Facing the Facts

Photo owned by Scott Beale

So I found out some news about my stuff being published, and I guess I should have seen it coming, but why didn't I? I was walking around in a perfect little world where nothing could touch me or my writing. Wrong!

It turns out that the literary magazine that is publishing me gets to decide what to edit in the story and what to cut out. I don't know why this surprised me, but it did. Then I read the changes they made. It wasn't anything astronomical, but one little line they cut out just got to me. It's still bothering me, almost a week later. I plan on emailing them right after and asking them to put a line back in, but it's just weird. It's weird to think that someone else has domain over my writing; someone that isn't me.

I've accepted what they've done and just plan on asking for that one line to be added back in, but then my poem came up. They added in an entire stanza. A stanza I'm not particularly fond of. I'm going to tell them to take it out or it's not being published. Some of you may say that's stupid of me, but it's my work and now it just feels like a frankenstein baby! When an entire stanza I did not write makes its way into my work, it's no longer mine.

But I have to face the fact, that if I want to get published there will be an editor and a publisher that ultimately has say in everything that goes out there, and as much as it sucks, that's my life. I'm okay with it though, people are reading what I've written and that's all that matters... right?