The Last Days of the Mimeograph Kid
Published October 29th, 2008 | 
In 1960’s, when those young boom generation poets and pundits were spewing their screed into waiting mimeo presses, I sincerely doubt any of them could have imagined the coming of the digital revolution and how it would change publishing. My generation — generation X has been lucky in a way. Gen Xers like myself are old enough to remember the small press the way it used to be and young enough to see the digital small press emerging in its embryonic stages. The first time I was exposed to a personal computer back in the 1980s when the first Apples and Ataris and Commodore 64s were rolling off the assembly lines you could almost feel the vibrations, the ripples in the universe. The 1980s and ’90s saw an explosion of new small press publications the likes of which even the mimeo revolution couldn’t touch in sheer numbers.
With the advent of the World Wide Web, however, what we think of as the small press has changed and expanded to include more and more non-traditional means of production. The spider traps have been set and those who haven’t embraced the new order are just flies for the spider to feed on.
Zines and literary journals that don’t have at least a marginal presence on the Internet are failing to find a significant audience. More and more publishers are either moving entirely to the Web or publishing as part of a Web/Print hybrid. Social Networking and email micro-blogging has replaced older, slower, less efficient means of communication and promotion.
The mainstream publishing media, though even slower to see the writing on the wall, is itself waking up to the fact that the traditional paradigm is dead, dead, dead. Just today, we learn that the Christian Science Monitor is shifting from a print operation to an online-only operation. This is very telling. If a long-standing, mainstream news magazine like CSM sees no future in traditional print media then it’s clear to me that those of us in the small press who’ve long embraced the new media have been right all along. There has been a definite paradigm shift and it doesn’t mean that print media has no role to play in the future — it simply means that print as a medium is no longer the wellspring from which all written art and information flows. I’d go so far as to offer that, if you are thinking about starting a print literary journal right now, you’d have to be an idiot not to at least have a grass-roots following for yourself and your prospective publication online before sinking money into a print-based project.
But that’s just my opinion (albeit one that others are starting to share). In any event, those last few hold-outs still clinging to that romantic vision of the “good old days” of rogue basement zine publishers are in danger of becoming irrelevant and extinct.
The small press is dead — long live the small press!
Edvisors.com
Published October 25th, 2008 | Given the lousy economy — which has been in decline for a lot longer than it’s been in the news, more and more people are turning to the convenience and relative savings of online degrees as opposed to attending a brick ‘n’ mortar institution. If you are interested in enrolling in an online degree program, you might want to check out Edvisors.com, a directory and search engine of online degree programs and courses.
Writer, Edit Thyself
Published October 23rd, 2008 | The other day, an editor’s comment mentioned a writer who got his panties in a twist because the editor edited his story. To that writer, I’d have to reply, “Yes? And your point is?” I mean, fuck man, that’s why they call us editors. Of course, it’s true that, these days most editors don’t do much actual editing. Most editors can be properly categorized as what editor Tim Scannell called a “compiler.” Just a collector of writing published “as-is” with no real effort. It’s even true that many of the editors who even care about quality don’t really edit anymore —but they do expect the writers to edit themselves before submitting a piece of writing.
What’s tragic about this is that so many would-be writers don’t care to do that or simply don’t know how to do it. Honestly, the majority of submissions I received just this week required editing to one degree or another. This presents a bit of a dilemma for an editor who actually edits. A compiler will either accept a piece without considerating the amount of editing needed or automatically reject a piece because of the amount of editing needed. A real editor will consider the amount of editing needed first and foremost. That’s why I usually read a submission more than once. I first read a piece to decide whether there’s anything I like about it. If I basically like it (and hopefully, love it), I’ll set it aside to read again later. If not, I ask myself a bunch of questions: Why didn’t I like it? Where did it fail for me? Can the problem be addressed simply? If I don’t like it, chances are there’s a good reason for me to reject it. In fact, I’d say that writing I’m not immediately taken with rarely makes it past that first cut. It’s either so badly written that it is beyond the help of an editor or it’s just not my cup of tea. But the stuff I like usually is my cup of tea and requires relatively little or no editing.
It might be something simple like cutting some extra words in a sentence:
The famed architect, Frank Lloyd Wright liked to incorporate carports into the design of his homes.
becomes
Frank Lloyd Wright preferred carports instead of garages in the homes he designed.
Or, it could be a matter of revising whole paragraphs for the sake of clarity and logic:
In an effort to cut down on an explosion of wasteful spending that has haunted XYZ Corporation for the first quarter of the fiscal year, the twelve board members voted yesterday afternoon to add the positions of IT manager and Chief Financial Officer.
becomes
The board members decided yesterday that XYZ Corporation could cut expenses with improved accounting practices and more efficient use of computer networks. The board voted unanimously to hire a new Chief Financial Officer and an IT manager.
Mostly, though, it’s just a matter of cleaning-up the odd mistake or typo:
Changing “their” to “they’re” or “week” to “weak,” for example.
Although I believe any editor should be willing and able to take on these editorial tasks without consulting the writer, and I don’t believe a writer worth the powder to blow them to hell should whine about it, I also think that writers should be able to recognize these pitfalls and fix these problems themselves before submitting to a publication. That’s just common sense, if you ask me.
Before you submit a manuscript, check your spelling (and don’t just rely on “spell check” either). See if your sentences make sense. Check for typos and such. Because a little due diligence goes a long way.
