10 (11) Ways To Tell Your Editor Hates You

Everyone knows editors are the natural born enemies of writers. We’re…uh. They’re mean, narrow-minded, ruthless people without an ounce of human compassion in their black, shriveled, gin-scented hearts. Bitter and entirely destroyed by the rigors of life, they hate everyone – but especially hate writers. And books. With a passion. And it’s likely that your editor hates you. In fact, it’s pretty obvious. Not sure if your editor hates you or not? Look for these 10 11 signs:

1. He points out your errors. It’s impossible to be perfect with some asshole constantly griping at you about comma abuse, homonym misuse, and proper apostrophe placement. You never do anything wrong. The dude needs to just back off.

2. He explains things to you about grammar, proper usage, plotting, characterization, etc. What does he think you are, five? Of course you know these things. You know everything. He just doesn’t get that you’re exercising your stylistic freedoms. And why is he giving you lessons in history, physics, Cantonese slang, Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the limits to which the human body can strain in that particular position of the Kama Sutra? You’re creative. You don’t have to be factually accurate.

3. He suggests improvements to your story and style. If you’d wanted to write it the way he suggested, you’d have done it that way in the first place. Even if you’d never thought of it before. Jesus. What an ass. He’s probably a failed writer with nothing better to do than try to undermine your talent. If he’s so smart, he can go write a book. You don’t need to improve anything. Ever.

4. He makes you do all the work of implementing his recommended changes. Cripes. You wrote the book once already. Why should you have to retain ownership of your characters and storyline to write it again? All that BS he spouts about trusting you and your talent, and about not taking over your story…pfft. He’s just blowing smoke up your ass because he’s too lazy to do it himself. He should just whip everything together and take care of it; it’s not your problem anymore. Editors are really just glorified proofreaders anyway. Everyone knows that.

5. He actually thinks your writing should mature with each iteration of edits and each new story. Why should you have to change what’s already perfect? So what if you just had to rewrite ten pages of action because he decided the existing scene created a plot hole the size of a mutant manatee? You’ll just dash it off and send it in as-is, flaws intact. Nevermind the fact that he’s spent the entire manuscript griping like your mother-in-law about semicolons can’t be used that way or make sure the modifying clauses agree with the main subject, verb, and object. Whine, whine, whine. If your writing style changed from edit to edit and book to book, he wouldn’t have anything to do. You’re just being considerate and keeping him from getting bored. After all, he wouldn’t have a job without you.

6. He’d rather go without sleep than miss another chance to go through your manuscript. I mean, obviously he’s just trying to create problems and he’s got a grudge against you. Does it really matter if every instance of the word Green in the Manuscript is CapitaLiZed? Get a life, man. Maybe if he slept more than three hours a day he wouldn’t be so nitpicky.

7. When you halfass your edits, he makes you do them again. Clearly he doesn’t understand that you skipped 75% of his editorial commentary because it was all asinine and destructive, demonstrating that he doesn’t get what you’re doing. Also, see previous comment re: getting a life. Doesn’t he think you have anything better to do?

8. He makes you kill your darlings. You spent months crafting that perfectly placed piece of purple prose, with its precisely poetic palliteration. You love that particular figure of speech and damn it, even if it’s not appropriate, you’ll make it appropriate. Your favorite 20-page scene detailing the movie the lovers watched in chapter 40 just touches your heart and reminds you of when you first watched it at a slumber party 72 years ago. You adore the way you always write “ocular orb-thinguses” instead of “eyes;” it’s your signature. You love your art. You are your art. And he’s trying to destroy you by making you cut out the things you love most. Nevermind that the narrative makes more sense without them. He’s ruining the beauty of the thing.

9. He challenges you. He pushes you beyond your comfort zones and asks you to write things you’ve never written before, try things you’ve never thought of, learn new ways to do an old art. What is he trying to do, give you nightmares? New experiences are traumatizing. If you take risks, you might fail. Wait. That’s it, isn’t it? He wants you to fail.

