wisb-Guardian-Express

If you're going to create a science fiction world, you cannot snatch up a random ancient culture and toss it into a universe in which interstellar travel is relatively widespread, servant robots are efficient and plentiful, and so on. If you want something like slavery to exist in such a world, you have to have a damn good reason for it beyond "they just don't like them." You have to adapt such things to technology. Otherwise, you're completely ignoring the impact technology has on the development of culture.

This is not the same as taking an analogue of a European medieval culture and inserting it into a fantasy world (unless, of course, you have a lot of magic and have made no effort to demonstrate how magic changes the cultures of a medieval society). There are at least reasonable assumptions one can make about early technological developments in human cultures. But it does not work in a science fiction universe as a cultural standard.

This is one of the few things that will make me toss a book across the room: when your world makes no sense. Mashing together ancient cultures with advanced future worlds simply does not work. No matter how hard you cram an eagle into a pig, you will not come out with a flying pig.

Sadly, a lot of people try to do this, and their books suffer as a result, because the moment I stop and say, "This doesn't make any sense," is the moment when I've been pulled out of the story. It won't be easy to go back after that.

Random question for you writerly types:

I'm currently working on a fantasy world, as I said a few days ago. The world is coming together well enough. Figured out the relationship between geography and climate (though not orbit and climate, sadly, which I cannot seem to find useful information for easily calculating). My problem now stems from a problem of naming, which seems to be a trap between oddly French sounding upper royalty "houses" and oddly middle English sounding stuff for most of the lower "houses."

So I suppose the question is this:

Should I change the upper houses to reflect the linguistic heritage of the lower houses, or could there be a valid reason from a linguistic perspective for those names to stay with their French influence (accidental) if there are no French-like cultures surrounding them (and, thus, no invasions, cultural transference, and so on)? 

I'm leaning towards changing the names, even though I like them as they are (the upper houses are Echeler, Millard, and Dorian, with Lyemark as the only slightly Frankish/Middle English outlier).

(The lesser houses, unfinished though they may be, are currently named as follows:  Leyne, Pyne, Trym, Cambryn, Caethyn, Prymsteyn, and Aestyn -- yes, I am fairly obsessed with the Y right now.)

To all the people out there telling me how I should publish my first book: please take your advice and shove it. You have no frakking clue what you're talking about. Anyone who says "there is only one way to do it" should be discounted as idiots. 

J.K. Rowling got rich publishing the old fashioned way. Amanda Hocking got rich self-publishing (and now she's got the old fashioned thing going). Lots of people have got rich doing it either way. Anyone who says "but my way is the only way" is full of shit. WTF do you know? Sometimes there is no right way. You just do what feels right to you and hope for the best.  Publishing is a crapshoot. Some of us make it. Most of us don't.

The only sure advice anyone can give is this: if you really want to make it, don't give up. Keep improving your writing and write better stories.

Meh.

That more or less sums up how I feel about it all now.  My thoughts have changed a lot in the last few years.  Such is life...

(Originally posted on Google+)

There have been a lot of lists recently of SF/F books everyone should read from *insert older decade here.*  While I enjoy these lists -- occasionally you discover something new or unusual -- I'm always driven to annoyance by the endless nostalgia for the "good ole days."  Don't get me wrong here.  I don't hate the classics.  Some of the best works of SF/F come from before my time.  But I think we need to have more discussions about the works being produced now.  Maybe that's because I like to pretend that I'll have a bead on what will be remembered 50 years from now.  Or maybe I like seeing what people feel are great works of SF/F from the 2000s (ish) so I can rub my chin and ponder.  It doesn't really matter.

Today's post is about this very question:

What do you think are the great works of science fiction and fantasy from the post-millenium period (the 2000s to the present)?  Why?

