Diary of a Mad Editor

There’s this dude who keeps submitting poems to me. Every day, he emails one poem to me. Imagine finding a really bad new poem in your inbox every single day by the same bad poet. Imagine this is in addition to dozens of other submissions by other writers that also arrive every single day.

Wouldn’t you get really annoyed if you had to send the same person a fresh rejection notice every day if you were an editor of a literary magazine and you had thousands of submissions flowing to you every day, but part of your day was being wasted by a godsmack awful writer who doesn’t follow submission guidelines — a fellow whose submission practices border on harassment. My guidelines firmly state that I don’t want to see multiple submissions (in other words, I don’t want to see new material from the same writer until I’ve read and responded to old material). And I certainly don’t want to see a person whose written 365 new poems send them to me one at a time day-in, day-out.

They have submission services for writers — companies that will submit to magazines on a writer’s behalf so said writer doesn’t have to deal with the submission guidelines or have any direct contact with editors, etc. I wish there was a service like iDump4U.com that actually rejected writers on an editors behalf.

It’s not that I’m a pussy or anything. It’s just that I’m at a point in my life where dealing with certain kinds of writers . . . um . . . well . . . I’m just past it. It’s not like me and this poet are going to be picking outwedding napkins together anytime soon. No, what this guy is doing is akin to being water-boarded or some shit. It’s a tactic, you know. He thinks if he keeps sending me a poem every day, I’ll get so tired of rejecting him, I’ll just accept one of his shit poems to get rid of him.

No, I’ve already warned him. What does usually happen in cases like this is I’ll just reach a point where I’ll just stop reading his emails and block the fucker altogether. I don’t want to do that, but what has become so tiresome for me over the years is having to explain to dumb-ass, no-talent writers why I’ve rejected them and have them a) respond to me with a dear-in-the-headlights, "huh?" and continue to ignore my attempts to educate them, doing the same thing that annoyed me in the first place or b) respond with vitriolic, self-deluding comments because I dared to reject their work. It would be so much easier if I had a Bradley to contact these kinds of writers on my behalf and have him be the bad guy instead of being pushed into being that bad guy myself.

There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.

There are no magic wands.

Can’t spin straw into gold.

Despite what the spam in my inbox says, there’s no such thing as an acne vitamin.

Likewise, there are no Leprechauns, unicorns or tooth fairies.

And there’s no such thing as a writing guru.

Well . . . there are “writing gurus”   — just that they can’t really help you beginners become better writers. If you’re a writer, it’s a nice little sideline. The self-help racket is a multi-billion dollar industry. And if you’re a writer, there’s lots of money to be made teaching others how to write. The thing is, one can’t really teach another person how to write — they can only teach a another writer what works and does not work for them. One cannot teach the creative process. They can only teach their creative process. So if you are a beginning writer looking for a mentor, run from anyone calling themselves a writing guru, writing guide, or creativity coach, because a good mentor doesn’t provide answers or claim to have answers. A good mentor is someone who plants a firm boot up your ass so you do the work to find your own answers.

It occurred to me, looking at the calendar this morning, that the current issues of Gnome and The 13th Warrior Review are now officially three months overdue. People have been emailing me, asking, "what gives?" and I’m running out of excuses. Truthfully, aside from writing this blog occasionally, I’ve mostly been at the gym. I’m obese, hypertensive, with hypothyroid, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and two and a half years in remission from cancer. So my health has been my main priority as I’ve said on many occasions. That means I spend a lot of the time at the gym. I’m staying away from the ephedra diet pills, thank you very much. But I am rocking the weights and aerobics and, according to the scale at my oncologist appointment yesterday, I’ve lost sixteen pounds since Christmas. So, I’m on my way to slimming down if not quite on my way to publishing those two issues. I do, however, expect at least one of them to be online sometime before the end of the month. Maybe a hard push over the weekend will do the trick. Anyway, before launching anymore submissions my way, keep in mind that I spend two hours in the gym every day and only spend about two hours a week reading submissions.