Open letter to Hope Hunt, Stephanie Todd, and anyone else who got screwed by Laray Carr

The buzz on the street is that none of the contractors employed by Laray Carr have gotten paid.

Hope Hunt posted on Writer Beware that she has not been paid, and an anonymous commenter on my blog stated that the other contractors haven't either — including, perhaps, Stephanie Todd and Shadra Bruce.

As per my anonymous commenter:

...Everyone is discouraged and confident that payment will never be seen since there has been no response from LCP since Friday.... It seems everyone was lied to at this point and we all feel incredibly naieve, ignorant, used and abused.

The comments made me sad, more than anything else. As a result, I feel compelled to say that I'm really sorry. As militant as I was about this whole thing, I would have happily eaten my words regarding Laray Carr if I could have seen some of my new friends paid.

I know Stephanie doesn't count as one of those "new friends." I know there is some bad blood between us now, thanks to the catfight on the FWJ thread. Honestly, though, Anonymous's comments have reminded me that Hope, Stephanie, and the others are not the bad guys here. Perhaps you guys believed in LCP a little too much, but it doesn't mean that you didn't get burned as badly as anyone else.

In fact, I would hazard to say that you guys got the shortest end of the stick. The writers were throwaways, true, but you guys were scapegoats. If Laray Carr is a scam — as I still think is possible — they put you in a position where you had to defend the company in order to try to preserve your own reputations. Perhaps worse, they set you up so that you would take the fall for their missteps, enabling them to simply hire someone else and start fresh.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer a public but heartfelt apology to Stephanie for the exchange on FWJ the other night. I'd also like to apologize to Hope for blasting her on FWJ when she first arrived weeks ago. If there are any others of LCP's contractors that I've unknowingly had words with or otherwise insulted, I'm sorry for that too.

Maintaining anger and blame is exhausting, to say the least. Let's not wear ourselves out by blaming each other. We have enough "real" bad guys to deal with as it is.