do the same to other readers’ of books that she apparently can’t relate to.

Mind you, reading the following comment from Sandy helped clarify things a little more for me:

I was also the target of a wanky (yes, I think that word applies) DA post recently and I undoubtedly will be again. So it goes. I don’t recall anyone taking the poster to task for being impolite.

So this post was really all about having a swipe at Dear Author, because of a perceived slight from a DA contributor? Well, why didn’t she just say so in the first place? I totally understand swipe-back posts, I do them often enough myself – the difference being, I’m not backwards in coming forwards when it comes to naming names.

Poor Sandy, despite her protestations to the contrary, she so knows that she came off as a hypocrite. If she’d just said admitted it, this conversation would have died on the same day the post went up. Hmmm…or maybe that was her evil plan all along, to keep ’em talking? Bwahahaha…