Some rules:

1. They obviously have to have been originally released at some point between 2000 and the present.  Re-releases or re-writes or pickups of self-published books published prior to that do not count.
2. "Great" should be taken to mean "a book that contributes to the genre in some significant way."  Interpret that how you will.  Entertainment value, however, is not enough on its own.
3. The books must be science fiction or fantasy.  I will not define what these mean; we can hash out suspect entries in the comments if people feel the need to do so.
4. The publisher or marketing strategy for the book is not strictly relevant.  If a great SF novel was published as a literary work in the general fiction section, then so be it.

The comments are yours.  Suggest away.

For those that don't know (which might be almost all of you), I have jokingly said that I am working on a 25-novel (1,000-page per book) epic fantasy series. In truth, said series will likely be 4 or 5 books, but that depends on how many subplots I decide to include.

Lately, I've been trying to build up the world, particularly the genealogical history of some of the main characters (it's relevant, since one of the POVs is The Bespectacled King, whose family have only recently risen back to the King's seat with said bespectacled person). This has no been easy, as there aren't many software programs that I've found that make it easy to create a chart following the familial line visually first (Freemind sort of works, but it's not designed to easily follow the lines of sons and marriages, and so on).

And, of course, I've bitten off more than I can chew. Of the four most powerful families in one of the kingdoms of my fantasy world, the first generation of children consists of 20 true blood sons (haven't started on the bastards yet...). No way to keep this all clear without better software (suggestions anyone?).

What about all of you? What adventures are you having exploring other people's worlds, or building your own?

I realize that a lot of people have already talked about Joss Whedon's portrayal of Black Widow in the smash hit The Avengers (and that I'm coming to this quite late).  Jim Hines has an interesting response here that is worth reading.  Much of the discussion has dealt with Loki's insult ("mewling quim," which more or less translates to "whining c-word") and the fact that much of Black Widow's screen time involves being subject to the authority of men.  Most don't seem to have a problem with the fact that Black Widow is under the jurisdiction of Nick Fury (a man); neither do I.  They do have a problem with the way in which power is distributed when Black Widow is on screen, and
particularly when she's doing her "spy" thing:  namely, that it appears as if men mostly have power in all situations, leaving Black Widow to navigate the patriarchal power dynamic that structures her society (and, in other words, ours).

On the one hand, I do not have a problem with this portrayal.  For me, The Avengers takes place in an alternate reality whose only difference from our own is that super powers and aliens exist and directly impact the lives of average people.  Comics always reflect our present in some way, whether through allegory/metaphor (think the parallel between anti-mutant movements and anti-black movements) or literal representation (the recent announcement that Canadian superhero Northstar will have a gay wedding is a good example).

In that sense, I think we need to take a quick look around us, particularly in the United States, where pretty much all Marvel comics are written and where the focus is almost always put (even when the characters are not Americans).  If we look at Black Widow, we realize that what we're seeing is a reflection of the reality we've presented women, whether we like it or not (this from the perspective of the film and not the comics).  She does not exist in an equal world anymore than she is part of a military or similar organization which reflects equality in its members.  In other words:  Black Widow's actions, unfortunately, must work within this system.  That means using what others perceive as her weaknesses to achieve her goals (even if those goals are S.H.I.E.L.D.'s and not her own).  It also means being subject to the patronizing gaze of her "male superiors" (in scare quotes for a good reason).

On the other hand, arguments for a more subversive feminist movement in The Avengers are ones for which I have sympathy.  On some level, Black Widow really should be treated more equally by her fellow "heroes," regardless of gender.  She is an accomplished spy, strong (emotionally, intellectually, and physically), and obviously completely capable of matching up with men, except where super powers give them the edge (let's be fair:  she's not going to overpower Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, or Iron Man, but only, I suspect, because they have things she does not -- powers or wicked technology).  With all that in mind, why would Whedon choose to portray her as less-than-equal?  Is it because men still have not moved well enough ahead, even in the fairly "progressive" realm of Hollywood, to see women as figures who subvert patriarchy?

