I know many editors. They are always hungry for good material, but in the course of their duties they have to turn quite a few writers away. Some of the writers, I’m assured, are just this side of insane. Some have probably never even considered suicide.
Editors are sometimes a writer’s worst enemy. I know deep in my confused web of consciousness that I am a writer. I have written fiction with a pathological insistence since before my middle school days. Six novels bear my name. Not one has merited publication.
I wonder about the ethics of editors. Who made them the gatekeepers of what is worthy of living or dying? Nine years of my life were spent in higher education, terminating in a Ph.D. that bears no street cred. How am I to convince an editor I’m no slouch? Disposable.
Anyone with server space and a few extra hours a week can be an editor. Yes, for just a little storage space, you too can turn others down. Feel like the big guy. I’ll just crawl back into my corner.
Some great ideas just won’t let me go. I awake at 3 a.m. unable to sleep for the ideas vying for the limited space in my diminutive brain. Instead of fighting, I struggle into the chill living room, warmed by the laptop I wear, and tap out my tales.
Most of us write, I suspect, because we can’t find stories like our own elsewhere. I try to figure out where to submit, but see that standard categories just don’t apply to much of my work. Nobody wants to publish what they can’t classify. The editors I know all agree on that point.
How do you become an editor? What courses in dashing dreams do you have to take? With each letter I’m made to feel that there are many, many writers I’ve never even heard of who are much, much better than me. I have nothing to say. Nothing to say.
Yet I can’t stop writing. If anyone knows the solution, please tell me. Don’t worry about the time, I’ll probably already be awake.
Comments
Post a Comment