Consultation with Christine Pride

I’m not sure this would be for genre authors, but it might work for them, too. Christine Pride is an experienced editor with Random House and Hyperion who has edited eight NYT bestsellers. I found out about this consultation on an author blog, Nathan Bransford, and I thought I’d share it in case anyone is interested. I’ll comment below.

Pride mentions this:

I’m offering a limited number of one hour Skype or phone sessions from February 10th to February 15th. This is your chance to have one-on-one time with an industry veteran to get individualized advice, information and answers.

The consultation fee is $200. And I think if you have $200 to invest in your writing career with a publishing professional it certainly couldn’t hurt. But on the other hand, you don’t find $200 dollars in the street every day and there are many authors making that in digital publishing on their own right now without investing a dime in advice from consultations. They’re spending their money and time in marketing and promotion.

So while I don’t think it could hurt anyone to do something like this, it’s probably not something I would ever do. But this one falls into the category of what’s not right for me might be right for you.

You can read more here.

AIDS Discrimination

We don’t hear about this sort of thing all the time, but it is still happening and I think it’s important to make people aware that it’s happening. A gay worker in the UK was allegedly asked by his employer if he has AIDS. The boss also used other offensive gay pejoratives I won’t repeat here.

A gay British worker has spoken out after his boss asked ‘Do you have AIDS?’ when he was ill.

Jack Howell, 36, said he was ‘mortified’ after boss Peter Chambers made the comment when he had come out of a toilet looking pale and sweating.

At a tribunal hearing yesterday (28 January), Chambers admitted it was ‘inappropriate’ but said it was part of ‘office banter’.

You can read more here.

The worker does have a condition called Raynaud’s Phenomenon, but because he’s gay his boss allegedly decided to stereotype him.

I know this kind of thing happens more often than not, and most of the time we don’t hear about it because the workers are too mortified to speak up.