Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for 2007

Wrapping Up 2007: The 10 Best “Mad Editor” Blogs of the Year

Hey there, kiddies!

You might’ve noticed the blog has acquired a new look. Well, that’s because it’s been a year of ups and downs — mostly downs and I’m looking forward to a fresh start in 2008. What better way to begin than to say, “Adios, old theme; howdy, new theme.” Hope you like it. If you don’t like it, you know very well where you can stick it.

And since the old year is coming to a close, I decided to shine a second light on what you, the readers, suggested are the best of my blogs this year. Drum roll please . . .

“A Fistful of Phonies”

“Another Quarter Heard From”

“Imitation May Be the Sincerest Form of Flattery, But There Ain’t No Percentage Publishing Flattery”

“Shit and Giggles on Amazon.com”

“What the Fuck Did You Say?”

“And They Probably Have Bowel Movement Coaches for the Constipated Too”

“This is the World’s Smallest Violin Playing My Heart Bleeds for Ya”

“A Trip to the Wood Shed is Not Out of the Question”

“There are More Bad Writers with Publication Credits than Good Writers Without Them”

“You Gotta Know the Rules to Know How to Break Them”

There you have it — the top 10 of 2007. And this is my last entry of 2007.

Happy New Year to all of you. May you have many acceptances and much love in 2008.

Catch you on the flipside.

Jesse James Never Did This

The reading isn’t anything too special. And yet, it’s something of a milestone for a guy who couldn’t even speak just six months ago. My first attempt at a public reading since finishing treatments for oral cancer. It isn’t a feature spot — I just read 4 poems at an open mic. My poems are politely tolerated by the small crowd gathered there. They applaud — politely.

So now, I stand outside the coffee house after giving my first reading in over 2 years. It’s a nippy December night, a couple of weeks before Christmas. I need some air and some solitude. Unfortunately, this guy follows me outside with his girlfriend close on his heels. They’d been lurking in the back all night. Neither of them participated in the merriment of poetry and song. Neither of them seemed much interested in what was happening on stage. At one point, I thought I saw the guy scribbling in a notebook.

“Damn,” he says, “it’s cold as hell out here.”

“Yeah,” I agree, leaning against the side of the building with my hands tucked into my jacket pockets.

His girlfriend, who looks a little like Avril Lavigne with a bad case of acne says, “Is it gonna snow? I heard it was gonna snow.” I wince at her breath which smells kind of like I’d imagine camel shit smells wafting across a desert.

The girl lights up a cigarette. Then, the guy lights up a cigarette, offers me one. “No thanks,” I say. “Don’t smoke.” He shoots me his best wise-ass glare that says, “Whatever, man” and takes a puff.

“So I thought you were supposed to be some kind of bad ass,” he says.

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Well, aren’t you supposed to be some kind of outlaw poet? I mean, that’s what they say.”

“You know, ‘They’ say a lot of things.”

“This is a pretty lame scene for a true outlaw poet.”

He was probably right about that. Lots of middle-aged, middle-class types reading Hallmark-y Christmas-themed shit. But, on the other hand, at least they had the guts to get up to the mic and read their shit in front of people and risk the slings and arrows of armchair critics.

“You write poetry?” I ask him.

“Yeah.” he says, confident that whatever it is he allegedly writes is in fact poetry.

“How come you didn’t read?”

“My stuff’s too hardcore for this crowd,” he explains.

His girlfriend nods, “Fucking-A,” she agrees.

I take note of that leather jacket he’s wearing that must’ve cost at least $200 on sale at Macy’s and those $100 Nikes. I don’t know where he gets his money, but I know it’s not from anything he’s ever written. Me, I’m wearing a ratty old jacket I’d gotten for $39 at Value City a decade ago. A pair of $12 Bobos bought at Wal-Mart over a year ago that have holes in them. A sweatshirt. Sweatpants.

What I’m thinking is that Jesse James would have just as soon shot a man in the back as get up in front of a crowd and recite poetry — but then again, he was a real outlaw and not an outlaw poet. This guy and his dirty skank of a girlfriend could probably write a manual on what it means to be an outlaw poet. They’ve obviously got the dress-code covered. They probably know the secret handshake and have the secret decoder rings to go with it. But I at least had the balls to get up there with my cancer-scarred tongue and poor fashion sense and read poetry that isn’t hardly tame for an audience that is and isn’t really made up of my kind.

Badass, you say? Get the fuck outta here.

