I heard that Bryant mentioned me in a blog. Here's what went down as far as interviewing goes:
I'd been somewhat neglecting my blog and my e-mail and didn't see his posts until far later. Bryant had e-mailed me asking if I'd like to interview him. I thought about it, but didn't think I'd be the best place for it. I offered to pass this along to someone else such as John, but Bryant said that he wasn't comfortable with that. I figured that was fair enough, given the animosity that had been growing between then during this time. It wasn't as bad as it is now, but it was enough to where I could understand why he was uncomfortable.
That was pretty much the end of it. He offered, I declined because I didn't think I was the best place and by large, I'd been trying to stay out of everything as far as the whole scenario goes. Heck, I don't even blog about BBA anymore unless it's something extreme, such as the whole Mike Kearby scenario. I just don't think there's any reason for most of the BBA things to get as much attention as they do. I understand wanting to boycott some authors if you feel that they've done something nasty, but then there are also some other scenarios where I feel that it's just a bunch of "me too" type actions and whatever message you were trying to send gets lost in the frenzy to react to whatever author has currently stuck their foot in their mouth in trying to respond to a review. I can understand some reaction to a point, but some reactions just seems a little overkill to what is sometimes a fairly underwhelming author response. When you've seen someone unleash full frontal crazy ala Candace Sams, it's hard to see the actions of someone such as Marata Eros as being anything other than a series of misunderstandings that got out of hand. But I digress.
The thing is, he knows I declined and he was polite about it at the time. I was actually a little impressed that he was as polite as he was which is why I ended up declining another request from the opposite camp later on down the line. Because I'd had a limited interaction with Bryant, I was asked to write a blog, which I declined. I didn't feel comfortable with it and besides, what was I going to say? That he'd asked, I'd declined, I offered another avenue, and he'd politely declined? That's not exactly going to set the blogosphere on fire. That's sort of lukewarm tea and watching paint dry type of material.
I just felt that the blogs talking about people's personal lives took away from the larger issues at hand when it came to the whole issue with reviews. I don't really see where anyone from either side needs to comment on people's personal lives unless it actually pertains to the reviewing process or whatever the person is writing about. For instance, if I was to write a book about BDSM ala Fifty Shades and talked at length about my Mistress Jolene and based the main character off of her, then went all batshit crazy over a negative review that says that Mistress Jaylene is the worst character to be written since Dark'ness Demetria Raven Way in My Immortal, then yes. At that point my relationship would be something that would probably be appropriate to address when talking about the book, the review, and my reaction to everything. To a point, anyway. When this discussion starts becoming more of a way to insult me by way of the subject matter, that's when everyone needs to step away and take a deep breath.
I don't really know what this blog will accomplish, but I wanted to clarify that despite the way Bryant put it on his blog, the whole interview request thing wasn't nearly as awful as it is made out to be. I just hope that from this point on he won't post anything like that again. There are better ways to make your point.