Frank Hecker

When i wrote my self-published book about the yuri manga Sweet Blue Flowers, I not only included some chapters about the history of yuri and its predecessor genre, “class S” stories, I also wrote an entire chapter about the fate of the “factory girls” who worked in the textile mills of Meiji and Taishō era Japan. If I were writing a real book with a real publisher, the very first thing my real editor would tell me to do would be to remove that chapter: it’s overly-long and almost totally disconnected from the rest of the book, including the chapters that precede and follow it. So why did I leave it in?