One last question, but first thank you so much to everyone who took the time to help me out. I brought up all my points and she accepted some of my requests but not all of them. I felt perhaps she has a better view with her years of experience and said okay...this is possibly my biggest problem: Since the very first email I received telling me she was interested in my story if I was willing to make a couple of changes, it has been nothing but requests for more and more changes plus more changes made by her. I understand it's a back-and-forth process, but why didn't she point out everything she didn't like at the beginning? This time I was a little more assertive about what I didn't want changed but she refused most of my points. My question is this: After weeks and weeks of back-and-forth emails and revisions (mostly by her; recently by her assistants), now what? She has put a lot of effort and time into editing my story, and withdrawing it now feels... just unspeakably rude!...
I'm tempted to just ask her, what do we do now? I need these things changed back and you'd rather not. But I don't want to end my chances with other editors -- I don't know if editors are like doctors who might label a troublesome patient as a nuisance and warn fellow doctors. I don't know...
For the first time, I've just had a literary editor want to make a couple of edits to one of my poems. It was a quick, short, easy email exchange with both of us accepting edits that the other mentioned: I agreed to the edit he wanted to make, changing my verb tense in the latter half of the sentence, because he felt it would be more active to have the background characters' behavior in the forefront, rather than in the background (like I'd originally written it), and he agreed to my edit of splitting the sentence with a period (and thanked me for mentioning it) because with his new, verb tense edits, the sentence he'd changed had been grammatically incorrect, but my new edit suggestion fixed it and made it correct.
At first, I felt a little nervous about correcting him, because he's a lot older than me, is an English professor at a university, a more experienced poet with published books, and has a couple of English degrees I don't have. But I knew that, with his edit that made my sentence grammatically incorrect, my name would be attached to it and would make it appear to others as though I'd written that incorrect sentence, myself, and don't know how to write, which I didn't want.
So, this just goes to show that, sometimes, even experienced professionals with English degrees sometimes make grammatical mistakes in their edits. Some may even thank you for catching something they didn't! The editor I've just written to was very respectful and pleasant, not annoyed or bothered by my edit in what he'd changed at all.
It's not bad or wrong to correct the mistakes they've made to your work because your name will be permanently attached to their edits, which will cause others who read your work to believe that you wrote it that way, yourself.
I'm still surprised to hear that your editor is trying to make several changes to your work, when they'd originally said they'd liked it; editors who've said they accepted and liked my short work have either left it alone and published it exactly as I'd sent it to them, or, like the editor I'd just mentioned earlier, only suggested changing a few verb tenses in the latter half of a sentence. Then, that was it.
I'm wondering whether withdrawing your work might be the best option for both of you, due to creative differences, since it sounds as though the editor wants to change your story completely into something that they like or want to write, themselves, that you don't feel represents you and the story you want to tell. Perhaps another editor out there would accept your work.
I hope this helps. I'm sorry to hear that you're going through this.