Rejecting what the market wants.

There are times when the brutality of the publishing industry takes my breath away, and one of these occurred recently when I was reading a report of an agent's talk about the industry to a writing group.

The notes recorded that the agent had given a list of what were hot topics at the moment.  And top of that list were psychological thrillers.  But that wasn't what had my jaw dropping open. That was the note appended to that list item, which read "with as much violence and sex as you can pack in."

Thankfully, this isn't an agent who handles my genre.  But if it had been, I would have crossed her off my submissions list immediately.  This is not someone I could work with.  This agent had casually tossed out the ingredients of sex and violence as if they were sugar and spice in a cake recipe.

Sorry, but I beg to differ.  This is something I've said before, but it bears repeating.  Everything in the universe is energy, and we get back more of what we think about.  And that makes the choice of what we write about a moral choice, in my opinion.  And that is why I'll never be adding sex and violence to my work just to meet the current formula for publication.  I don't want to see more of them.

Writing, even writing that is commercially published, needs to be about far more than that, in my opinion.  I want my writing to question and challenge our current society, to sound warning bells about our destruction of the planet, to challenge the ways women are limited and controlled.

Because what the market also wants is "fresh new voices", and "authenticity", and there's no way in hell I could ever be authentic adding sex or violence to my work.  They just ain't things I want to focus on, thank you very much.

I'm too naive, too idealistic, for that.  I want to write about people saving the planet's wildlife, and freeing their women.  Freeing themselves from violent cultures, and that includes sexually violent ones.  In short, I want to write about making the universe a better place, not wallowing in the culture of "ain't it awful".

And if that means I must reject some shallow, market-obsessed, editor or agent who is unaware of the impact of their actions on the world, then so be it. The search for the right agent will continue.