He shot it back to me with a very terse note that put me firmly in my place: “If you are not going to make the changes the editor suggests, don’t waste his time by sending it in again.” Ouch. I immediately did a new version of the piece incorporating all of his suggestions, and–long story short–I earned my first publication credit, a nice paycheck, and a life lesson about this business: the editor is my boss, and if I want to be published in his venue, I must be willing to work with him and give him what he needs.

Yes, it *does* hurt when you run into an auteur who refuses to change a word, whose story is really good *but–*, yet he utterly refuses to change a word of his precious text … and in the end, you have to make a decision no one likes and he remains both arrogant and unpublished. But this is a business; authors have to learn that fact, and treat it like one.