Op-Ed: Jay Lake Dogfighting Scandal: We are all responsible
Today, Jay Lake (jaylake) sits behind bars, indicted for allegedly running a dogfighting ring from his Oregon home. The reaction from the fiction world is mixed. Some want him banned from writing for life. Others see his private crimes as completely separate from his public accomplishments. And others, like me, are torn.

Lake came from a poor background, and has said at public events that writing was a way for him to stay away from gangs. It also got him out of the low-end side of town, as he led his high-school Academic Decathalon to an undefeated season and landed a scholarship at USC, where he shattered word-count and university-press story records. From there, it was a sure bet that Lake was going to enter the high-rolling world of professional short fiction, and in 2003, Lake was unable to resist the promise of $.06 to $.08 per word offered by editors at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Other pro short story writers have talked about the temptations of the market. "You go from tossing around the said-bookisms in the library with your friends to making $150, even $200 a month on a short story," says Yoon Ha Lee (yhlee), "and these markets have hundreds, even thousands of readers. You tell kids to stay in school, but who's going to take the extra year to get that MFA when they could be making five cents a word on every story they sell? It's hard for anyone to keep their ego in check. If you're lucky, you just get gold-plated RSI wrist braces or a pimped-out ergonomic keyboard. But some people, like Lake, go all the way." (Lee is no stranger to controversy herself; she took the fifth rather than testify about her involvement in a 2001 shooting at a Pasadena poetry bar, in which one of her writing group members was charged with assault and illegal possession of adverbs. The case was ultimately dismissed, and Lee has since become a born-again Pastafarian and renounced the hard-partying short-fiction lifestyle.)

And Lake did indeed go all the way. The $300 check from Realms of Fantasy went into a palatial mansion outside Portland. Another $280 from Asimov's let Lake upgrade his collection of vintage Corvettes. And apparently, some of that money was used to fund Wheatland Wars, the high-stakes dogfighting kennel that Lake, along with Portland writer David Levine (davidlevine), owned and managed.

It's easy to blame Lake, here, and rest assured, after the public outcry and the dramatic downturn in Ideomancer sales, incoming SFWA Commisioner Andrew Burt will make sure that Lake never works in short fiction again. But a lot of the blame has to rest with the publishers, too. When they offer $.03 per word, they are sending writers a clear message about the power and influence of short fiction. Here's the kind of power you have, say the magazines, shoving a stack of one-dollar bills at the writer. Here's how much you're worth. And the writers listen.

And finally, I think we have to blame ourselves. When enough people buy a copy of F&SF that its sales figures rival that of a 2AM showing of M*A*S*H, publishers get inflated egos. They wouldn't be publishing this stuff every couple of months if several thousand of us weren't reading it, and our refusal to hold writers accountable for their actions only damages the entire field of what was once a noble pastime. Whether it's Charles Coleman Finlay (ccfinlay) shattering a writing-group buddy's collarbone during a practice critique, Ted Chiang leaping into the audience to choke a listener during a convention reading of "Division by Zero", or Harlan Ellison assaulting Connie Willis onstage at the 2006 Hugo Awards*, today's short fiction writers live in a world of wealth and prestige, a world of no responsibilities, where any desire is only an Paradox Magazine paycheck away.

And until we're willing to hold the publishers accountable for the absurdly high salaries that the writers receive, we have nobody but ourselves to blame.

* Oh, crap, one of these is real!