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)
Yes, she was white.
But y’know. She knows better.
And this editor’s feelings about being told we were speaking across a cultural divide—not even being called racist, as that was never said—were more important than actually treating a POC author with any sort of decency or respecting boundaries of culture in the story.
Thou shalt not explain anything, ever, to someone who already knows everything.
It was a shiteshow of a phone call. Literally, since the publisher was kind enough to inform me that the entire senior editor team now called my book “the diarrhea book” even though there was never, uh, any scene with that in the book. But that was meant to undermine my confidence, make me feel terrible, so I’d lose my spirit and cave in, because my book and I were already worthy of mockery so I should scramble to please them.
I didn’t.
I just trunked the book and walked away.
I haven’t spoken to that publisher since, and the editor I was working with has since quit without ever reaching out to me.
Because I violated the tenets of thou shalt not.
Thou shalt not be brown in publishing, and expect to be treated with any level of decency or equality.
This was even before Riptide, and all the messes with Sarah Lyons. Lyons informing me loftily, during the Winter Rain project, that it’s unrealistic for my character from a poor background to have even realized she had the option to go to university, because in her esteemed experience in academia, all those sad little poor kids just didn’t think about it until she stepped in to save them and tell them so, especially the brown ones. Then on Shatterproof, her little laughing comments about not putting POC on the cover because lol it won’t sell, don’t you know? The way she abused our editor/author relationship to get me to provide unpaid sensitivity consulting on POC and trans matters, because you know, those baby authors will do anything when they’re just starting out and afraid of losing a contract, and for a little fun let’s add dangling the promise of a paying job you never meant to give them over their heads while getting them to do a thousand little unpaid “favors.”
I won’t even get into the personally disgusting things she said to me, both denigrating my mental health and with her sexually inappropriate behavior toward both me and others. She treated me like I was less than human, spoke to me as if I was a pitiable animal, ignored that I had a right to consent or not consent to her sexual oversharing—and made it very clear she was aware she had power over me as someone influencing my career and knew I couldn’t wiggle out of the trap she’d put me in, frequently holding me hostage to unstable emotional whims where her bragging about her unpredictable violent dish-smashing meltdowns felt more like threats.
I had expected professional dignity and boundaries.
But thou shalt not do that in publishing when you wear a skin like mine, I guess.
And thou shalt not speak of it, as people swiftly reminded me with the death threats, scorn, demands for me to kill myself, and screaming I had to remove from the comments of my blog. “Mentally ill waste of space” was the nicest thing I was called. Several people were more concerned with a white woman losing her job than a white woman abusing her power over marginalized authors, even after other authors stepped forward to validate what I’d said and share their own experiences of Lyons being inappropriate with them.
Thou shalt not ever stand up for yourself.
So long before I wrote His Cocky Valet, I was used to facing down the thou shalt nots, both in what and how I wrote. But I still let certain things get under my skin, like the idea that if you write quickly, if you’re prolific, if you enjoy it, you must be doing something wrong because anything written quickly must be of poor quality. Just terrible. So I slowed myself down. I second-guessed. I spent ages writing and rewriting things, going back again and again, adding things that weren’t necessary to cover all my bases for what people would complain about, deleting things that were necessary because someone might take them the wrong way, looking at what I wrote in a blitz of joy and trying to find things wrong with it even when there wasn’t anything wrong with it, because if I enjoyed it that much then it must be bad, I must be a terrible writer.
Then that week happened. That wild writing frenzy, starting off meaning to do just a quick 10K short story in a couple of days and somehow ending up with a 70K novel in a week.
It’s not my best novel. It’s definitely not very tightly crafted. There are a ton of inaccuracies, weird things, etc. There’s triggering content, and a trigger warning that people have ignored to their detriment. But at its core, His Cocky Valet hits the right notes for intensely charged emotion, relationship development, Black Butler in-jokes, and just a little bit of taboo kink that, for readers who are into that sort of story, it just works. Well enough that it launched my career; well enough that it made my brand.