It has been nearly a year since I posted this account of withdrawing a story after discovering the magazine editor who had accepted it was a convicted paedophile. ‘A Mother’s Touch’ – an alias I used for for the sake of that post – was in reality a story called ‘Night Feeds’.
When I pulled ‘Night Feeds’, my conscience told me immediately that I had done the right thing. I simply could not have lived with myself if I had sold out my principles for the sake of a publishing credit. But to get past the immediate rash of disappointment, I did what I always do when a story is rejected: I sent it somewhere else.
I love ‘Night Feeds’ – I would class it among the top five best things I’ve written – but in the ensuing 12 months it copped another five rejections. I began to wonder if standing up for those principles had been a quixotic gesture, a distasteful version of what American academic Barbara Oakley called “pathological altruism”. I had also begun to wonder whether the story was not the masterpiece I had hoped – after all, writers (as I’ve noted before) can be the worst judges of their own work.
Then, on June 3, I was sitting at the airport waiting for a flight when an email arrived in my inbox. It was from Jennifer Word at EMP Publishing, who said she and her team loved ‘Night Feeds’ and wanted to publish it in their Creepy Campfire Stories anthology. It will appear in November 2015.
Not only was this validation of the stand I had taken against one of the vilest crimes in existence, it came with a mercenary reward - payment for the story will be ten times what I would have got if I’d put away my moral compass and agreed to publish with Alban Lake.
One last thing: I don’t think it’s chance or coincidence that the editor who chose to publish ‘Night Feeds’ was a woman. When you read the story, you’ll understand what I mean.