To be honest, I do not have an answer for this question.  Personally, I do not have a problem with her portrayal, at least insofar as I can reflect upon my own reality.  My hope is that perhaps discussions like these will make us think about how our society is structured, because to change representations, we have to change the the society it reflects.

Anyone have thoughts on all this?  The comments are yours.


P.S.:  On some level, we should also acknowledge that some of the superheroes and leaders who are men in this movie also come from an older era.  In particular, Captain America spent the generations after WW2 as a Capsicle, which means he did not have the benefit of time to change with, well, time.  I don't know how much we can attribute this to the sexism of the film, but it's something to consider.

(Originally on Google+; cross-posting to amuse myself.)

Excuse me while I call this the dumbest thing to hit Geek culture all year that happens to not be some racist or sexist rant of doom. Seriously? Your idea of how the Hulk would speak is to give him remarkably sophisticated diction...but in ALL CAPS? Because ALL CAPS = The Hulk, right? Because The Hulk is a privileged white male teenager having a temper tantrum, but who is remarkably aware of himself as a literary cliche?

Here's how the Hulk would assess Mark Ruffalo's performance in truth: Funny jokes. Smash good.

That's about it. He's a man/creature of few words for a reason. That's why he says all but one (maybe more if you count grunts and roars as words) line in the entire Avengers movie.

Pah! This is why Film Crit Hulk works on Twitter, but not on a blog. On Twitter, he seems like he's actually in Hulk character (or she, if the person behind the persona happens to be a woman). On the blog? Not so much. He's using "Hulk" as a justification for putting things in all caps (i.e., to be annoying as hell).

Meh.

If you didn't know, I've been hard at work putting together my committee and reading list for my PhD exams, which I intend to take in March or April of next year.  The list will likely change in the next few weeks, given feedback from my director, but I thought you'd all like to see what I'm up to academically.

In celebration of Mother's Day, I offer to you all my favorite science fiction mothers. There are a few lists of mothers in science fiction, but this will be one of the only lists that narrows things down specifically to heroines who are also mothers (of which there are very few) and who can be found in fim.

I gave myself a few rules for the selection process:

1. Heroine will be defined as a woman who achieves (or attempts to achieve) physical or intellectual goals either as an equal member in a group, a leader, or on her own.
2. A mother will be defined as a woman who either gives birth to and participates in the raising of children OR a woman who adopts (de facto or literally) a child and participates in their raising.
3. They must actually be heroines while being mothers.  It doesn't count if she was a heroine in her younger days, and then stopped being one when she got pregnant and had kids.  It also doesn't count if she wallows in despair because she lost manly man, gives birth, and then decides to die (I'm looking at you, Padme Amidala).

Here's my list:


One of my favorite Sarah Jane moments:  reminding Davros in "Journey's End" with little more than the tone of her voice that she was there in the beginning, on Skaro -- sort of like rubbing salt in an open wound.  There's a reason Sarah Jane Smith remains a favorite among Whovians.  It's because she's awesome.

#4 -- Dr. Beverly Crusher (Star Trek:  The Next Generation)
An accomplished doctor on a powerful exploration ship full of menfolk with enormous egos?  Yup.  But she holds her own, telling her Captain what's what from time to time and resolving all manner of medical anomalies brought aboard by her intrepid crew.  And she has to handle all of that while being the mother of a genius son, Wesley.  Imagine trying to do best by your son while in an official "military" post.  Now imagine trying to handle being separated from your son in an increasingly hostile galaxy.  Yet Crusher handles all of that with extraordinary strength.

Not many mothers have to survive the disgusting levels of violence thrown at Sharon Agathon.  Being a cylon, she's hated by what's left of the human race, because her people nearly wiped humanity out.  She's hated so much that she's kept in a prison for most of her life -- where she is beaten and almost raped -- and has her half-human/half-cylon baby stolen away from her (supposedly "dead") by people who think Hera (the baby) will destroy the ragtag fleet of leftover human ships.  But she perseveres, fighting with all her might to save her daughter and her family.  She's a lot like...

