Firstly hello to the forum!

As an independent writer I find it a welcome surprise to come across a place to hang out and bounce things of peers. So hello all! :)

Now, I wonder if the community might give me a little advice on something please?

I've written a contemporary story with a very dry humor style. My first in a few years. It contains a lot of situations which are designed to shock the reader and misdirect their thought train. Originally, all of these situations were necessary, as my plan was to justify them later in the work. However, I ended up just dropping those threads as the story seemed to flow better without resolving them.

When I took the story off ice last night and gave it a scan through as a precursor to editing, I noticed that now some of these situations could possibly be taken way out of context to the point of appearing to be racist, sectarian or misogynistic. Even when in comparison with other sections of the story. These are most definitely not the kind of messages I wanted for the reader. Quite the opposite in fact.

Making alterations to these sections will significantly change the feel of the story. I'm sure of this. I wanted to ask what you would do yourself under the circumstances.

Would you just leave it as it is and let the publisher worry about it? Would you modify the sections which might cause offence or would you try and resolve them according to the original plan?

As it stands, a careful reader would bundle the situations in with the overall style of the story and take them with a pinch of salt. A scanner will probably swallow his own tongue in outrage.

From my perspective the situations in question could happen to anyone of any sex, creed or race. I'm a white guy but I've worked and lived amongst Asian communities for most of my life. That's taught me not to tiptoe around this kind of stuff too much. Forced political sterility invariably creates problems where there weren't any. To me they're just urban characters. I don't want to change them because they are what they are.

On one hand I'm mainly worried that the story could be read by people who don't share that perspective. Anybody could read all sorts of terrible things into the text if they were in a frame of mind to do so. On the other hand I wanted to shock people to a certain degree. The story needs it and to be honest most people in real life aren't generally very politically correct anyway. There's no such thing as safe controversy.

Maybe I'm just thinking about it too much. I really would appreciate some input on this. :S

~Peter