Forum / Dynamics in Amateur Publishing

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 15, 07:06pm

  Carol Reid recently gave a link to a new journal, and I agreed with her that the description of genre the journal provides seems promising. Yet there seem to be a lot of rules for submission at that and many other web sites I have examined recently.

  After losing this Sunday morning and my accepted submission to a self-appointed journal editor, I am not feeling cheered by the rules of self-appointed publishers. We all know how to set up a web site. It seems on the increase that editors without bonafide credentials in editing are taking control of writers' work without offering compensation for it. There are those, too, who merit the designation "editor" and who have brought valuable writing to the Internet without necessitating that the writer self-represent his or her work and so lose favor in that act.

  It's getting weird or become apparent how weird it has been to enter upon these dynamics with anyone who declares himself or herself to be an expert in publishing. A few editors worth their salt: [list]. There are others worth their salt who do not rook the writer and turn editing into a power game that gives the editor power to reject, accept then reject, fail to read or understand a submission before accepting it, and other errors that ought to cause embarrassment on the part of the amateur editor but that revert in blame to the writer.

  We need as writers to consider the ethos of those who are self-regarding as publishers.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Sep 15, 07:38pm

  Caveat scriptor.

  It's always been that way.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 15, 09:22pm

  So far, our email correspondence this morning into the afternoon spans three 1.5-spaced pages, 10 pt., Arial. I offered to rewrite one sentence and await the editor's decision.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 15, 10:47pm

  He's pretending it is my fault that he accepted stories he hadn't read at all, read thoroughly, or thoroughly considered. He seems to be suggesting there is a legal issue with the use of names in them. I find it just shocking and unacceptable that people in life can behave badly but writers are never to write about it. A first name is never to be used, a public figure's name as related to his or her actions is not to be used. I agree that the policy of naming has to be understood. I do not accept blame that the five stories were accepted without editorial scrutiny in the first place. It's at four pages in email correspondence, the entire day. The editor is considering ideas for the first time that I have considred for decades. He is thinking of a man to ask for outside counsel, though he is prone to openly praise the international status of women of the avant garde. It is clear, at a shadow of a glance, that the avant gardists do not know the answer to the legal question that the editor is asking condescendingly of me.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 15, 11:22pm

  In a way losing a Sunday over it, over the post-acceptance of stories that took a year of Sundays to finalize, helps me feel I earned it in a milieu of easy publication.

• 
  Barry Basden

  Sep 16, 12:59am

  I should stfu, but i've had a few and it occurs to me, Ann:

  1. Other than that, how's your Sunday gone?

  1.a. In the long run, we're all dead.

  1.a.1. One hundred years from now who will give a damn?

  2. I don't have a 2.

  3. Please take a deep breath. You are not going to change the world or probably even one asshole's mind in it.

  4. It is what it is...

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 16, 01:02am

  Yes and yes, Barry, and yes and yes. That's pretty good for a few. I had a few yesterday and I advertised merchandise advertised to me on Facebook.

• 
  Nicolette Wong

  Sep 16, 12:20pm

  Wise words, Barry.

  It's a matter of temperament. There're lots of editors/publishers just starting out - who would be amateurs in the conventional sense of the word - but they're self-respecting enough not to try to ruin a writer's word. I say self-respecting because any "editor" who's got some decent talent and flair should be able to truly trust their own judgement, i.e. "I trust the writers whose work I choose to accept."

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 17, 08:43pm

  Today he wrote to withdraw a blurb, just after we had fully settled my stories for the issue. I think he thinks he is supremely famous and that I am a local. That is okay by me ... this town needs writers. I am here. Do I regard this editor as a genius writer? No, but I have thought about it as much as a wife for a month, practiced analysis without its leading to sex, and I decided: He is a gifted community organizer and a determined writer.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Sep 17, 08:57pm

  "practiced analysis without its leading to sex"

  There's your mistake. Just ask Joyce Carol Oates.

  http://www.theonion.com/articles/if-you-wish-to-be-a-writer-have-sex-with-someone-w,32687/

• 
  Sally Houtman

  Sep 18, 03:00am

  Good article. Sound advice.

