kill your editor

Corporate capital punishment had been reinstated, although in the book publishing business it was mainly used by authors who were unhappy with the way their editors handled their books. I had the unfortunate luck of having two separate authors sentence me to death at the same time. The authors in question did not believe in coordinating their plans with others, so my first execution was scheduled for the morning and my second for that same afternoon.

Author #1 was a very successful entrepreneur, and a bit of a showman. He rented out a large public atrium and set up ticket booths. The public was welcome at $20 a pop, but he promised an especially gruesome old-school decapitation for their money. I'd be put up on a platform while someone ran at my neck from behind with an authentic samurai sword. As the crowd began to gather, I snuck out from back stage and began pleading my case with them. I hoped that if they got to know me as a person they would be less willing to let my author go through with the beheading. They pretended they couldn't hear me.

At the last second, author #2 rescued me from the chopping block. His motives may have been somewhat self-interested (he didn't want to have to execute a corpse), but for the moment I was grateful. I was kind of upset that author #2 was going through with this. I thought we had a pretty good relationship. But he was very sensitive, and he claimed I had never paid enough attention to him or called him often enough to talk about his work. I suppose that may have been true. I have been very busy lately.

We discussed all this on the car ride upstate. He had rented out a cabin in the woods for a small private ceremony. Just him and me, the still lake, and some geese who would flap up in the air in a big flurry when he shot me in the back of the head and let me fall face-forward into the water. The blood would spread out around my head in the water like a halo, he said. He asked if he needed my permission to write about this in his next book. I told him I thought the imagery was actually rather derivative, but I knew he wouldn't listen to me.