Diary of a Mad Editor

So I recently published this poem by this poet who uses the asterisk as mark-up to call for italics. Since he didn’t state his preference in his cover letter, I didn’t italicize his text. My bad, I suppose. But, I didn’t appreciate his snotty email after publication telling me how I didn’t format his poem properly. I’m thinking, you send a poem that’s poorly formatted to begin with and you use the asterisk, what do you expect? I’m no soothsayer. I formatted the poem as best as I could. And, to be fair, I fixed the poem shortly after reading his email. That’s not the problem.

See . . .

I must be getting old. Seriously, when did the asterisk become the method of choice for calling for italics in text? For as long as I can remember, one underlined text in hardcopy and used the underscore for italics in digital text — the asterisk was used for bold.

Okay, sure, I realize it has changed for many people. And I wouldn’t complain about that in cases where a writer says in his cover letter, "the asterisks are intended to be italics." Because it’s confusing. Sometimes asterisks = bold print and sometimes the asterisks = italics and sometimes the intent is just the asterisk. That’s why, in text submissions, I prefer the writer to use HTML tags — it’s so much less confusing for me. When I have one writer who uses the asterisk correctly and another who likes the asterisk for italics and another writer who just has an asterisk fetish, I don’t have to figure out which is which.

Anyway, back to the poem in question: You can read it in the latest issue of Gnome: the online journal of underground writing, which is now online.