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Aug. 21, 2007 This is Aaron again, I am too lazy to set up a separate e-mail account from my wife, so if this gets posted under Amanda's name again, this paragraph will fix it. Anyway, back to the article. I was curious about an old publisher that my wife once used, and found an interesting article about publishamerica (http://pyme.com.mx/eng/business/book-review/Publish_Anything_The_Saga_of_a_PublishA.html). Particularly interesting to me was the comments by publishamerica writers about the use of editing. The first comment that struck me was "I felt like you did when I found errors, but then I realized, hey people read it for the story, not looking for mistakes in typo land! LOL Now I just keep on a keepin on!" My next paragraph, if the editor will humor me by not fixing it, will express my views on this: Michelle ran around the corner and ducked the laser blast and went down the corridor swiftly. The robot fired it's guns at her and the shot went wild. Sparks spat from the damaged oxigen tube that caught on fire and flames billowed out, burning her. The robot was also in the flames and got burned too. She shot the robot, and it died, but the flames got hotter and burned her more. This is the sort of drek you get when books and articles are not edited. I will follow with the way I would write the paragraph if I wanted to use it. For the record, I just wrote that paragraph, even I can write badly if I try. Michelle ran around the corner, panting from exertion. The corridor ahead was open-too open. She sprinted down the corridor as a robot fired a laser at her. The blast missed her, but struck an oxigen conduit. Sparks from the blast ignited the volitile gas. The fire billowed out from the gash, almost roasting her and even singing the robot. Desperitly, Michelle returned fire, striking the robot in the chest and putting it out of action. But the battle had cost her presious time, and the flames grew unbearable. Assuming the editor fixes my spelling errors, the above probably gripped you better than the non-edited version. Why? Because editing is about clarity as well as "the rules." Bad writing doesn't make sense. Now there are exceptions, my writing is more gramatically correct than my wife's, but her writing is better. I compare her to Mark Twain, who also disregarded the normal rules in favor of "plain talk." My writing scores on average 14th grade on the flesh-kincaid index. That means that if you haven't got a few years of college under your belt, my writing will be difficult to read. My wife generally scores a 5th grade, which is only a little past the average American's reading level. But I digress, another thing editors save us writers from. Here is another quote from a publishamerica writer. "I too am not the best editor LOL! I did get my finished books. And when I met with a lady that is huge in the marketing field, she told me that my book at it's length of 132 pages needs to have chapters." Am I saying that the people on U-K who don't want an editor are too stupid to put chapters in a 132 page book? Well-no. Am I saying that the people who don't want U-K to have an editor are as stupid as someone who doesn't put chapters in a 132 page book? Well-yes. I have written in the past about how people who do not write for the reader are engaging in literary masterbation. If you are not writing for the reader, don't put it out in public. I do not know if the editor who quit because of the morons was the right editor for the site. This is not a slam on him, merely an expression of lack of knowledge, I did not truly get to see his work. I vaguely remember one of the authors who can't write having a readible article, and that may have been because of him. Still, all the childish and soap-operaish stuff flying around ruined any chance of improvement. I may be repeating myself here, but... If a writer complains about a mistake an editor makes politly, the editor can generally fix it. This happens due to lack of clarity on the author's part, so the writer should not complain too much. If a writer is abusive about it, or the editor has to put too much time into corrections, only to be slammed for it-well, there is a reason editors reject submissions, and I think U-K desperatly needs to reject low quality articles. If a person who submits his work to a web site later advocates the deletion of that web site, the submitter's work should be deleted from the site. This removes there avowed reason to want the site removed. There are two ways to do this. The malicious part of me says just delete them and never take another submission from them. But the best way to do it is to make all of the person's articles into documents, e-mail them to the last known good e-mail of the writer, and include a repudiation of the web sites copywrite in the e-mail. This removes all moral athority from the whiner about being taken off the site. They have the right to look for another site which will publish them after all, and they have lost nothing that they would not have lost if the site was truly destroyed.
Gack, that was a run on paragraph, hope the editor
fixes it (grin).
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