Annette,
Thank you for your note and comment. And… I feel I should congratulate you on your “divorce.” The biggest wake up call of my writing life was realizing that a previous publisher of mine was as mercenary as any other business. I think the writer-editor chatter about books, writing and the editorial process often gives us a false sense of ease and “kindred soul-ism,” but it’s good to remember that, once you put yourself out there, it’s mostly about sales and money.

Fran,
thank you for your kind note. I’m intrigued that you thought it “terrible.” When it happened, in typical female style, I downplayed it and went madly foraging through my essay in a fit of the usual writer self-blame. But … nope. Just a bad editor who auto-linked the bio, the nationality and the content and then forged her own bias-laden conclusions. As we submit more and more to digital pubs, it was a big lesson for me and I was more than happy to share it with other authors.