10. He gives you deadlines. You have other priorities. Your hair appointment is this afternoon, your dog needs a mani-pedi, you’re working on a brilliant new story that will blow the NYT list out of the water. Look, those deadlines can wait. It’s not that hard to put a book together. You can just turn it in the day before the release date and it’ll be fine. It’s not like there are any other books in the pipeline, anyway. Yours is the only one that matters. If your editor really cared, he’d prioritize you above everyone else.

11. He makes you self-promote. And he’s out there promoting you, too. I mean, really. There are marketing and PR people for that. You shouldn’t have to self-promote; you are the author, the diva, the prima donna who watches from an ivory tower as the fans come flocking. You shouldn’t have to do anything to draw them. And heaven forbid anyone expect you to speak with them or engage them in any way. They aren’t authors like you.

If your editor meets even half these criteria, it’s obvious that he or she hates you and wants your book to fail. Or at the very least, they’re trying to make you as insane as they are. You should take up drinking. Make sure you drink while you write and while you edit; it’s a bonding experience, and you’ll be keeping your editor company. It won’t affect the quality of your work at all.

Besides, even if it does, your editor will fix it. That’s what he’s there for, after all.

I just know someone out there will take this seriously. And then I’m going to cry. You wouldn’t want to make a poor, defenseless, exhausted editor cry, would you?

Is there such a thing as a revenge award?

So yesterday a silly tweet or two (or three…or twenty…) turned into an entire day of wombat snarkiness on Twitter, with Allison, LaTessa, Kerry, Janelle, Jeffe, and Kristine all getting their wombat on up in dis place. (Yes, wombats. Don’t ask. FYI, Thursdays are now Wombat Day. Ffft ffft.) Of course Allison, in all her goofy glory, had to take it a step further. And thus this was born:

When I finished laughing (and that took a while), I promised revenge. Revenge in the form of…BACON. For never was there a nuttier bacon nut, and one day I shall bribe her for ARCs with entire pans full of greasy goodness. (Because really, what else is a pig good for?*)

Oh, and this:

(Click for the larger version.)

Taylana the Cat Princess.

Lately every time my mind wanders, it goes limping down memory lane. Maybe it’s a sign of early-onset senility. Maybe it’s just that time of year when one reflects on one’s life. I can’t say I’ve done much reflecting; I’ve done a lot of cringing, remembering stupid things I’ve done and embarrassing situations I’ve been thrust into. But while dodging the specter of my humiliating freshman Latin class or trying to forget how I lost a track meet by two inches of distance on a shotput throw, I stumbled across another memory: my English teachers.

I only had two between 6th grade and senior year; I had the good fortune of being in the AP English & Creative Writing class, which meant the same teacher guided our progress year after year and gave us personal attention when developing our speaking and writing skills. For my freshman through senior years, that was Mrs. N. She was utterly out of her mind – and utterly brilliant. She was the one who shaped my love of reading and writing, and encouraged me even when others admonished me to get my nose out of the books and go do something normal kids would do. Her lessons have remained with me for my entire life, along with her frizzy yellow hair and enormous coke-bottle glasses.

Actually, she looked a hell of a lot like the principal on South Park. Only crazier. A lot crazier. We’re not even getting into the incident with the eggs and the beeswax.

No matter how dotty she was, though, Mrs. N was a great teacher…and she saved me from Mrs. L, my teacher throughout the three years of middle school.

Mrs. L was a nice woman, for the most part – in that rather false way that said she was only being nice to her students because it was her job, though she really did work hard at teaching us the foundations of proper English while still letting us have free reign to develop individually. She even tried to stimulate our creativity, which led to our 6th-grade project.

We had to write a book.

Oh, not a full-length book. Forty pages, double-spaced…which was still quite daunting to a 6th-grader. We had a semester to write it. Most of us dove in with eager enthusiasm, chattering about our ideas all through class and completely ignoring Mrs. L when she tried to call us to order. I still remember my book; if I recall, it was called CAT PRINCESS.

I was in 6th grade. Shut the bloody hell up.

