I’ve just finished fixing galleys of an anthology story made juvenile and riddled with errors by the editors, who evidently don’t know to from too from two, among other horrors such as inserted exclamation marks, italicized words that are also emboldened, grammatical errors in usage, dropped words, inappropriate verbs, and so on. It was disgusting how they degraded what I offered, no joke. So I am freshly and continually reminded how appallingly off-the-mark editors so often can be.
It’s an exercise in despair to hope any of one’s stories will prevail beyond maybe a single flash of cheap publication when faced with such sub- and illiteracy seeping into even the so-called professional levels. Of course, everyone can edit, just as everyone can write, paint, sculpt, act, sing, dance, and get rich, right?
Ha.
Sadly, anyone can be an editor these days simply by calling for mss. Call it a crowd-funding project and you don’t even have to pay. Isn’t exposure enough?
Wow are people duplicitous and also suckers. What other profession outside the arts demands free work, tells us to be satisfied with “getting our work out there” so it can be “seen”. WTF? Try that with a plumber, electrician, or mechanic some time. Try it with anyone BUT some schmuck trying to get along in the arts.
Meanwhile my abilities keep developing. This too is a source of frustration. A good 2/3 to 3/4 of what I write goes over the head, or at least past the degraded commercial concerns, of genre editors.
Literary editors, who’d be prone to like my work, ignore me because I have neither Ivy League connections nor an angel who dredges the bottom feeders like me into the golden net of a prestigious literary journal. No college professors promoting my work, dissecting it in dry essays, or putting it on their reading lists.
All my serious work, which genre /commercial editors mostly dislike, is written to last. It is written as intelligently as possible. It is intended as honest translations into words and images, people and scenes of the experience of life.
Ah, but we all know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s lesson about lesser work prevailing, don’t we? It’s the plot-point extruded fiction product that appeals and tends to last simply because it is lowest common denominator in appeal and can always make at least some money. That’s the theory. Proven retreads and simplistic representational kitsch over abstract, literal over metaphorical and so on downward toward the lowest pulp hackwork. Pandering is what the market wants. Significance does not signify. Readers don’t want deep, baffling, serious stuff.
People like their wind-up toys eh?
I’ve spent my life becoming what I am apparently not allowed to be, a man of letters, a gentleman novelist, a successful artist. While there are such people, I have aimed at becoming what may be impossible from birth. It may also be my ethics, sense of fair play, or lack if psychopathic determination holding me back. I’m no Palahniuk going for workshop shock nor am I a Warhol scanning rich suckers in contempt of the gallery system. Too bad for my work.
Worse for me, I bought the argument for quality over connections. What a sap. My hard work went into learning craft and art rather than cultivating connections, polishing golden apples, and sucking up to anyone who could promote my work further, wider, higher.
I actually thought content trumped form and package. What an idiot. Marketing laughs at those like me.
As to beginning a new story, a new exploration of character and situation, the best advice is to remember always to claim your own work. Prevail by being true to yourself or it’s no success at all. I will continue to write Ficta Mystica as well as I can, stories that knock the right people flat, work that explores reality as bluntly and truthfully as possible. It’s all I can do. I’d advise you, for your own peace of mind, satisfaction, and art, to do the same.
Then again, what do I know?
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“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
