A hard decision

So there’s this small press whose anthologies I contribute to now and then. About every year or so, I check in to see what themes they have going on, and decide if I want to write for them. It’s been a while, so I checked in and liked one of the themes. I wrote a nice story for it, submitted it, got accepted.

Found out that my story was going to be the first one in the anthology, which is where they put the very best one. It was a real feather in my cap and I was all proud of it.

Then the editor let slip on social media that this was not going to stick to f/m pairings. No, she was going beyond that in the name of non-discrimination.

Until this point, this had been a Christian press. I had always been pleased with the quality of the anthologies they put out, and I enjoyed working with the editors. But this new direction was a slap in the face. For one thing, this anthology featured mail-order brides. The whole point of mail-order brides is to import a member of the opposite sex to start a family with on the frontier. If you’re just going to settle for the same sex, why order one in???? You have plenty!!

Anyway. I also disagree with this on theological and moral grounds that I won’t get in to at the moment. To make a long story short, I thought long and hard about it, and decided to withdraw my story from the anthology. I couldn’t be proud of being the front runner of a bunch of stories that feature stories/authors that literally hate me and everything I stand for.

Anyway, the anthology has launched, and the stories not only feature m/m, they also have weird harem romance garbage. It’s like, you name a perversion, it’s in there. It’s way worse than I thought. I can’t grasp how the concept of mail-order brides could be stretched to cover this nonsense. It’s certainly nothing like the original concept as posted on the website. I have a friend who kept her story in, and now is very sorry she did.

So yeah, this experience has been really, really bad, and it seems to just be getting worse. I’m going to change my story to remove all mention of the anthology setup and publish it myself. I worked hard on it, dangit, and I loved the idea of my alien rancher on Mars sending off to Earth for a human wife, who is willing to give him a shot … and winds up saving him from pirates.