My heroine was Taylana. Her mother was a postal worker, just like mine. She was as confused about girls as I was about boys. I was projecting just a little – no, a lot. I was young, and at that age where every story I read cast me as the hero inside the shell of the author’s character. So when I wrote my own story, I wrote a story I’d want to be in and a persona I’d want to adopt, with the gender reversed. Taylana had bright green eyes, because I thought mine were too brown and ordinary. She had long, dark hair that didn’t need special treatments to be straight, and because she was a girl she didn’t have to argue with her mother about keeping it long. She had a black cat just like mine.

And she had brown skin, just like mine – though darker. She was purely African-American, while I’m only part.

There were a few other influences; Occula from Richard Adams’ MAIA, along with another story I’d recently read (but can’t remember now) about a middle-aged woman who was transported to another world and at some point discovered her real heritage…about the time her inner self transformed her into an angry mother bear. Literally. Thus Taylana was the lost princess of the cat people, who’d been sent to the human world to keep her safe; the black cat was actually her guardian, and could talk to her. She shapeshifted into a panther.

Let me remind you: I was eleven. Maybe twelve.

I wish I still had the story, for nostalgia’s sake. Other than a 3rd-grade effort about Dolores the talking hamster, it was my first real work of fiction. Well, it would be if I’d finished it. I failed the assignment, because about two thirds of the way through I put it down with no desire to ever touch it again. It was stupid, it was wrong, it was bad, I shouldn’t have even bothered. Or at least…that’s what Mrs. L led me to believe. During our progress check-ins, she’d read the stories and offer a little advice.

In my case, her advice was to make Taylana white.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, why is she black?”

“Because she just is.”

“She needs a reason to be black.”

“Why?” I asked again, confused.

“Because without a good reason for her to be black, no one wants to read about her. Nobody wants to read a story about a black person. Those stories don’t matter.”

And that was it.

Just like that she’d rendered my character and my story invalid without any consideration of its merit, its worth; all that mattered to her was that the character was black, which made it wrong.

Even worse, she’d rendered me invalid. She’d told me my perspective, my voice didn’t matter…and never would. She’d told me that even though I grew up around people of so many races – most of them not white, especially the majority of my family, my neighbors – there was nothing important about the stories they had to tell, real or fictional. There was nothing important about their thoughts, their perspectives, their cultural insight. There was nothing she could ever possibly relate to, simply because of the color of their skin. The color of my skin.

I felt small. I felt transparent, invisible, dehumanized. I was already a wallflower before, but after that I became wallpaper. I retreated into my books, hid my notebooks full of scribblings, and avoided my friends…my primarily white friends, who found plenty to relate to in our common childhood experiences and had no idea what Mrs. L was talking about, or why it should matter. They liked my story, with the unbiased view of the young – but it was too late to change my impressionable young mind, as an authority figure had already told me it was worthless.

It took another authority figure to straighten me out: Mrs. N. She gave us creative writing assignments starting in freshman year, and noticed mine were a bit stiff, unnatural. I wrote about white boys and white girls, not as normal people, but as ideals of what Mrs. L had told me people wanted to read. I wasn’t comfortable with them, and she could tell in every word – when I even did the assignments, as I felt like there was no point in even picking up a pen. She tried to work with me, despite my mutinous silence and withdrawn nature. After some patience, she managed to pry an explanation out of me.

And when I finally told her about my misgivings, she laughed.

Not at me, no. At Mrs. L. She also called her a few interesting names I won’t repeat here. And then she told me,

“Adrien, who cares what color they are? Who cares what color you are? Every day African-Americans and Chinese people and Arabs and Malays and Latinos and hell Nigerians – everyone’s out there having the same experiences as you and I. There’s a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl somewhere right now staring at a handsome boy with her heart in her throat and hoping he’ll notice her, and just because they’ve both got brown skin and black eyes doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel the same damned things as the blonde white girl when she’s looking at her handsome green-eyed boy.” Then she rapped my knuckles with her pen.

“Ow!”

