Tags
#amwriting, BBW Romance writers, Judy Bagshaw, Skyla Dawn Cameron, The Curse, The Evil League of Evil Writers, Writing mentors
On Thursday evening, I got a piece of bad news about an old friend. An old friend who I had never actually met who is now in a critical care ward in Canada, apparently in a bad way. This news came to me from another friend who I have never met. Said friend being a member of an organisation calling themselves the Evil League of Evil Writers who are dedicated to performing evil* for the good of humanity, she posted this blog post:
This post says more about Judy Bagshaw than I ever could, about the sort of person she is and why she deserves acclaim. Not surprising as it was written by someone I consider to be a great writer. I urge anyone reading this to go visit the blog linked above, read it and perform at least one of the tasks of ‘evil’ that are requested. When done, leave a comment so Skyla can read out your deed to Judy and let her know that there are people out there doing evil on her behalf.
Why am I involved in this? Well, I owe Judy a hell of a lot. She is the evil person who got me involved in this writing lark. Not only that she was an enabler who kept me writing when I wanted to quit. She is a true mentor, a great cheerleader and an inspiration. Without her Transitions would have never been written because I would not have bothered to try this insane experiment in romance writing. She was also instrumental in getting Transitions published and performed a lot of the really hard work involved in that.
She was one of the insane collaborators from the BBW Romance Writers group on our bizarre collaborative novella, The Curse which you can download for free from her site and has her own collection of romance novels out there for you to buy. She beta read Transformations (now published in Lurking Miscellany) and finished her critique with a cheery ‘well done’ which remains my most awesome review yet. When Lurking Miscellany was published, she told me that she was not going to buy it from Amazon because she wanted to buy it direct from me at greater postage cost so I could sign it for her. I lied about the postage cost to Canada so she actually ended up paying less. It was the least I could do.
I beta read some of her stuff and had a lively online conversation with her that has lasted almost ten years so far. I really hope that conversation is going to continue. The last we spoke she was talking about getting Shades of Love, the novella anthology we collaborated on that includes Transitions, published as a collected print edition. That needs to happen and if she cannot do it, I intend to.
In her honour, I spoke to some of my students yesterday about reading and writing (among other things, it was a long conversation). That was my act of evil. I intend to do more of that when I get back to work. Please perform your own acts of evil and pass the details. The ELEW can’t do enough evil by itself, it really needs your help…
* I say evil. For the ELEW the term evil has a specific meaning. The following is copied from the above blog post and covers that definition very well..
“Standard Evil Explanations for Newbies:
Wait, what’s this about evil? I’m a member of the Evil League of Evil Writers. Everything we do is evil, including charitable acts.
Aren’t charitable endeavors inherently good? Judy has fostered evilty in many children, including me, who co-founded the ELEW. Also, by supporting this endeavour, that might make people cry happy tears. Making people cry is of course evil. See? It all comes back to evil, folks.
As a friend said, when the universe kicks one of us, we kick back twice as hard.
I’m kicking.” Skyla Dawn Cameron (2015)
D.A Lascelles is the author of Lurking Miscellany, Transitions (Mundania Press) and Gods of the Sea (Pulp Empires). He lives in Manchester UK. You can sometimes see him writing about Zombie porn on https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ but he mostly blogs about books, vampires, science fiction and Terry Pratchett. He is inordinately proud of the fact that one of his Pratchett articles was referenced on the French version of the author’s Wikipedia page.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DaLascelles
Twitter: @areteus