Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
I did not.
Instead I quit working for them as an editor (after putting up with a lot, including the publisher—who knew I was trans—mocking me and asking if I had been in the hospital for testicular cancer after they literally worked me into collapsing and needing medical care, and after I left the publisher using me as a scapegoat for all kinds of incidents, including things that happened long after I had quit). I struggled through edits on my second book with them. It didn’t go well. I had written a modern-day Roma hero, a bit of a dreamer, and my editor made snarky comments all over everything talking about his culture, his family, his history. I ended up pulling the book, and it became my first self-published book, though by then Ion Blackwell had been sanitized to a white man in tan skin with little to no reference to his Roma heritage—and I had too much anxiety about it after those edits to put that back in.
But I was still under contractual obligation for a book with them, so I wrote a contemporary M/F romance with a white hero and heroine, set against the backdrop of a Cambodian village where a local Cambodian engineer was leading a sustainability project to modernize rice farming and implement hydro and solar power, while the hero was the funding for the project and the heroine was a reporter trying to find out what had chased a famous actor into a remote village in the countryside. The goal of the story was to connect with allies and have a bit of a gentle discussion about how allyship isn’t a leadership role; about how you can want to help, how you can want to support marginalized people, but through these two POVs that reflected their own allies could see ways to do so without stepping all over those marginalized people.
That book has never seen the light of day.
My editor and I did okay through edits on that one. But then it went to a sort of “round table” where a number of senior editors shopped it, and they had…demands. One being that I rewrite a very sad scene where a young girl in the family the heroine had been staying with succumbed to dengue fever, the same dengue fever the heroine just barely survived while trapped in the village during monsoon season. In the version I wrote, the hero and heroine excluded themselves from the Buddhist funeral rites. It wasn’t for them. They hurt, they were sad, but they recognized their presence there would be a disruption.
The editors insisted that I rewrite it not only so that the heroine pushed aside the little girl’s family to take a key role in caring for her during her illness, but that she and the hero attended the funeral rites. I absolutely and unequivocally refused. I explained again and again that it was culturally disrespectful, that I could not, that it would push the book over the line from a book discussing allyship and into a white savior book. I explained that this is very personal to me; I’ve lapsed in my Buddhist faith, but still have extreme respect for it. They still insisted. They asked me ignorant questions. They said since the H/h were white allies, it was already a white savior book, so I might as well just cross the line and do it. They told me since the H/h were an accepted and beloved part of the community, it fit the story, and scoffed when I said there was a huge difference between being kind to foreigners and accepting and loving them as part of the community, and in no way had the latter happened. Again and again I said no, and when they pushed more and wouldn’t listen to my explanations, I said, “Clearly the cultural disconnect here is greater than I thought.”
That factual observation apparently warranted a three-way phone call with my editor and the publisher, in which my editor listened passively while the publisher browbeat me, used gaslighting barrage tactics, and just overall steamrolled me in an attempt to force me to do it. It’s not an uncommon tactic for this publisher, and anyone who recognizes who I’m talking about is probably well aware that she thinks she’s a Machiavellian mastermind outwitting and maneuvering everyone when she is, in fact, simply and transparently a wholesale bully who gets her way through force, not through wit, and typically when she thinks she’s pulled one over on someone from her superior position it’s more likely that they just didn’t feel like fighting with her was worth it.
She also informed me that, although I had attempted to maintain a polite but firm tone in my emails, I had basically called the senior editor a “racist whore.” (Her words, not mine.) When I protested I had said nothing of the sort, she told me yes, I actually did, I’m just too emotional and not objective enough to realize it—but of course, she is absolutely in a position to know what I said and meant better than I did, and to lecture me on my position as a man of color.