Then she rapped hers. “Ow!” And she laughed. “See? I’m a nutty old white lady, and you’re a stubborn mule of a young – wait, what are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’ve got pretty skin. It’s like nutmeg. And mine’s like flour. Young dark boy, old pale woman. But the pen still hurt us the same way. And if you wanted to write about it, you’d write it the same way, because we have the same experiences, and they mean the same thing. Exactly the same thing. Your pen smack isn’t my broken leg. Do you get it?”

I nodded slowly, though I wasn’t sure I did, and wasn’t sure I wholly believed her. I’d been burned once already.

“Good.” She started to smack my knuckles again, then grinned when I yanked my hand back before she could. “You learn quick. Let’s see if you’re as quick with a pen. Throw this shit away, don’t tell your mom I said shit, and start over. Write stories about people who matter to you, and if they matter enough…they’ll matter to everyone.”

It took years before I had the maturity to really grasp what she was trying to tell me, but I’d already grasped one important thing: the hand she offered to lift me out of the pit of misconception so I could stand on even footing with everyone else. And what she taught me stuck with me beyond even high school and college, even though I didn’t know until five or six years ago that I wanted to be a writer. I’d thought about computer programming for a while, ended up in data analysis before moving on to full-time writing and editing…but thanks to Mrs. N I never stopped writing on the side, whether it was college assignments, fanfic, or random little drabbles of no importance.

And there was always someone brown in the stories – not just because Mrs. N said it was okay, but because it was what I wanted, and most importantly Mrs. N had taught me to stand up for what I felt was right regardless of any authority figure’s opinion. Whether the protagonist, antagonist, or supporting cast, there were always brown people as part of the landscape of the story – because brown people have been part of the landscape of my life. We’re part of the landscape of your life. You interact with us every day; maybe we’re part of your story. Or maybe you’re part of ours, and we’re the star; that doesn’t make the story any less valid, especially if you stop to think about the fact that we have enough in common in our lives for them to overlap. You talk to us every day; you know us. We’re your friends, your coworkers, people you pass on the street. We have the same concerns you do, the same joys, the same fears.

Just like you, we read. We write. Yes, there are higher rates of illiteracy among the ethnic population, but we’re fighting to change that. We’re fighting not only to make our voices heard, but to learn the right ways to communicate our message on common ground.

We’re fighting to tell stories that give us a little something more to identify with. We’ve grown up reading stories where the white person is the star, and anyone dark is a marginalized token that’s often stereotyped. Yet we’ve found something to identify with in those stories; we’ve found something to love, something that fires our imaginations and makes us want to write our own stories with people like us. People like you, with only a few differences of language, culture, and coloration. We’re trying to be recognized as part of the mainstream – because “mainstream” shouldn’t mean “white only.”

And it doesn’t, anymore. Despite some old voices who still insist no one will buy books with an ethnic protagonist, more and more writers are striking out to speak with colorful voices on every page of their stories. Are readers having trouble identifying? No. No, instead they’re falling in love with the stories and the characters, because good fiction is good fiction – period. They’re proving the status quo wrong.

One day I hope to prove Mrs. L wrong. One day I hope to see Kensington, Akhilesh, Sujit, Hai, Rio, Crow, Akai, Vice, all my rainbowed cast in print – and not just the ethnic rainbow. Grayson, Vee, Marcus, Sebasien, Kira – another rainbow, on the LGBT spectrum; another set of voices who are just as mainstream as the heteronormative ideal.

We aren’t any better than you. You aren’t any better than we.

We’re all the same, but no one asks if there’s a good reason for your characters to be white.

So why do we need a good reason not to be?

Blog awards?

Okay, looks like I’ve now been tagged for two blog awards and have been entirely lazy in doing something about that, probably because they’re basically memes from hell and “doing something” requires an hour of cadging post bits together. I normally ignore these things and fully expect 75% of those tagged to do the same, but this time I indulged in an effort to not be such an antisocial grouch. (Though the next person to dump one of these on me is dead. I will hunt you down and slap you with fish. Cold, slimy fish.) Allison tagged me for the first: the Sunshine Award, which is…well…c’mon. You guys know me. That’s hilarious. Irony abounds. Rules for the award:

*Put the logo on your blog in your post.
*Pass the award onto 12 bloggers.
*Link the nominees within your post.
*Let the nominees know they have received this award by commenting on their blogs.
*Share the love and link to the person from whom you received this award.

