Some Young Women Still Obey The Old Scripts
2023 closes with an online review “bombing” scandal full of backstabbing, manipulation, racism, internalized misogyny, classism, all the “good” stuff.
When I was young, I remember a lot of people expressing feelings that they’d been born in the wrong time period. Usually this took the form of “I want to be the princess at the RenFaire” or “I would have been a conquering knight!”
But now I really do I wish I’d been born in the future. Because the world that today’s best young people are building feels much more comfortable to me than the old ways.
Yet even so: “not all young people.” Some are still obeying old, evil scripts of harming, denigrating, and exploiting others to benefit themselves in short-term, material ways.
Last week, a 2024 debut female sci fi writer, Cait Corrain, lost her first novel contract and has been dropped by her agent because since 2022, she established a series of fake social media accounts and put false one-star slam reviews of other debut novelists scheduled to be published around the same time. She didn’t go after just any debut novelists, she focused on diverse women who were also publishing first sci-fi or fantasy books in early 2024.
Not only would I have never done such a thing, the thought patterns that produce a plan to write fake 1–star reviews and target them to other writers of similar work — are completely foreign to me.
I’m supposed to be able to imagine motivations for any type of character. The ones I imagine here are all the worst. Some people call people like Cait “Karens.” I think the more accurate term is untrustworthy psycho bitch.
Corrain has issued an apology for her behavior, which mostly occurred via the Goodreads platform. The reason she did so much harm to the other authors is that Goodreads is owned by Amazon and reviews on it are cross-posted to Amazon book product pages. So those 1-star reviews can easily reduce the other authors’ sales and readership.
I don’t know many writers who like Goodreads. I haven’t visited the platform for almost two years. I looked at it again when I was seriously trying to publish Like Fire, but now that Bruce is so ill and working hard to recover, I don’t have time or desire to follow up.
Goodreads was already a toxic and bad place full of sociopathic maniacs (mostly readers or “fans” of a certain type of book) back in 2014 when I first finished the book, and my (now deceased) agent told me, “Not right now dear, I’m negotiating Season 6 for George,” and then I lost my house and filed for bankruptcy because I was a complete and total cretinous fool to try to start a diverse publishing company.
Corrain’s “apology” posted via former Twitter (X) is two pages long. Here’s a screen shot of the first part of it.
“I can’t remember the insane lengths I went to in order to backstab my ‘friends’ any more … I’m an addict … feel sorry for me …”
Yeah.
Corrain now joins the elite literary club of “The Man Who Lied to Oprah” and “The Woman Who Put An Innocent Man In Prison For Rape For 20 Years” along with a vast number of other fruits, nuts, and diehard bootlicking servants to power and cash that have created the appalling stack of slurge that this “industry” has forced down your throat with a firehose for 50 years.
I’m sure she will meet up with a new fame- and money-hungry partner in rehab.
They can make their new debut as a power couple via TikTok. Or maybe by that time, there’ll be a new social media for them to gather likes, clicks, and shares. Her memoir of addiction and recovery will be out in 2025, certain to be a starred Publishers Weekly review.
At a time they should rightfully be excited and happy about the release of their first novels, the young writers that Corrain targeted now have endured the trauma of being betrayed by someone they thought was a colleague or maybe even friend.
I know how I felt when I heard how a friend of mine was talking behind my back recently.
None of these writers did a thing wrong. Their lives have been hijacked by a monster who isn’t an individual so much as she is a type and behavior pattern that this society has tolerated, encouraged and promoted for far too long.
A pickme, a bitch, a backstabber, a traitor, a selfish abuser — a manipulator, someone out for herself first, fraudulently taking advantage of systems for money, fame, and adulation.
A capitalist. An adherent to the patriarchy. Someone who swallowed the whole 80s ethos and has done it 100 times over.
Someone with the ethics and morals of a snail. I’m sure her book about the Space Crown (“I wish I was born in another time, let’s make it space!”) was amazing. What a shame Del Rey won’t be publishing it.
Oh, did I mention she didn’t target any white or male authors with her bad review campaign?
The ones she “review bombed” were all female authors of color. Of course Corrain is not racist or misogynist!
One of the younger people who’s built a sales funnel and publishing platform, Courtney Maum, already wrote a Substack piece about this appalling incident, concluding that debut authors need instruction in how to behave once they get a publishing deal, and publishers need some type of training to identify miscreants like Corrain so they avoid this type of embarrassment.
Yeah sure. It’s impossible to tell that somebody’s a racist lunatic with bucketloads of internalized misogyny without special training. You’d never see that in the fiction of such a person. And debut authors need to be instructed not to set up dozens of fake review profiles and put hundreds of 1-star slam reviews on other authors’ books that will be released at a similar time: as long as those authors aren’t white or male.
I wanted to write my thoughts about how in 1967, a group of 12 elite athletes gathered in Cleveland to talk with Muhammad Ali about his opposition to the Vietnam War and refusal to serve in the U.S. military in Vietnam. Jim Brown, one of the best American football players in history, organized the meeting in order to talk with Ali about his decision. At the time, Ali was out front of everyone in turning aside from the Vietnam War.