What list of SF moms would leave out Sarah Connor?  With two enormous weights on her shoulders -- the looming threat of the sentient robot apocalypse and the responsibility of raising the savior of mankind -- she's  the kind of mother we all can respect.  Sure, she's not perfect -- after all, she's sort of mental and homicidal -- but so is everyone else.  Without her strength and determination, John Connor wouldn't exist and humanity would be screwed.



I rest my case.

Collecting all the votes I received on my blog and on Young Writers Online, it seems folks want to see "Lendergross and Eaves" first (following closely by "Suckled at the Edge of Flesh").  Cool beans.  That gives me some direction and focus.

And so, for your gentle reminder, here's the description (once more) of the upcoming WISB Short Story, "Lendergross and Eaves":

Set in the same city as the previous story, and in roughly the same era. 

The Anurians of Bifur live out their toad-like lives in the slums, eking out an existence while the city finds new ways to exploit them. Except for Terk. He's cornered the Eaves market, pushing illicit drugs as high as the elite circles. That is until someone important is murdered with Terk's calling card all over him. Except Terk doesn't kill people. Maims? Sure. But never kills. Which means someone is trying to set him up to ruin him. Unless he can figure out who's behind it all and clear his name. Well, mostly clear his name, that is...

I shall finish it soon!

they're a threat against the military, and neutralize that threat if necessary; Faisal Jenkins, captain of the Carthage, who wants to ferry people down the river to safety and listens to the river for the day when it will consume him and his ship; and an eclectic mix of secondary characters, from a con artist to a ship's first and second mates to military men and resistance fighters, all searching for a sense of home, a sense of who they were and who they have become, and a sense of what it means to have lost everything but not the will to find it all again.

I'm starting up the WISB Project again.  This year, I am going to finish it.  Through and through.  That means four new short stories set in Traea, and a full novel podcast, with an ebook release.  And to make up for life's complexities, I will give anyone who donated $5 or more a copy of the ebook for The World in the Satin Bag (and the deal applies to anyone else who decides to donate in the future).  I won't be pushing for donations this time, around, though.  Donate if you want.  All I really want is to hear from people.  If you like a story, or a chapter, leave a comment.

But for now, I need some direction.  I have four short stories in the works for the project, ranging from pre-WISB eras to distant futures (though still very much in the realm of fantasy).  Based on the following descriptions, which would you want to read first?  You can leave extended answers in the comments, if you are so inclined.

Here goes:

"Suckled at the Edge of Flesh"
A prequel to The World in the Satin Bag.

Fagan Tarceron rides the seas to map the unknown stretches beyond the shores of Elithae and the Black Gap.  But when the many ships under his lord's command discover a massive continent covered in abandoned cities, Fagan knows they should turn around before it's too late.  What could empty entire cities without leaving a trace?  The real question:  Is it worth finding out?

The Girl Who Flew on a Whale
Set several hundred years after the events that take place in The World in the Satin Bag.

In the long-forgotten city of Arlin, the Dreamer imagines riding the seas and the skies, having grand adventures with brigands and pirates and all manner of strange creatures.  Most of all, she dreams of the flying whales who have become the great myths and legends of the sailors and seafolk at the edge of the long-forgotten city of Arlin.

But the Dreamer is a young lady.  She's destined for courts and finishing schools and all manner of obscure tortures her mother can dream up.  And when the Royal Archbombasin of Cagerock convinces the Dreamer's mother to send her to his special school for special children, where it is rumored that he feasts upon young flesh, the Dreamer can take no more, fleeing into the city to discover the adventures she's always dreamed of...

(Probably more like a middle-grade novel, to be honest.)

"Murder in Hodgepodge Alley" 
Set in a pre-industrial city several hundred years or so after the events of The Girl Who Flew on a Whale.