  I don't know anyone in the publishing industry. I'll settle for someone who has a library card.

  Or someone who can read.

  Hey, it's a start.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Sep 18, 03:16am

  "I'll settle for someone who has a library card."

  That's "liberry."

  --Cletus

• 
  Sally Houtman

  Sep 18, 03:23am

  Cletus was out of the running from the get-go.

  No libary card.

  Can't read neither.

  Will have to keep looking.

• 
  Sally Houtman

  Sep 18, 03:28am

  ...though he *did* drive his truck into the front of a bookstore once.

  May have to reconsider.

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Sep 18, 06:43am

  "1.a.1. One hundred years from now who will give a damn?"

  One of the (many) reasons I write is the hope that someone may.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Sep 18, 10:57pm

  I think the best way to do that is bury your writing under a rock.

  And wait to be discovered.

  Or not.

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Sep 19, 01:15am

  See, I'd think the best way is to not dick around on writing forums all day.

  But maybe not.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 19, 04:09am

  Today on the phone with the editor I suggested that he was ultimately telling me to keep most of my writing private, since the use of a first name in a quasi-true story or story based on memory is defamatory, according to his lawyer, who termed the stories defamatory without reading them or understanding them as literature. The portrayals in the stories are true or rather true, filtered through the guise of prose poetics. I want to remind the editor, who is very fat, true, that his lawyer -- one I imagine wearing a printed plaid jacket, not necessarily true -- entered law school less competitively than I entered Ph.D. studies in fiction writing, and to take it from there.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 19, 04:56am

  It's a type of anti-writer tyranny to behave as an abusive boyfriend toward a woman or her writing without ever having been her boyfriend. He forbids the writing of events in the past. He favors the poets of the avant garde. I like their dull contentless drum beat. I am a hick for it.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 19, 05:11am

  I just went out to smoke a Nat Sherman. The weather permits it. I sat on the lawn chair on my front step. The basil bloomed at my feet, the rosemary. I heard a door slam across the street. A figure left the building. A woman came to the front door and called gently into the night, "Mark?" The man at the curb said, "Shit," but the other words were inaudible to me. Then he started and revved his engine. He pulled away from the curb on a small motorcycle and rode down the street in the breeze of his motion. The woman turned out the front light.

  That just happened, and I witnessed it. Then I came inside and typed it. The editor and his lawyer said that to write a real event using a first name is defamatory and that to permit such writing requires the labor of editorial fact checkers and the willingness on the part of the writer to be strictly factual in her first-hand report. So I am and have been.

• 
  Barry Basden

  Sep 19, 02:36pm

  So, Ann, change his name to something a bit more unusual, say, Travis, or exotic, maybe Ahmad. Then delete 'but the other words were inaudible to me' and send it somewhere that likes flash fiction slices of unresolved reality.

  Then write something else...

• 
  David Ackley

  Sep 19, 06:21pm

  I am not sure which correspondence school credentialed the editor's lawyer, Ann, but the mere mention of a real person's name in a work of fiction does not constitute defamation. Defamation, which is the umbrella term for the more narrowly defined libel and slander, occurs when a false statement about the person is made that can be shown to have caused her (e.g. financial) harm. The likelihood of the mention of a person's name in a story fulfilling those criteria seems about nil -1.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 19, 06:25pm

  Thanks, David.

  Barry, I like your idea.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Nov 17, 04:19pm

  I was invited and I invited James Robison in turn to contribute to fictionaut research taking place at the undergraduate level at Brown U under . The student's name ... newsbreak ... in looking up the professor's and student's name, I found that my AOL emails had been recently deleted going back to 2009. I saved them again as new. The intruder who delivered the last email in a set of six emails that ought to have been spam but that went to my inbox is mikerobert55 @ hotmail . com. Where do I report it, any ideas? Someone in Minneapolis has recently sabotaged local writing experiences and misnegotiated readings and submissions to his journal. I may need help to resolve this problem. My mother suggested getting a restraining order a few weeks ago, yet it's an Internet and intellectual property matter so far.

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