You do not understand, darling. You see, I am an artiste. I have spent hours – count them, hours! – formatting the story I have been gracious enough to let you read. So imagine the horror and disgust I feel when, having pored over ten pages of your patronising and aggressive guidelines, I arrive at the submission page to learn that I must PASTE my work into a box!
Have you lost your minds, you decrepit bunnies? Do you know how much my soul SINKS when I am told that submissions with curly inverted commas will be blasted into the stratosphere, or that indents for paragraphs is anathema in your pedantic, self-pleasing realm?
Idiots! You buffoons do not understand how we writers TOIL for our art, how we strive to take our stories beyond the banality of conventional formatting and embrace the creative possibilities of the technology upon which we write. We should not have to pander to your archaic whims! Tish and piddlecock!
On an unrelated and self-glorifying note, my story For the Sake of Argument is in the Spring issue of Twisted Tongue – a PDF and print (glorious print!) magazine of sci-fi and crime larks. Very happy to be included there.
On another unrelated note, why is using Blogger in Mozilla Firefox harder than prising open a can of beans with one’s toenails? I had to use IE8 to post this, which meant logging in AGAIN!!! Curse this infernal life!
And where is the frigging 'spell check' in the updated html Blogger edit version???? huh??? huh????
ReplyDeleteI downloaded ~
Yeah! Damn fascists!
ReplyDeleteMy story is a wee but overwritten, belonging to the earlier part of my oeuvre.
"Up the Revolution!"
ReplyDeleteSomeone needs a little crocodile slobber this morning. ::pets raving artiste on the head cautiously::
ReplyDeleteAnd congrats on the pub.
i feel for you guys! but i also ask for the submission to be posted in the email. i do, however, note that we will fix any formatting issues before the publish date. :)
ReplyDeleteYou tell 'em, Mark!!!! Don't put Markie in a box, dammit!
ReplyDeleteAnd congrats to you on the IN PRINT, GLORIOUS PRINT! story!
Oh, poems are fine. 3000-word stories pasted into the email are SICK.
ReplyDeleteThank you Tart & Chris!
I like another trend starting up now...
ReplyDeleteTo see whether we accept or reject your work, login and check for yourself. We will not be emailing you.
Soon the requirements will include:
Come make my bed.
Cook my breakfast.
Sign in at work for me.
Send my wife/girlfriend flowers every Tuesday.
Maintain my site.
I won't, of course, acknowledge any of that either.
Yes! That is for another rant, methinks.
ReplyDeleteWhat a bunch of lazy geriatrics.
To be fair, the sites that have online forms and systems for acceptance and rejection usually send the writer notification of acceptance via email. I think this type of system works for a certain type of story. It also helps large publisher to organize submissions more efficiently.
ReplyDeleteHee hee. And now I'm finished defending the Titans.
For flashes and poems, it's fine. Not for intricately formatted short stories. They should be committed to supporting the artiste.
ReplyDeleteThank you.