Harper is one of the many who occupy the winding alley of monstrous houses and board-bridges called Magpie City.  One of the Prolet.  The lesser folk.  Life isn't terribly hard there.  They have food.  They have water.  And they can build up and up and up almost without limitation.  But the city of Bifur does have its limits, with strict security forces to keep those limits enforced.  When Harper finds the body of a member of a royal house, he knows that things will not go well for Hodgepodge Alley or the residents of Magpie City.  Not well at all...

"Lendergross and Eaves"
Set in the same city as the previous story, and in roughly the same era.

The Anurians of Bifur live out their toad-like lives in the slums, eking out an existence while the city finds new ways to exploit them.  Except for Terk.  He's cornered the Eaves market, pushing illicit drugs as high as the elite circles.  That is until someone important is murdered with Terk's calling card all over him.  Except Terk doesn't kill people.  Maims?  Sure.  But never kills.  Which means someone is trying to set him up to ruin him.  Unless he can figure out who's behind it all and clear his name.  Well, mostly clear his name, that is...

Have at it, folks!

SF Community: "WER IS ALL THE ADVENTURE AND FUNN IN SF!!! ITZ SO DEPRESSERING!"

Me: "How about +Tobias Buckell? Have you read him?"

SF: "WHOOOOOO? DAT AUTHER ECKZISTS? WUT? HAHAHA!"

That's the intellectual quality of the SF community right now. 14-year-olds writing text messages.

This is not to suggest that Tobias Buckell's space opera novels didn't sell at all, or that nobody had heard of them. But it seems to me that there's a huge sea of new, adventurous, exciting SF sitting out there on the shelves. Right now. Waiting to be read. If the SF community is really so annoyed by all the darkness and introversion, they can solve that right quick by buying the hell out of the kinds of things Buckell writes. It exists. It's waiting to be read. So where are you, SF community? Why is Buckell not a bestselling author for his non-tie-in SF, hmm? Exactly.

All this fist pumping over Elizabeth Bears column at Clarkesworld seems like a pointless misdirection.  SF isn't too dark.  SF isn't without its excitement and fun.  The community just isn't buying it.  They've spent the last 70 years trying to be taken seriously, and now that they are (by academics, by literary critics, etc.), they're shocked to find that what people want to read aren't the adventure novels of old.

You want to solve SF's public image of doom and gloom?  Start pushing the stuff you like.  Create a blog.  Tell your friends.  Advertise your favorite books.  Write reviews.  Otherwise, stop complaining.  You created the bed SF sits in, but SF isn't the one that brought the fleas and ticks.  It just opened its arms and legs to let them feed.

To all those who stared at me like I was a freak:  look at my fist.  That is the size of the stick you've got jammed up your ass.  Retract it before you cause permanent damage.

That is all.

P.S.:  Expect a video in the next few days.  No, I will not tell you anything about it.

L. B. Gale recently wrote a post detailing five ways J. R. R. Tolkien defies arguments over his simplicity as a writer.  What I find interesting about this post are the numerous inaccurate or false arguments provided by Gale in defense of Tolkien as a writer, all given in an attempt to support her claim that "these contradictions are what we find when a literary establishment deals with an original."

My problem with this argument isn't just that Gale's support is inaccurate from a literary history perspective, but that her argument relies on a fundamentalism within the genre community of which I've grown quite tired.  There is no "literary establishment" anymore.  If it existed, and it was as rigidly structured as genre folks would have us believe, then I could not do what I am doing now:  getting a PhD. in literature in an important English program at a large university which includes genre fiction as a component.  The fact is that those silly walls have long since been cut down; the barrier now isn't whether there are professors interested in genre fiction, but whether there will ever be enough jobs specific to genre for those of us who want to spend our lives immersed in it for academic purposes (it may take some time for the field to have an explosion; literary fields go in cycles in academia).

