• It turns out that the anonymous ex-editor who hates chick lit might have a slightly more personal motivation for her resentment than her professed belief that it's destroying the American mind. You see, it's come to my attention that Boston's Dig isn't the first place she's tried out her rant. In comments posted to an AlterNet interview with Elizabeth Merrick, our unnamed player-hater (posting as "Screwsan") identifies herself as "a (published) short story writer [who] used to work as an editing cog in the publishing machine to pay the bills. [T]he place I ended up working (at the time, I needed a job and couldn't be picky) was at an imprint of a huge publisher that did (and still does) a lot of chick lit." (Hmmm, Avon or Downtown Press, perhaps?) At the time, she declared, "I feel well-qualified as both a former purveyor of chick lit (other peoples') and literary writing (my own) to speak on this issue." So when she says that chick lit is driving serious fiction out of bookstores, perhaps she's referring to her own work?

But how do we know that "Screwsan" is the author of that Dig article? Well, right around the time she was posting to AlterNet, she was also commenting on another tirade against chick lit at Shameless, where she directly confronted Lauren Baratz-Logsted, the editor of This Is Chick Lit, using the exact same phrasing that appeared in Dig pertaining to her claim that chick lit "fills trade slots at publishing companies that used to be given to literary fiction." Clearly, she's been polishing her pearls for some time now. Anyway, now we've got some more clues to her secret identity—anybody in women's fiction know about a former colleague who quit the biz to focus on their fancy-schmancy writing and has some short stories published? Tell me!

• I've also discovered that the sexual assault at WorldCon wasn't the first time Harlan Ellison physically attacked a fellow writer at a literary conference. A little bit of research digs up a (rather lengthy, so don't say I didn't warn you) story about how Ellison punched Charles Platt at a Nebula party and then basked in the admiration of adolescent fans who loved to hear him brag about it. Frankly, it's amazing to an outside observer (love the genre, never spent much time around fandom) that anybody invites Ellison to any public function, let alone gave him guest of honor status at such events—as one fan observes, "What sort of smeghead chooses to allow—nay actively encourages—themselves to be defined solely by their very worst behavior? 'That's just Harlan being Harlan' references nothing good about the man. In fact, it implies that the entirety of his being is defined only by being an asshole. 'Harlan being Harlan' never means being quick-witted, or a talented writer, or an astute observer of the human condition, or in fact anything good at all. It's always used to refer soley to his assholishness."

Meanwhile, the collateral damage from the incident has now spread to writer David Moles, who decided to compile the reactions from Ellison's literary peers, many of them posted in the Science Fiction Writers of America's private newsgroup sff.private.sfwa.lounge, including quite a few who attempted to rationalize Ellison's behavior as, in the words of veteran editor Ellen Datlow, "a joke/schtick gone a bit over the top." But, says another fan posting on Moles' blog, "pretty much every woman I know has a story of being on the wrong end of exactly that kind of inappropriate behavior. Taken individually, each incident is just a thing you brush off and move past, in the aggregate they add up to a big goddamn mess."

As a result of his actions, Moles was suspended from SFF.net for violating user policies. "I knew that if I posted those quotes something like this was a likely consequence," he writes on his blog. "I did not post those quotes lightly. This is not just another internet slapfight." One agent who represents science fiction and fantasy authors commented to me, "If only we had more male authors like Ben Rosenbaum, Christopher Rowe, David Moles and Jeffrey Ford in our industry. Because if we did, I have a feeling this atmosphere of puzzled disdain wafting from the SF old guard regarding the outrage over Harlan Ellison's behavior at the Hugos would not be so thick and cloudy. Bless those guys, and others, for not rolling their eyes and muttering, 'Goddamn feminists.'"

• As a tangential note, emphatically not about "last week's idiots," another blogger would like to remind us all that Connie Willis won her ninth Hugo that evening, which she says is the most any single person has won for fiction writing in the award's 50-plus year history. And John Scalzi has written on his blog about the best novel Hugo won by Robert Charles Wilson: "Does Spin not represent the thoughtful, intelligent, optimistically human-centered sort of book that we ought to be celebrating, and pressing into the hands of people who don't think there's anything about SF they would like?"