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.

News arrived earlier this week that yet another print literary journal is packing it in. Free Lunch is calling it quits after two decades and 42 issues. The message which states simply:

The Board of Directors of Free Lunch Arts Alliance regrets to inform you that Number 42 of Free Lunch will be its final issue. Ron Offen, the editor and founder of Free Lunch, has health issues that prevent him from continuing the magazine.

came as a bit of a shock. One gets used to a literary magazine that has been around that long. Apparently the situation is grave as Mr. Offen suffered a stroke due to a brain lesion from what I hear. I wish him well for, even though we had differing opinions on occasion, I always respected his editing chops and the loss of a good literary editor always leaves a hole that can never easily be filled — and there’s so few literary editors nowadays who know fuck-all what they are doing.

Just as the death of poet and literary ezine pioneer, Michael McNeilley, nearly a decade ago prefaced an explosion of new ezines, I predict that Ron Offen’s forced retirement will preface a further decline in print-only literary publishing. Mr. Offen, in addition to his gifts as editor and poet, was also a poster-boy of sorts for the pre-digital publishing era. There’s simply not very many old-school editors of his generation and caliber left to carry the banner for print-only literary publications. Literary editors of my generation and younger abandoned print-only publishing years ago. People like me just saw the writing on the wall, while the generation behind me was born into the digital revolution and don’t know anything else. I think it’s safe to say that you’d have to be a fool to launch a literary magazine in print-only medium nowadays. Still, it doesn’t stop me from feeling a bit sad at the prospect of losing yet another good print journal. It’s a shame we can’t buy cheap term life insurance for small press literary magazines. Anyway . . . Be well, Ron. Free Lunch will be missed.

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>