But beyond that, there are a few points that I think need to be made to put Tolkien into perspective (in contrary to Gale's argument):

I.  Fragmentation ≠ Original
While it's true that Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings during the modernist period and published it at the (arguably) start of the postmodernist one, the notion that this strategy is wholly original, or a mark of a kind of originality that somehow implies "merit" from a narrative perspective, is somewhat shortsighted.  Tolkien, of course, was writing a linear narrative, contrary to Gale's argument, but in a way that required multiple strands weaving together towards a common point (all of the narratives in LOTR move in the same direction:  forward).  But breaking up a story into strands, or even breaking up a narrative so that it does not follow in a straight, linear form, extends well into the periods that preceded the modernist one (one might even consider something like The Histories by Herodotus or The Decameron by Boccaccio as examples of this broken strategy at work, albeit in different forms).
II.  Tolkien Did Not Obliterate Formula
Gale argues that Tolkien cannot have had a linear plot with a straightforward narrative because "the moviemakers would have little trouble translating that to film" otherwise.  The problem?  Cutting is a natural process of adaptation, and the degree to which Peter Jackson and his fellow writers had to trim out details from LOTR to make it work as a film only tells us about the level of detail Tolkien managed to produce.  But this is no more a compelling reason to place Tolkien on a pedestal than any writer of history or any writer of exceedingly complex novels.  You'd be hard pressed, for example, to adapt The Canterbury Tales or any number of less-well-known Romantic-era works (for lack of examples that aren't canonical).

But, again, Gale relies on these assumptions to suggest that Tolkien did not write simplistic, linear patterns into his work.  Tolkien did write simplistic, linear patterns.  What he didn't write were stories of a reductive world -- that is a story about a specific place pulled out of the wider global context.  That's a far more compelling argument to be made about Tolkien than the unsupportable claim that Tolkien's very straightforward plot (evil ring is evil, the evil bad is eviling back, and the little hero must destroy the ring while the rest try to keep the world from crumbling) is anything but straightforward.

These assumptions also must be accepted to believe Gale's claim that Tolkien was obliterating formula when he wrote LOTR.  The problem is that Gale also acknowledges the sources that Tolkien drew upon as a student of mythology, all of which influenced not simply his interest in writing mythology, but also the very structures of myth, fantastic narrative, an romanticism that appear in his work.  What Tolkien did as a writer had been done before.  What Tolkien did to the literary field hadn't.  If we're going to think of Tolkien in the context of his greatness, then we have to do so primarily in terms of his actual achievements:  worldbuilding and almost single-handedly creating a commercial genre.

Gale makes a lot of these arguments, often by speaking about unnamed critics who make arguments that most legitimate critics wouldn't make if they actually read books (example:  Gale says that critics ignore the fact that Sauron is mostly a psychological presence; I suppose this would only be true if said critics believed Dracula was a dancing ballerina).
What I draw from this is, perhaps, the exact opposite of Gale's intent.  The problem with the genre community is that it spends too much time trying to legitimize itself to the imaginary literary establishment and ignoring the instances when genre writers do break through.  While there might be great reasons to argue over Tolkien's exclusion from discussions of "the canon," there is still the hard truth that what Tolkien was doing was only original because he was applying a fictional world to a pre-existing idea.  James Joyce was doing the same thing with Ireland in Ulysses (that is, using a real place as opposed to a fictional one).  But none of this makes LOTR or Ulysses great books.  There are different and more effective criteria to consider, I think.

Thoughts?

(Personally, I prefer the movies.)

I've had the pleasure to work with or receive criticism from a number of wonderful people.  Lyn Perry of Residential Aliens, for example, is one of the most gracious people who has ever published one of my stories.  In fact, when I was rather harsh about the stories in one of his issues last year, he didn't react as you'd expect (getting in a huff over it).  Instead, he was happy for the criticism, and offered up the next issue for my perusal.  He and I are likely to disagree on all kinds of things (personally and religiously), but our relationship has, however brief, remained friendly.

