DOWNING TOOLS

I’m concerned some blog followers might think some pieces here are just about personal issues, or personal problems. It has certainly been a problem coping with something so personal, but the professional is far more important, especially in writing about the publishing industry, storytelling and authors. I’ve met many editors who show an extraordinary arrogance, and this is most certainly a case in point. In the UK a publisher long ago shut a door, after a department had moved jobs, and then told me ‘there was no market for animal fantasy’. It was complete nonsense, and Fell went on to be a small best seller in America, and sold here too. It is partly why having to face that attitude again, but with people I knew so personally, became appalling. The things I believe were specifically wrong though were virtually disallowing me to represent my own work properly, entirely for the comfort of someone else, allowing a situation to develop, seemingly unresolvable, that totally inhibited real editor-author honesty, and holding up another book for years, that was part of my potential livelihood, and so holding my whole life to ransom. As hokey as it might sound, I threw down tools at one point, and said I had not become a writer in the first place to allow those kind of values to operate. It’s true, but by then internal politics was far more important than any truth about art, the fight of writers, or what is vital to the writing process. DCD

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