*about the 2025 winner, not from. Typing with feelings is also fraught!

Oh and btw, I'm the only writer to place in a mainstream category with a queer book in RWAus's history. I would rather it was one of my sapphic books, not one of mm books, but there you go. There are many reasons why I wish I wasn't first. It's a good book, sure, but that's not the point.

I've always cared. I wrote the current committee on several occasions to voice my concerns about the siloing issue.
Today RWAus have announced that the award won't run for 2026 due to feedback from the 2025 winner. They invite more feedback, so people who understand this better than me - go hard!

Obviously this rather defeats the point of a 'diverse' award, and the fact that she was audacious enough to enter with her book with one brown character (and I think no others and no queer characters, etc) highlights why a silo category, especially without own voices, is fraught.
Why do I care now?

After listening carefully to what happened at RWA USA when they fell apart, we decided that a silo award for 'diverse' books was a bandaid and not a solution, so we didn't do that.
The next committee decided this was the answer. The inaugual award was won last year by a white straight writer...

Definitely weird. It's one thing to say 'lots of authors have other jobs' and another to accuse a successful author of making up how much money they make. I know heaps of authors who are making great money, especially those in the indie space who are great at hustling/marketing.

Five years ago, this looked very different, but since then I've gone through a divorce and am financial independant and value things like my Stud Book job where I am an employee and get benefits like Super (I'm in Australia, in case USA's don't know what that means).

For what it's worth, I love that book. I wrote a sapphic burlesque club series during 2021 that was set in a contemporary but slightly fanasty 'vaccines work and covid is over' London. Wishful thinking, in hindsight, anyway, the first one is Show Up.

My current 'to be written' plan takes me to the end of 2029. And that's the books that have gone from an original idea into something that has enough substance to become a book. The list of ideas that I haven't spent much time on just continues to grow.

I have this too, and it's great because occasionally I read through it, and one of my old ideas solves a problem in the book I'm currently writing. Many of the ideas on my file aren't enough for whole book, but they can join together to form the basis of a book.

One of my all time favourites that I re-read at least once a year.

So I guess buy my books because they are good and writing them helped me escape some tough times, so I hope they help readers also escape tough times.
www.reneedahlia.com

I have two good part time jobs (having had none while I was married, except writing books which he deemed a "glorified hobby").
I made it through what I hope was the worst time in my life, and never once did I use that to market my books (seems a weird concept but maybe would've been useful?)