Polemic Litany

My latest editor and I got into a pissing battle over a comment she left on my manuscript during initial edits. The ferocity of the exchanged words were unintentional and probably blown entirely out of proportion by circumstances. I was tired of what I perceived as vigorous demands for rewriting as opposed to editorial revision, and I suspect she hated editing a literary tragedy. You can read that as “piece of crap.”

She made a suggestion for a word change which in and of itself would have been well received. She phrased the suggestion as if the reader were too dumb to understand my word and that pissed me off.

The publisher is trying not to get caught in the middle, but she is forced to take sides with the editor (a personal friend) because as a writer, this person has a series of books which is making the publisher money.

I cannot say the same.

From Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

“I’d like to ask the panel what they would do if they were Hitler?”
“I should annex the Sudetenland!”

The above joke was partially an obscure historical reference even to Monty Python fans in reality, and especially to anyone born after 1938. When I first heard the joke back in the 1970s, I had to look it up. It meant Germany invaded the western regions of Czechoslovakia because the area had been settled by Germans way back during the Hapsburg empire.

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Last year about this time we were steered toward a publisher who might be interested in publishing Phlogiston. I, for one, was very excited to learn that Tiger Publishing, Inc. showed some interest in the novel. Of course, the terms of our agreement with the publisher to submit to rewriting actually appealed to the Jeef as he felt inclined to heavily revise the text anyway.

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Here is a review of “Flyover” from Some Gave All done by the unnamed reviewer at “Book Utopia.”

Some of the stories in the anthology took a real slam, but I came out pretty well.

“Flyover,” by Jefferson Dane, is a paranormal drama about a soldier rescued from the Afghanistan mountains, who has been traumatized by both the slaughter of his unit and the terror they witnessed on a nightly basis. It is moody and chilling, and proof that strong authors can rise above sloppy editing, because this suffers from none of the mistakes of its predecessor [in the anthology]. The slowly built tension in this helps to make the paranormal aspects painted over an all-too-realistic and grim setting believable. Characterization is careful and delicate; I believed completely in all three of the principles in this, even if the psychiatrist is more of a means of ferreting out the story than anything else. By far, the strongest story of the bunch.

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