Play nicely, now.

This week there has been a thread running on the Romance Divas forum about the ethics of blogging. I guess I'm really naive, but it never occurred to me to use my blog to attack someone. Either that or I am truly a preschool teacher at heart. Everybody plays nice.

My college background was in English Lit. In those classes I was taught never to assume the author was saying something based on a text. Would you say Dickens promoted misers because he created the character Scrooge (as well as several other misers) or that Swift advocated eating babies because he wrote an essay suggesting it as a solution to the Irish potato famine? Should you claim that Author Jane Doe should give up writing and get back to the kitchen because you hated her last book? Or because you hated all her books? There are lots of authors I can't stand or whose writing gives me the willies. Do I therefore, courtesy of this blog, have the right to call down curses on their heads?

Of course not. Just because I don't like it or think it's bad doesn't make me the final answer. I can't stand Korean food. I mean really, there's dishes I wouldn't feed my dog (if I had one and if there wasn't dog in it. They still eat dogs in Korea.) There's one dish here we refer to as "wet dog stewed in old mop water" based on the smell. However, my total abhorrence means nothing to the millions of Koreans who can't eat a meal without kimchi.

So those authors I don't like, chances are they can find thousands if not millions of fans who think I'm off my rocker. And what does it get me to attack someone? It raises my blood pressure and it might hurt the feelings of someone I don't know, but could have been friends with. Why bother? There's so many fish in the sea, why not focus on what you like?

Now everybody, play nicely.