"Pain. There's nothing but it. Lashing out like twisted strobe lights. Ravishing and all-consuming."

A Note from the Author:

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I was 17 when I published A Cactus In the Valley. I have a lot of regrets about it, but I will still defend the book for the most part as a great leap forward in who I am as a writer and as a person. I don’t talk about it much, and I don’t advertise it really because I don’t feel like it’s a good representation of who I am as a person or an author anymore.

 

Now that I’m 23 with another published book and currently working on fantasy—a genre that all too easily slips into racist tropes—I am hard at work on avoiding those pitfalls. This has caused me to reflect on the racial/ethnic portrayals I’ve included in my previous novels. I was educated and mature enough to have sensitivity beta-readers for Casually Homicidal, so no qualms there. 

 

But about 70% of the way through A Cactus In the Valley, I include a few scenes where Wyatt and Terra encounter the Maricopa Native Americans in Southwestern Arizona. I want to be upfront about the things available to the public, and I want to apologize for the ignorance of my youth. There’s a few lines that read as exotic fetishization of a male Native American when Terra describes her crush on him. There’s an argument to be made that their inclusion serves to only further the plot.  There are areas where it’s clear I relied on stereotypes and antiquated information from Wikipedia when I wrote it at 15. I also completely fictionalized the group they come across. The present-day Maricopa-Piipaash live in Arizona reservations NEAR, but not exactly IN, the territory that the main characters pass through. I know now that it is still a misrepresentation. 

 

I could talk about the good intentions I had as an ignorant teenager, but I won’t—because if anyone reads this and is offended, my good intentions don’t matter. Mostly, I find it incredibly cringe to read in retrospect because of how uneducated I was about the state of indigenous people in this country. While nobody has said anything about it since publication, I want to get ahead of the game and go on record to say that the opinions, stereotypes, and portrayal of the heavily fictionalized group of Native Americans in A Cactus In the Valley do not reflect accurate information and may in fact contribute to harmful stereotypes. The portrayal does not reflect the person I am today and I am sorry for it. 

 

This may sound egregious to some—given that there’s currently no controversy and probably nobody cares—but I care about my ethics and legacy as an author.  On the scale of all the offensive media against indigenous Americans that exists, it’s probably only like a 3/10, but that’s not the point. It’s not violent and it’s not obscene, but it is cringey and inaccurate and clearly written by a white teenager. I don’t want to be associated with that anymore.

 

Anyway, please don’t go and read A Cactus In the Valley just for the Native American part. In the grand scheme of things, people were a hell of a lot more offended by “fuck” and “shit.” I have decided to pull the ebook and paperback from Amazon and will sell the last tiny bit of my author copies and archive it. I hope that you will continue to come on this journey with me as I unlearn my unconscious biases. 

 

Best, 

OJB

7/5/2023