Between the Moon and the Deep Blue Sea was first released in May 2011 at the now-defunct Amber Quill/Amber Allure publishing house. It was the third best-seller at the pub that month (brag, brag!). As one would expect, I promoted the hell out of it, posting it on every blog I had posting privileges. That was in 2011. Suddenly, in April 2023, I got a few notices from Google that the post didn't meet their "guidelines" and was under review.
Wow. Twelve years later.
I went back and took a look at the excerpt I used for promotion and decided Google had a problem with a couple "slang" words, namely that used to describe a bit of male anatomy and a common usage word to describe giving pleasure to that part of the anatomy by mouth. I made a few changes, clicked for a second review, and the posts were once again approved.
Wow. Twelve years. I wonder how many people saw all those posts? And I wonder what snowflake saw a post and complained. I mean, twelve years later.
I've written about censorship before. Censorship is a danger, a threat to all of us. If a powerful company is willing to censor my poor little romance novel, what else is it willing to censor? I fully expect THIS post to go up for review.
It may sound like a good thing to keep "adult" posts behind a content warning, but it's not. It's not my responsibility to parent YOUR children. The Internet/Interweb is a marvelous place, but it's also very adult in nature. YOU need to guide your children inside it, not me or any author.
Censorship blocks the sharing of free thinking. Free thinking is dangerous. Free thinking might have us planting a garden and growing some of our produce. Free thinking might have people reasoning out that when the nearest grocery store is an hour away, a short-range electric vehicle isn't practical. Free thinking might have some of us believe our daughter is really a biological female who will eventually choose to procreate, or not. Free thinking might have some of us believe that it's okay to accumulate enough wealth to support ourselves in retirement instead of having the State support us. Free thinking might have some of us believe that we have the right to defend ourselves under the Second Amendment.
Now, I realize that censoring my silly little post is nothing in the overall larger scheme of things, but that's the insidious nature of censorship. It starts small and chips away, chips away, chips away at all the little things until suddenly what has been lost is a big thing.
We need to be on guard. We need to stay diligent. We need to be able to recognize how censorship attempts to shepherd us into having only one choice, and one voice. As an author, as an America, I believe in the First Amendment and the guarantee of free speech, of which writing is a form.
Opposing views and free speech are necessary to a free people. It's a lot more important issue than slang words in a romance novel, but I recognize it as just the beginning.
If they have eyes, let them see.
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www.kckendricks.com
My home on the web- Between the Keys:
http://kckendricks.blogspot.com
Visit my bookshelf at:
https://kckendricks.blogspot.com/p/the-bookshelf-of-kc-kendricks-and-rayne_3.html
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