It took me a while to actually stop and say, “Wait…out of all the blogs I read, do I actually bloody well talk to a dozen of those people?” Surprisingly, the answer was yes. So here are the twelve people I’m passing the award on to:

1. Anji and her crew over at Cinema Chicks: http://cinemachicks.wordpress.com/
2. Kerry: http://uppington.wordpress.com/
3. Carrie: http://www.carrieclevenger.com/
4. Janet: http://muffintopmommy.wordpress.com/
5. Jinxie: http://jinxiesbabblingblogs.blogspot.com
6. Sabrina: http://coffeequill.blogspot.com/
7. Jennifer: http://www.jenniferambrose.blogspot.com/
8. Lessa: http://gonfalon.org/eclat/
9. Jeffe: http://lovepowerandfairytaleendings.blogspot.com/
10. H.C. Zuerner, also known as the scary hungry kitty: http://kittysbleedingwords.blogspot.com/
11. Wookie’s Girl: http://www.blogger.com/profile/07726231846622344573
12. Slush Pile Hero: http://slushpilehero.wordpress.com

Next, the…uh…”Creative Writer” award, emphasis on the quotes. Which I guess is accurate, since the stories we tell are a big mess of lies. They’re just enjoyable, intricate lies. The rules are a little more complex for this one:

1.)I am to thank the person who tagged me,

2.)Copy and paste the award on my blog,

3.)link to the person who nominated me,

4.)Tell up to 6 lies about myself and one truth.

5.)Tag at leasr 7 people for this award. I tagged 8 because the whole “7″ thing was getting redundant and I despise redundancy.

6.)Post links to their blogs

7.) Comment on each of their blogs to inform them of the nomination.

So, thank you Annarkie. My (sometimes snarky) six lies and one truth, and you get to guess which one is the truth:

1. My name is actually Adrien Luc-Sanders, not Adrien-Luc Sanders. I’m really a woman who married a man with the last name Sanders, but wanted to keep my maiden last name of Luc.

2. I am entirely neurotic about walking on floors in bare feet. As in, I refuse to put my feet in the bed if they’ve touched the floor, because they might contaminate the sheets.

3. Once I came two tequilas away from getting married in Brazil. To a woman.

4. When I was a little boy, I fantasized about having Superman for a boyfriend.

5. I once accepted a dare to eat a live lizard.

6. I’ve left weird things hidden in various places in every apartment I’ve lived in, just to freak out the next renters.

7. I’m really Billy Joel.

And now for my list of seven bloggers to pass the award to:

1. Allison, who bled sunshine all over me. http://mynfel.blogspot.com
2. Kerry, who has a bloody sunflower for her Twitter icon. http://uppington.wordpress.com/
3. Carrie, who rhymes with Kerry but writes bloody stories. No sunshine or sunflowers. http://www.carrieclevenger.com/
4. Janet, also known as MuffinTopMommy, whose Twitter icon sometimes looks like a flower. http://muffintopmommy.wordpress.com/
5. Jinxie, because I’m running out of ways to link these and figured a J-name would work. http://jinxiesbabblingblogs.blogspot.com
6. Sabrina, because her blog name makes me want coffee (and she’s one of my closest friends, not just a fellow writer). http://coffeequill.blogspot.com/
7. Jennifer, just because I like her and completely gave up on the thematic thing. http://www.jenniferambrose.blogspot.com/

…at least I could use part of my list of a dozen for the list of seven, just with a few embellishments.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a crap ton of comments to leave. ~groans~ I have some other good news to share, too, but I’ll save that for tomorrow after I’m done with some paperwork.

So…

…it’s almost mid-February. Is anyone surprised that my outgoing Christmas cards are still sitting on the kitchen counter, addressed and waiting to be stamped and sent out?