Most of the attendees at the Cleveland Summit weren’t just top Black American athletes, they were business people. And, the majority were also military veterans. Many of those Brown called to the summit could expect to benefit economically if Ali changed his mind and agreed to support the Vietnam War and many went into the meeting thinking that if they had served, why he wouldn’t be willing to also serve. I’m not sure if they intended to ask him to relent his refusal to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces: Ali had already been convicted of “draft dodging” and had already had his boxing titles and ability to box stripped.
But the athletes came out of the Summit holding a press conference in support of Ali’s anti-war stance for pro-peace and religious reasons.
Part of the controversy driven by Ali at the time involved his change of name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali when he joined the Nation of Islam. Ali later became a Sunni Muslim (leaving the Nation of Islam). Black Americans were changing their names to follow their own identity and Ali was one of the most famous, if not the most famous.
It was Ali’s change of name when I was five years old that led my grandfather, a former sheriff, to order his former deputy off our porch.
The men were talking about “Cassius Clay” when I was riding my little kid tricycle around the driveway and I heard the deputy say “That dumb N__________.”
I had never heard that word before. All I knew was a man named Cassius had changed his name and the deputy didn’t like it.
I had never seen my grandfather angry before. I seldom saw him angry ever again.
But he stood, pointed at the driveway and said in a loud, firm voice, “Get the Hell off my porch, D__________ and don’t come back if you can’t keep that word out of your mouth.”
That’s a true story as well as I can remember it. This guarantees I’ll never make a dollar from this, since what they pay for are lies that serve the powerful, evil, and rich.
Not true stories about regular people being decent and good to each other or overcoming adversity.
Here is another true story based on what my grandfather taught me.
So, I recently learned about the Cleveland Summit in the context of how much Muhammad Ali did to serve the cause of civil rights and betterment of our benighted nation. I was just a kid at the time and it’s not like such historic events are publicized much to non-Black Americans.
And I thought, “Those Black men were all different but they were able to come together and see the truth of what Ali was saying, respect his principled stance and religious beliefs, and support him, even though it went against their immediate personal interests.”
Why is it so hard for women to do this? I was thinking.
Yes, I have some close friendships now, and do have lifelong friends of all walks of life. I am still friendly with kids I went to preschool with.
Only now have I even barely begun to ask any of them for any type of support, because I’ve been so conditioned to “go it alone,” “suffer in silence,” and — because of fear.
This fear is not completely unjustified. A woman we thought was a friend recently stabbed several of us in the back in a display of craven, low-down pick-me-ism and blizzard of endless lies. She has lost all of her friends here, but if someone pressured her, I’m she’d issue a similar “apology” to Cait Corrain.
I just kept looking at these pictures of the Cleveland Summit, looking at Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who wasn’t even Kareem yet, he was still Lew Alcindor.
“Did you know that Kareem saw Ali doing magic tricks with kids in South LA when he couldn’t box because he went against the Vietnam War?”
No. But I know the corner where he was doing those tricks for those long-ago kids.
I know the values I was raised with. They aspire to be like Muhammad Ali’s and the men at the Cleveland Summit, not backstabbers, cheaters, liars, and those who falsely serve a power that should not exist, a world that is dying, a way of life that comes from a very few people living easy lives off the backs of so many others. Indeed, off the back of our very planet itself and every living creature.
I know I’d rather never publish Like Fire and never make any more money from fiction writing than do something like Cait Corrain did.
I quit using the Goodreads service a long time ago because it was filled with toxic people whom I would rather not read my writing.
Now I understand why some writers have burned their work rather than have others without ethics, decency, or values read it. Because it was personal and truthful to them.
Yes, I do have many friends who are conservative and who probably wouldn’t look at the Cleveland Summit as something admirable.
But these men faced adversity. They came into that summit trying to tell their peer to stop harming their businesses, and stop bringing so much heat on the Black community because of his anti-war stance.
They left the summit with new-found respect for their peer because of his integrity and focus on the values that really matter to all of our lives. Together they discovered the courage to tell the world the truth about Ali’s beliefs and decisions.
The truth is that this business, the one I innocently selected as the one I wanted to do since I was five years old (I wonder, around the same time Bampy kicked D________ off our porch?), is run by people who could not care less if any reader lives or dies.
And of course money is one of their main Gods. But the other is a deceitful, evil, cruel one that promotes worship of fame, power, and exploitation.
There’s a whole lot that goes into writing the truth well.
And none of it is what any of the people that call the shots in today’s publishing business seem to even slightly understand. They are still running their programs based on the interests of the disturbed, even at times, deranged individuals that dominate services like Goodreads.
And among them are some of the worst, like Cait Corrain and her “let’s knock those others out of competition” approach, starting with non-white female competitors first.
All is not fair in any endeavor, much less a creative one. Behavior like hers and businesses like contemporary ad and algorithm-driven publishing impoverishes all of our souls.
There is never any shortage of "what not to do" stories for me to be referred to on the Internet. Hers is perhaps the worst so far.
Speculative fiction authors (I am one, BTW) typically tend to be, in my experience, much more supportive of each other than this- which is always why the bad apples stand out.
What a cringe story, as the kids say. I've been warned publishing is a more of a mess than it's ever been, but I didn't anticipate having this to also look forward to.
She gets a book published, and then goes out of her way to torpedo others? Man.
I didn't know Goodreads was Amazon. Thanks for the tip!