Diary of a Mad Editor

I was feeling a little ambitious lately — a bit of a departure for me as I’m one of the most unambitious people I know. Anyway, a couple months back, I’d decided that before the end of the year, I would not only write a novel, I would publish two new issues of my ezines, The 13th Warrior Review and Gnome. Well, I did manage the first during NanoWriMo and I was on my way to accomplishing the latter two items on my list, but then problems arose to thwart my efforts yet again.

The first thing that happened was my mistake — a big mistake, actually. See, I had these two poems I was going to publish in Gnome and I thought I’d actually accepted them months ago as I had them in my folder to the upcoming issue and, as per my normal routine, only accepted submissions end-up in the folder for upcoming issues. What I realized was that I’d accidentally sent this poet a rejection instead of an acceptance. Now, I’ve made some mistakes in the past. In fact, by my calculations in the last twelve years, I’ve averaged at leasts half a dozen mistakes a year. But I’ve never done anything this stupid before. Of course, I feel like a huge honking tool and of course, after all this time the poems in question are no longer available. My bad, I guess . . . really and truly.

And then we come to the submission withdrawals which have been coming en masse of late. Remember my little hissy fit a while back about simultaneous submissions and how I hate it when writers don’t inform me about that then pull the rug out from under me later? Well, in the last two weeks, no less than five writers have pulled this crap — the latest just yesterday. I’m especially disappointed about yesterday’s loss because that was a fucking awesome story. More importantly, though, I now have two issues with major holes in them, so the likelihood that I will be able to publish both of these ezines before the end of the year is less likely than it was two weeks ago. It’s very frustrating. Especially considering that with maybe one exception none of these writers waited more than a couple of weeks for a response from me. You would think with all I’ve said and written about simultaneous submissions, these people would know better. Anyway . . .  <sigh>