We All Know What Happened to Marilyn Chambers Behind the Green Door

I’m sitting here in the Cumberland County Library writing these words on the brand spanking new Dell Inspiron notebook PC I received from Santa this Christmas. They have a nice, speedy free wireless network at the library and it’s so toasty warm sitting here that I thought, what a great place to write about something that’s been eating at me the last few days.

Technology is a grand thing. But it can also be a bad thing. The same Internet technology that’s facillitating this blog today can also allow all manner of con artists to take advantage of the unsuspecting. You may recall me discussing this theme generally in my previous entry, “In the Land of the Blind, the One-eyed Man is King.” However, I’d like to speak about a more specific element today: an outfit called Greendoor Publishing.

Allow me to be up front about something: I am not an unbiased observer. I did not happen upon this website by accident. I have been desperate for money lately in an effort to save my own publishing enterprise, Asterius Press. Desperate enough to do something I, myself, consider to be profane among most bloggers: take money to write about other websites. So far I’ve only done this a couple of times, but have been actively bidding on jobs for the past two months. And this is how I came across Greendoor Publishing. This outfit was soliciting someone to write a puff piece on their operation. I bid on this job because theirs is a writing/publishing-related site and it seemed like a fair exchange of money for me and exposure for them. Needless to say, I never wrote that puff piece because they quickly declined my bid. I was astonished not so much that they declined my bid but that they did it so quickly. I wondered why. I mean, I am a small press editor with a lot of experience. This blog is all about the small press. Pretty much every reader I have is a writer and/or editor. If I were looking for exposure for my writing site, I’d accept a bid from someone like me. Now maybe they turned me down because my rankings were too low. Maybe, but is that the only reason? If so, it’s a little unrealistic to find a suitable writing website ranked higher than P3 willing to write a positive review for what Greendoor is willing to pay and if they aren’t aware of this, it just goes to show how ignorant they are. Anyway, I became curious and looked at their site more closely. What I discovered is that they are the very kind of snake oil merchants I was referring to in that earlier blog. No wonder they didn’t trust me to write a review of their website. No wonder they wanted a “benefits-only” review. “Ah hah!” I exclaimed to myself. And you know what? I decided to write about them anyway — for free. Aren’t I a sweetheart?

The name of this so-called operation is memorable, but only because it makes me think of that old ’70s porn movie, Behind the Green Door. You know — the one starring Marilyn Chambers and directed by the infamous Mitchell brothers of the legendary O’Farrell Theater.

The first thing you notice upon visiting Greendoor is the minimal web design. Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of minimalist web design. Unfortunately, when I say this site is minimal, I’m telling you outright that it looks like no thought went into the web design at all. It looks like something that was thrown together quickly by some half-assed Front Page user. Greendoor is actively seeking submissions, but there’s no evidence that they’ve ever published anything by anyone on this site or anywhere else. The only work on the site is the writing samples from those “disparate group of writers” Greendoor’s head honcho, Fraser McKay, has gathered around him — a motley crew of unknown writers (I think there was only one poet whose name I’d heard of before and I can’t honestly say I’m a fan). What they are selling are editorial and ghostwriting services. Ah, the plot thickens. Judging from their bios, none of these people have any editorial experience that I can fathom. Fraser McKay is the only one among this bunch who even claims to have editorial experience — although he doesn’t articulate what that experience is. His dull, pretentious poetic offerings only tell me what kind of poet he is — not what kind of editor he is, or what kind of projects he’s worked on previously so I only have his word for it.

Can’t figure why a serious writer with even half a brain would pay even a “modest fee” to this bunch for editing when there are plenty of experienced editors out there offering freelance editorial services. And a lot of editors will tell you what they think about your work for free when you submit to them if they are of the mind to do so and are asked nicely. And what serious writer would need a ghostwriter? Why would a legitimate editor even offer such a dubious and unethical service?

So are these guys ezine publishers? Book publishers? Editors? Ghostwriters? I don’t know really, but I can make a stab at who their services are for: no-talent wannabes looking for a short-cut to literary fame. And I can tell you straight — no editor can guarantee you success as a writer. Having someone write something based on your own idea doesn’t make you a writer — it makes you part of a conspiracy toward fraud. And any service that promises that they can turn anyone and everyone into a writer is just blowing smoke up their ass. So if you consider yourself to be a serious writer and feel you need an editorial service to help you with something you’ve been working on, you’d better shop around. Do not allow yourself to be duped. Do not open the Green Door.