Personality #9 Went on Holiday and #10 Is On Strike
Published January 4th, 2008 | 
“It is almost like you aren’t even the same person. Maybe you’re not. Maybe personality #9 or 10 was at the helm.” — Sydney Elle Testa
You know what? Being a small press publisher is a lot like having a split personality disorder. Some writers I deal with imagine I have a staff of magic elves that come out at night and do all the work. Unfortunately, I don’t have a staff. I can’t even afford to pay myself a salary much less hire a staff and pay them. This is the case for many small press operations.
And of course, when you are the one and only guy holding the bag, you are the one they all point fingers at when things don’t go smoothly. Admittedly, I’ve been dropping the ball a lot lately. Missing deadlines. Falling behind with submissions (and this from a guy who once had the most efficient turnover in small press history). Every time I make even a minor error, I have to hear about it. Anytime someone doesn’t like my guidelines or the way I word a rejection letter, I have to hear about it. Because there is no one else to pass the buck to. I’ll even admit that I’ve thought demoting myself and inventing a replacement so that when someone does complain, I can say to them, “Hey, man . . . I just work here. I don’t know nothin’.”
Just this morning I had to hear about another thing I’ve let slip lately — apparently I forgot to update the archive page for The 13th Warrior Review. Oh, I’d updated the original file, but never uploaded the page to the server. The back issues are pretty well indexed in the search engines, so it’s not like those two back issues were impossible to find. A minor slip-up, but one that didn’t sit well with one of the contributors to issue #10. I opened the file, made certain it was updated, and uploaded it to the server. Then I emailed the woman who informed me of my mistake to let her know it was fixed. No excuses. Sometimes I’m out to lunch.
Sometimes real life and too many responsibilities interfere with the proper order of things. The only thing to do is move on and try to do it better next time.
Right now, in addition to my own writing and writing this blog, I’m working on a second blog, trying to refurbish the homepage, putting together new issues of my ezines and serving as Web Master for my sister’s website. It’s impossible to keep all those balls in the air a hundred-percent of the time especially when lately Asterius Press has taken a backseat to my health concerns.
I am the Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor, Art Director, Webmaster, Web Designer, Assistant Editor, Editorial Assistant, Copy Editor, Proofreader, Executive Assistant, and the Wise-ass Intern who fetches the mail. I am my own staff. Needless to say, we hate our boss. We think he’s an asshole too.
My Mama Don’t Dance and My Daddy Don’t Rock ‘n’ Roll
Published January 3rd, 2008 | I was raised by a temperamental, thoughtless, trifling man-child of a father and a complaining, overly critical control-freak of a mother. I say this, not to be insulting to my parents because I do actually love them, but simply to acknowledge their influence on me as a human being — and, more to the point, as a writer and editor. Every time I’ve launched an insult at a rather terrible writer — that’s my mother talking. Every time I’ve written a blog in which I’ve insulted someone, that’s my mother talking, but with my father’s strap. Every time I’ve left work unfinished at some arbitrary but critical moment to fulfill some appetite, or shouted out a long stream of expletives when some writer didn’t follow my guidelines that’s my father. Whenever I’ve suggested a revision to a writer (or, more often than not, insisted on it) that was my mother.
A few weeks back, I found a box of old, unpublished poems — lots and lots of unpublished poems. I’m not talking about poems that are unpublished because they had been rejected; I’m talking about poems that I never bothered to submit because I didn’t think them good enough. While some of them are pretty awful to me still, others weren’t bad at all. In fact, some of them are quite good. Why didn’t I submit any of these? I asked myself.
Why not, indeed?
And yesterday, after writing a poem that took me all of about five minutes to write, I spent another several hours tinkering with it. Changing line breaks and rearranging the words, it was like I was moving furniture around a dusty room. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head like she was supervising the move, saying to me, “You couldn’t find a verb with a prayer and a flashlight.”
And I’m frantically pacing around the room mumbling, “Where’s the fucking flashlight?” “First thought, best thought” went straight out the window.
Okay, sure, it turned out to be a better poem than it started out to be. Not only a publishable poem, but a pretty good publishable poem. Nonetheless, the process of revising the poem sucked all the joy out of writing it.
I’m all for revision when revision is necessary. And, as an editor, I know well that writers sometimes need a kick in the ass — myself included. But it shouldn’t be at the expense of joy. Because if writing stops being fun, it’s probably time to walk away.
