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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Everybody's a critter

  
 
deja_vroom
18:21 / 27.10.09
In which we share stories of our dealings with critics of our works.


So get this. Friend of mine directs me to a friend of his who's starting a small publishing house, set to release a collection of stories in the not too distant.

Instead of spending valuable space describing what type of stories will appear in this collection, I'll merely post part of the image from the cover of the book:



Those type. Those type of stories.

So, while I have nothing that could even approximate that type of literature, I have some old stuff which was kinda sorta genre-ish if you looked the other way for just a second or two.

I dusted off this Lovecraft-inspired short story and sent their way. It was Lovecraft but kinda skewered (an effect maybe of me having recently read "There Are More Things" by Jorge Luis Borges, which it's his own attempt at writing in the Lovecraft mythos). But for pete's sake, there was even a monster in it. The monster even ate the good guys, for crying out loud.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, while the Editor let me know that he didn't think it was fun, and that it hadn't really worked for him (things which I was ok with, obviously), he also took the story to his critical reader (I'm making explosion sounds with my mouth as I type his job title), so the guy could make a thorough assessment of the story's worth.

Jesus wept so much he made a mess of his beard, it was heartbreaking. The criticisms ranged from instances where the guy couldn't understand passages understandable to anyone with a modicum of experience in daily human interaction to a bunch of remarks made with the haughty peremptoriness of a hungover headmaster on everything that the story contained, from the characters to the setting to the dialogues etc. Which, you know, could have been invigoratingly positive, if he had been right about them.

Of course this rant can't go very far if I don't provide my text and his critique alongside each other, so just to give you a glimpse of the Shambling Horror that his review was: I had made the story purposefully vague vis a vis its setting/time period, giving just enough of a hint to the reader that it was taking place between the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, and with enough anglo references so as to place the story in a familiar territory (It could have been Dublin. It could have been New England - there were never historical facts pinning down the time period, nor references to actual famous buildings, people etc.). I must have been very sucessful, because the dude put in his mind that the story was set in England, and he used that to lambaste the story into a pulp based on a technique I'll call "Things Were Not Like That in Olde Albion!!1". He even criticized the taste in decoration of one of the characters! It was precious.

So, cutting this short - I had a lot of fun making fun of the dude to the Editor, starting from the very facile point that not even once had I actually typed "England" in the text. I think I vented enough bile for two months or so. It felt good. It felt just.

Six pages of free entertainment later the editor asked me to try and send another story for them. I'm trying to write another "horror" story, this time using Oedipus & the Sphinx, but I have no illusions. They'll find it boring at best (now would be a good time to ask you to take another good look at that illustration in the beginning of the post. Thank you.)

I wouldn't even bother trying to write another thing, weren't the opportunities to be published in other venues inexistent at this point in my life...

What about you, me darlings? What tales can you share for our moral and spiritual enlightenment?
 
 
Alex's Grandma
00:23 / 28.10.09
Le sigh. Not to be a buster, DV. Gird up your loins and submit your material to somebody else. Don't let those minor press, lunch-breaking fuck-horses get you down, in the way that they nearly did to me.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:49 / 28.10.09
I think I second that emotion, DV. You've just called this chap a cock, basically. And at great length. And you've told him that his colleague, who presumably he respects as a professional, is also a cock, that neither of them know a good story from a hole in the ground... at this point, is there a lot of point in maintaining this professional relationship? You can pull that sort of thing if you're Giles Coren and you stick to the little people, but... well. Unless the money's awesome, is there a lot of point in going further with this, rather than working on finding a more appropriate venue?
 
 
deja_vroom
00:42 / 29.10.09
Oh, I know. And as you can imagine, having your first published material coming to light between that type of covers is... well, a lot of things - funny, for instance! I'm not really actively pursuing anything professional regarding writing, so when this came through a chance acquaintance, I thought at least it couldn't hurt. Chances were that the company would be a bit... uneven, and the pay certainly wouldn't be anything fantastic (as you can imagine from the quality of execution and style of that illustration...), but really, if I can be frank, a little money at least is something. I don't even think I have good chances of scoring with the second story, but at least it's coming out quite decent, I think \o/.

I didn't want the post to give the impression that the interaction was rude - I know I certainly didn't go into too much detail (trying to err by lack, not excess). My reply was... pointed, but I tried to make light of the issues when possible (down here we have a saying, "lose the friend, but not the joke"). Actually the better critique in all this imbroglio came from the editor himself, not from the critical reader. He curtly told me that while he liked certain things in it, he didn't think it was clear enough, and that he, as a reader, had gotten frustrated with the story. Now this can be both good and bad, but this isn't relevant - what's relevant is that the editor represents the demographic for this type of book, so if the story didn't do much for him... I let him know that, which he can't but take as a compliment (hopefully).
 
 
oryx
08:01 / 29.10.09
I am an academic. As you may or may not know, the merit of most academic output is assessed by peer review - a system which presupposes that no-one in the academic community will ever be self-interested, insecure, or have an axe of any sort to grind.

Thus, I have had one recent article described variously as "radically undertheorised," "potentially interesting" [but only if I edit it so that it says what the reviewer wants it to say, and not what I've actually written] and "outstandingly original and intellectually rich contribution to the field."

How one 6000 word article can possibly be all of those things is a mystery to me.

To the OP - regardless of the quality or otherwise of your work (which I can't comment on because I've not read it) it strikes me that you've come up against an amateur who couldn't edit a bowl of cornflakes much less a book. There's lots of them out there, but there are equally lots of very good editors. Try your luck with someone who knows what they're doing instead.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
16:21 / 29.10.09
The critics. The press. The men with their notepads and the men with their blogs. The men with their columns and with their reviews.

They love me for what I'm not. They hate me for what I am.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
11:05 / 03.11.09
Guys, in all seriousness, you shouldn't worry. What I learned, after my literary agent told me that he wasn't too sure if he should kill himself, or finish reading my novel, is that sometimes, in life, the best thing to do is move on to the next chapter.

The second-best thing is trying to firebomb the building, but it's ... well there are various problems to do with that, honestly.
 
  
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