Behind the scenes of Everything I Need.

 

I love sharing behind the scenes of my stories almost as much as I love writing the stories. Well, almost as much as I love having written the story.  I’ve held off on Everything I Need because my first publication experience with the story was more difficult than usual and I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable opening up about what I could only view as Bi-Erasure, no matter how much I tried to think otherwise. It took a long time for me to return to the story in order to expand and update the work and I’m grateful to JMS Books for giving me the chance to republish the work with comfort and confidence.

Everything I Need was written to in response to the 2016 Orlando, Florida mass shooting tragedy at the Pulse nightclub where 49 people were killed, and another 53 wounded. The submission call was for stories highlighting the theme of love wins for publication in a charitable anthology to benefit the victims and families. This was a tough time for me personally. I was spiraling with an additional deterioration in my sight and now my community was working through the emotions of how a safe space became anything but. I was simply happy my words might do a bit of good. The characters demanded they be put to page,  and once the short was complete, I dove right into writing a prequel.

Somehow this simple short became a total gut punch and a crippling blow to my confidence in the direction and future of my writing. 

Bi-Erasure has always been a thing. At least in my personal experience. Even in this age, where our understanding of the complexities of our sexuality can be expressed through a range of identifiers, bisexuality still seems to catch some flack. The insults are old and tired, and I don’t want to go into them here, but it’s kind of a damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, and the hurt left in their wake is real. It’s a shame. Love between two people is an amazing and wonderfully transformative experience. No one should have a voice in who you share the experience with.

One of my characters in Everything I Need is Joshua Lawton. I love his character. He’s a bisexual, ex-military EMT. He’s a little rough around his edges, but head over heels with the love of his life. I’ve never been a writer who swears the story gets hijacked by the characters, but Joshua was as demanding as my characters get. Especially when it came to his appearance. A large part of his identity is expressed through his tattoos. Some are hidden beneath his uniform and explored in the prequel story. But as bold and brash as Joshua himself are his hand tattoos, visible for the world to see. The word love is inked across both sets of his knuckles, with the astrological symbol for male on one thumb, and the symbol for female on the other. Or so he was written.

Somewhere in the first publication, something happened. The original call for submissions stated characters of all orientations were welcome. I triple-checked. But after initial acceptance and two rounds of edits, with no word of explanation to me as the author, the published version of the work had Joshua sporting the astrological symbol for males only on each thumb. 

I’ve never been good naming my emotions and to this day, even as an author, I’m not sure I can detail how devastating finding this change felt. The depth of my  response  still surprises me. It was visceral in every sense of the word. We all read what we like, whether it be genre, sexual pairings, or the lack thereof. It's fine. But in this case, while the change might have been made to my character, it reflected something larger and greater to me in what was already a difficult emotional place as more and more of my sight drifted away.

The initial publishing company responded to my request for clarification with an immediate apology and made the needed correction to the already-released work. I appreciate that now as much as I did then. But I still don’t know what happened or why. Was it Bi-Erasure in its simplest form? A simple last-minute editing error? Someone, somewhere late in the production process felt the change should be made. With the new and updated version released by JMS Books, it shouldn’t matter to me anymore. But it does. Especially when I remember the tragedy behind the story and the reason for its inclusion in the anthology in the first place.

I’m slowly writing again. In addition to rewrites and republication of my older stories, new work is on the way. Every time I open my main work-in-progress file, I see the folder for my still-unfinished prequel to Everything I Need, and Joshua starts demanding I pay attention to him again. I tell him it’s up to the readers to decide. Would you like to read more of Joshua and Michael’s story? I’d love to know.

5:15pm - various edits made for blind life typos.