I've had similar experiences with Bruce Bethke, who will be publishing one of my fantasy shorts this year ("In the Shadows of the Empire of Coal"), and Nick Mamatas, who ripped one of my stories a new one, but in a way that showed me what I had done wrong (in a way that was irrefutable).  I've been fortunate to have these experiences, and the many others I don't have the space to talk about here.  The vast majority of editors are in that "nice people" bin.

But this post is about a bad experience.  No names.  No specifics beyond the event itself.

Some time ago, one of my friends pointed an editor with an anthology to fill in my direction.  I
read the details, thought it sounded pretty nifty, and set to writing a story.  There were a few hiccups on the way -- personal issues and so on -- and I spent a bit of time facetiously hyping up the story (I tend to do this with people I'm friendly with -- "This is the best thing ever" and so on, though it almost always comes with a :P face; my friend thinks the story is brilliant, and I trust his opinion on almost anything.  Plus, it got an honorable mention in a major award recently, so there's that).  I appreciated having the extra time and said as much.  Eventually I got the story done and submitted it.

As with any submission, I expect a preliminary "acceptance" to come with the caveat of "w/ edits."  This is (usually) a normal process.  Most of the time, the edits are minor.  You need to trim this.  You need to add a little emotion here.  And so on.  In this case, the edits were extensive.  The story I'd written was a tad long, with a lot of attention paid to the world and the characters.  So I went to work.  I cut the beginning and sucked relevant details out and moved them down into the second half.  I trimmed quite a bit from that story, to be honest, but there were some aspects of the edit requests that I didn't understand.  And if I don't understand something, I have to ask about it.  That's what I did.  I sent the new edit back and asked for clarification:  "I don't quite know what you mean by X.  Could you give me an example?"

What follows is one of the most unusual experiences I've had in the writing world.  The editor decided to do the edits themselves, along with their co-editor.  I assumed this was their "deal," and let them do it.  A week or so later, I receive a heavily-edited story.  The vast majority of the edits made sense.  Trim some worldbuilding here.  Trim some of this here.  Get to the meat quicker.  I accepted most of those.  But then there were the edits I didn't agree with.  These edits required cutting a lot of character development in order to reduce the story into the theme, moving details where they didn't make sense, or cutting details entirely, which you couldn't remove without tossing the whole world out of wack.  The crucial point, however, rested on whether to keep a secondary character's motivations apparent (the editor wanted to cut that out; I wanted to keep it in, even if trimmed excessively, because otherwise that secondary character would be little more than a shell).

The editor and I argued about this until he finally said that unless I accepted all their edits (the implication being that the publisher would ask for more edits anyway, so why bother haggling?), they would not accept the story and would have to find another fill the anthology.  Shortly after, they proceeded to tell me that I was one of the most difficult writers they had ever worked with:  I had forced them to edit my story, refused to accept most of the edits, and had wasted their time, etc.  It got worse.  I was told that their other reader didn't finish the story (why accept it, then?), that if another story came in, they would take it over mine (umm, ok), and, the icing on the cake, they denied that what actually happened (I asked for clarification in an email I still have in my inbox) didn't happen because "that's not how [they] recall it."

The reality? I accepted 90% of the edits (or more), and wanted to rework other suggested changes so as to avoid losing important details.  I never asked for this person to edit the story for me, nor refused to accept the majority of the edits.  There is no evidence of that ever happening (I have almost all of the emails and tweets).  This same person has since written their imaginary version of the experience (granted, without names).  It is just that:  an imaginary version of what actually happened.  The facts don't lie.

The result of this experience?  I will never work with this person again.  Ever.  I'm sure they would rather not work with me either, but for reasons founded on a reality that never existed.  And that's fine.  Because in the grand game of writing and publishing, there are a lot of people I'd rather work with anyway.  People who I've already had the pleasure to work with.  They'll get my stories.  Some of them will publish them.  Some of them won't.  I'll get rejections, calls for edits, and publications because I'll keep at it, keep working on my writing with my friend, and keep pushing forward.  But I did learn something important from all of this:  not all editors are nice people.