Thank you, Cheryl Morgan, for your grace and frankness under fire when responding to some of the, shall we say, tinfoil hat fans in the comments.

Thank you, John Scalzi, for your wisdom and humor and also your very succinct reprisal of Adam Roberts’ little note to fandom.

Thank you, John Picacio, for your wonderful rebuttal of Roberts’ rather feeble attempt at art critique.

Adam Roberts, I knew your name was familiar from somewhere. I actually don’t like your writing, but I always thought, maybe I’ll give wossname another try after a year or so.

Now I’ll remember your name a bit better so as to avoid it in the future.

Update:

Thank you, Nick Mamatas, for making me laugh about some of the ensuing wankery. I already ponied up for you to review G.I. Joe, though! So I’m not namin’ the perceived father of stream-of-consciousness writing here.

I actually do like the dead dude’s writings, as emo as they sometimes are, and would toss some of his classics into the YA section.

Update 2:

Contrary to perceptions of some folks, me and my card-carrying fan friends actually aren’t a group of Midwestern Conservative White Males.

Most of us are pretty liberal, one of us is an out and out libertarian, one of us is actually a Buddhist (it’s not me), half of us are atheists, and while over half of us do come from the Midwest, we left it for various reasons that tend not to, um, pool us into whatever the “Generic Middle America” taste is, which by the way, tends not to touch upon SF/F very much.

Half of us are women. And many apologies, but a quarter of us are non-white.

Most everyone has a college degree, and one guy is so wise he should’ve had one in philosophy long ago.

All of us hate Sarah Palin. None of us are interested in the elitist-versus-non-elitist game. If an “elitist” writes a book we like, we read it. My general sense of fandom is that it’s mostly like us, small sampling that we are.

So, sorry about nominating for the novels that we did, but you can’t blame it on us being Conservatives-with-a-capital-C.