Tag: editors

At least TRY to rob me

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Watch: once this post goes live, I’ll get another email, and this whole thing will turn out to have been real, only now I’ve pissed her off.

Suddenly it occurs to me that the fact that there has been a delay in this person replying to me is actually evidence for it being real. Surely, surely I’m not actually being ghosted by a scammer, right? These people are nothing if not persistent.

At any rate: last week I got an email from someone purporting to be an Editorial Director at a publishing group that shall remain nameless, as will the actual person. That person showered several paragraphs of praise upon The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 and then asked me what my future plans were for the series and whether I currently had representation. Which, obviously, I don’t, seeing as how I haven’t written a single word of fiction since Covid hit.

The praise felt a lot like AI. Which, y’know, suspicious, especially when coming from someone who was purportedly an editor.

I did some research. The publishers were legit and the person was a real person. I allowed myself to get excited for a moment, then noticed that the email address was clearly not from any kind of official work email. A personal email address? Maybe, but it added additional tingles to the Spider-sense. Plus there was no actual promise of anything in the email, or was there actually an ask, so if this was a scam, they had multiple steps planned for it.

I went to LinkedIn. The editor was there, too. I dug up the work email and sent a quick message: a more polite version of hi, is this real?

I got an immediate response saying that the person had retired in December and that the email address was going to be shut down in January. It is May; clearly this did not happen. LinkedIn made no mention of being retired and the website of the company still refers to this person as if they are currently employed.

Also, this provided a reason for the personal email, right? Maybe they’re retired, but not retired-retired, if that makes any sense.

So I did two things, wanting to see where this was going, especially if I could get some posts out of it: I responded politely and with some interest to the original email address, but I also sent a message to the person’s LinkedIn, with a brief explanation of the situation and basically saying Hey, I don’t quite trust this, would you mind letting me know if it’s real?

And now it’s several days later, and I haven’t heard from either of them. The editor doesn’t appear to be especially active on LinkedIn, and their messaging system is opaque at best, especially concerning messages from people you aren’t already connected with, so that’s not terribly surprising, but I was expecting a pretty quick response from the original email– either you’re real, so you’re looking forward to hearing from me, or you’re not, in which case you’re still interested in … whatever it was you had in mind in the first place. I’m still not completely clear on the angle, to be honest.

It also occurred to me that whoever sent the email very well might be monitoring the blog, so maybe an explanation is the post from the day it happened saying I thought I was being scammed? Maybe they just dropped it at that point, realizing it was futile.

Either way, this didn’t end up being nearly as entertaining as I wanted it to be, dammit.

I need a new word

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing7 Comments

There is a very specific type of bad writing that I feel like we need a name for, and this couple of paragraphs from the book I’m currently reading may be the literal Platonic ideal of it:

I’m not going to name the book, but the sleuths and generically curious among you shouldn’t have a whole lot of trouble figuring it out.

  1. This is the wrong verb, in a way that would make Mark Twain’s eyelid twitch. One does not “snatch” a piece of paper that is sitting on one’s own desk.
  2. Also the wrong verb. I also kind of want to quibble about the use of the word “worn,” which implies age– “tattered” might work better here. That said, I think this is probably the point I’m most willing to argue about.
  3. A blockade “of sorts”? You’re surrounded by twenty thousand enemy troops. That’s a fucking blockade. Or, even better, a siege, which has the advantage of being the correct word.
  4. Two sentences ago you said the blockade happened “one night past,” and now they’re testing your defenses “each night.” You’ve got to be outnumbered thirty to one; what the hell could they be waiting for?
  5. How are the scouts getting past the twenty thousand enemy troops? Why do you need scouts when you’re fucking surrounded? Also, how the hell did this letter get past the siege in the first place?
  6. This is Capital One arena, which seats twenty thousand, in far tighter accommodations than troops besieging a fort would use. See note #5.
  7. This is a world where dragons exist. So do the Uraks themselves, who are basically tall orcs. “Monsters” really doesn’t tell me anything about what these “larger beasts” are.
  8. Why? Why in the world would you not believe them?
  9. I don’t think you will, sir, and you’re sending this letter because you don’t think you will either, so “No matter” is a really weird way to conclude this letter.

This book is six hundred and eighty pages long, and this type of thing is on nearly every page, although it’s quite a bit more concentrated than usual here. I’m going to finish the book today, because while the writing is … again, I need a word more descriptive than “terribad” here, the story itself is engaging enough to keep me interested. But god, man, find a better editor. You need the help.

In which I investigate

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Reviews5 Comments

Huty1913428I’m issuing a qualified thumbs-up to the new text editor, guys, and I’m surprising myself by doing so, believe me.  The only thing I’ve found that doesn’t work like I want it to is moving images around, and that feels more like a temporary bug than a deliberate decision someone made.  It’s also pretty easy to fix in HTML if the image won’t slide around properly in the WYSIWYG editor.

One thing I’d like to see is a way to copy posts straight from the new editor; I actually use that feature quite a lot what with the various hashtagged posts I do every week, and it’s kind of annoying to have to go through the My Sites menu to copy a post or to just hope the original (as in, the black-and-white one from three years ago) editor pops up.  However, now that I’ve typed enough that I don’t want to cancel out, I do seen an “All Posts” arrow in the upper-right hand corner, so maybe that’s where I’d go before I start writing if I wanted to copy a post.  (EDIT: Nope.  As of right now, you need the admin page to copy posts, which is unchanged from the last version of the editor.)

Another minor annoyance: Choosing a category does not unclick “Uncategorized” automatically like it used to.  They should fix that.

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