Props to SLJ for getting this story out in the first place, but I have to note one thing that skeeved me out about the lede in the original article: “Don’t expect to see Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches (Abrams/Amulet, 2009) at Scholastic school book fairs this year. It’s been censored—at least for now—due to its language and homosexual content.” Calling the presence in a children’s book of a couple of lesbian mothers “homosexual content” is gross unless the two of them are totally going at it.

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Anyone else?

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Many years ago I was on YALSA’s (then YASD) Intellectual Freedom committee, and we had a bit of a tussle with Scholastic, which was asking authors to make “word changes” (read: remove obscenities) from their books before Scholastic would reprint them for its lucrative book clubs. Two things were at issue: Scholastic did not want to acknowledge, in the paperbacks, that changes had been made, and, in the cases of books that had been named to the Best Books for Young Adults List, the publisher wanted to be allowed to say that the expurgated editions were BBYA winners. No and no, although we only really had the power to enforce the second.

To me, the weirdest part of Scholastic’s argument was that since it was the author making the change, an affected book was still a BBYA choice. And some committee members bought this argument, as well as buying into Scholastic’s emotional blackmail that we were “punishing the authors” by disallowing the BBYA designation. Well, tough: why would we want to reward authors for caving to commercial pressure? The money would have to be enough.

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Goofus, on the other hand . . . .

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I had to explain this phenomenon to another editor today. (Don’t ask why.) I call it That Marilyn McCoo Thing. Back when “One Less Bell to Answer” was the number one song in America, the Fifth Dimension made a guest appearance, as themselves, on It Takes a Thief. On the show, they were recording “One Less Bell to Answer,” and lead singer Marilyn McCoo was insisting on finishing the song with an odd sequence of four dissonant chords. She would not be moved, even though everyone around her–Billy, Lamont, Ron, Florence and the recording engineers–said it was a bad idea. Well. It turned out that Marilyn’s brother had been kidnapped by bad guys who threatened to kill him unless the song was recorded with this ending–because the sound waves of the chord sequence, when played over the radio, would cause a bomb, secreted in a ship-in-a-bottle that sat on the desk of someone the bad guys wanted dead, to go off.

So when you ask someone to murder their darlings, be careful.

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