Hey! I'm David Peterson, and a few years ago, I wrote a book called Create Your Own Secret Language. It's a book that introduces middle grade readers to codes, ciphers, and elementary language creation. The age range is like 10-14, but skews a little bit older, as the work gets pretty complicated pretty quick. I think 12-13 is the best age range.
Anyway, I decided to look at the Amazon page for it a bit ago, and it's rated fairly well (4.5 at the moment), but there are some 1 star reviews, and I'm always curious about those. Usually they're way off, or thought the book was going to be something different (e.g. "This book doesn't teach you a thing about computer coding!"), but every so often there's some truth in there. (Oh, one not 1 star but lower rated review said they gave it to their 2nd grader, but they found it too complicated. I appreciate a review like that, because I am not at all surprised—I think it is too complicated for a 2nd grader—and I think a review like that is much more effective than a simple 10+ age range on the book.) The first 1 star rating I came to, though, was this:
Now calling a completely mild description of a teenage girl who has a crush on another girl controversial is something I take exception to, but I don't want to pile on this person. Instead I wanted to share how this section came to be in the book.
The book is essentially divided into four parts. The first three parts deal with different ciphers or codes that become more complicated, while the last part describes elementary language creation. The first three sections are each built around a message that the reader can decode, but with language creation, the possibilities are too numerous and too complicated, so there isn't an example to decode, or anything. It would've been too difficult.
For what the messages to decode are about, though, I could do, potentially, anything, so at first I thought to tie them into a world of anthropomorphic animals (an ongoing series of battles between cats and mice), with messages that are being intercepted and decoded. My editor rejected that. Then I redid it so that each section had an individual story that had to do with some famous work of literature. My editor rejected that as well. He explained that it needed to be something that was relevant to kids of the target age range. I was kind of at a loss, for a bit, but then I thought of a story of kids sending secret messages about their uncle who eats too many onions. I shared that, my editor loved it, and I was like, all right. I can do this.
The tough part for me in coming up with mini-stories to plan these coded messages around was coming up with a reason for them to be secret. That's the whole point of a code/cipher: A message you want to be sure no one else but the intended recipient can read in case the message is intercepted. With the first one, two kids are poking gentle fun at a family member, so they want to be sure no one else can read what they're writing. For the last one, a boy is confessing to a diary, because he feels bad that he allowed his cat to escape, but no one knows he did it (he does find the cat again). For the other, I was trying to think of plausible message-sending scenarios for a preteen/teen, and I thought of how we used to write notes in, honestly, 4th and 5th grade, but I aged it up a bit, and decided to have a story about a girl writing a note to her friend because she has a crush on another girl, and wants her friend's opinion/help.
Here's where the point of sharing this comes in. As I had originally written it, the girl's note to her friend was not just telling her friend about her crush, it was also a coming out note, and she was concerned what her parents would react poorly.
Anyway, I sent that off with the rest of my draft, and I got a bunch of comments back on the whole draft (as expected), but my editor also commented on that story, in particular. Specifically, he noted that not every LGBTQ+ story has to be a coming out story, the part about potential friction between her and her parents because of it was a little heavy for the book, and, in general, not every coming out story has to be traumatic.
That was all he said, but I immediately recognized the, in hindsight, obvious truth of all three points, and I was completely embarrassed. I changed it immediately, so that the story beats are that it's a crush, she's not sure if it'll be reciprocated, and she's also very busy with school and band and feels like this will be adding even more busy-ness to her daily life as a student/teen. Then I apologized for making such a blunder. My editor was very good about it—after all, that's what drafts and editors are for—and that was a relief, but I'm still embarrassed that I didn't think of it first.
But, of course, this is not my lived experience, not being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. This is the very reason why you have sensitivity readers—to provide a vantage point you're blind to. In this case, I was very fortunate to have an editor who was thinking ahead, and I'm very grateful that he was there to catch it. That editor, by the way, is Justin Krasner.
One reason I wanted to share this, though, is that while it always is a bit of a difficult thing to speak up, because there might be a negative reaction, sometimes there is no pushback at all. Indeed, sometimes the one being called out is grateful, because we all have blindspots due to our own lived experiences. You can't live every life. For that reason, your own experience will end up being valuable to someone at some point in time for no other reason than that you lived it and they didn't. And, by the by, this is also true for the present, because the lives we've lived cause us to see what's going on right before our eyes in different lights.
Anyway, this is a story that wouldn't have come out otherwise, so I wanted to be sure to let everyone know that Justin Krasner ensured that my book was a better book. An editor's job is often silent and thankless, so on Thanksgiving, I wanted to say thank you, Justin. <3
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