"The Frog Prince"

As an editor, I'm very hands-on, and I expect the contributors who write for my anthologies to accept my editorial changes without kicking up too much of a fuss. If there are changes they disagree with, however, I'll almost always agree to do things their way, unless there's a really compelling reason not to.

Given that, I believe that it's incumbent upon me as a writer to return the courtesy and accept with good grace the changes that other editors make to my fiction, and I usually do so without argument.

"The Frog Prince," however, is a rare exception. I was invited to contribute to this anthology of crime stories inspired by fairy tales, and I wrote a story in which a male-chauvinist-pig of a character makes a chauvinistically piggish remark about a woman, a remark I would never in a zillion years make myself but which was perfectly in character for this character — and the editors took it out and substituted a wimpy alternate insult that in my opinion was completely out of character. I argued the point, but to no avail.

Some writers would have pulled their story from the project, but remembering the thing about "it's incumbent upon me to return the courtesy and accept with good grace," I let it slide. Except for that one part of the narrative, I think the editors' edits were fine, and I think the story is a good one. It also gave me the opportunity to reference Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre, specifically the Frog Prince episode, which my daughter Becca and I must have watched ten thousand times when she was a kid, so that was fun.

The anthology was released on June 2, 2026, and the story is my 135th. If anybody ever wants to reprint it, I'll attempt to reinstate the chauvinistic insult. (And if anybody ever reads this and wants to know what the chauvinistic insult was, there's an email link on this website's homepage, and you can email me and ask!)

Return to Bibliography.