Re: Edit Ink
XThe NavigatorX said:
Horror author Matthew Warner recently wrote a very long, but very interesting article about his time as a naive book doctor/ editor for one of the most infamous literary scams of the 90s, Edit Ink.
I was tooling around the interweb and found this fascinating thread about this fascinating article about Edit Ink. A few comments are in order regarding the whiny self-serving piece offered by Mr. Warner. Regarding my bona fides, I was an editor for Bill and Denise for more than five years in the late eighties/early nineties.
-- I was in fact the second outside editor Editcetera hired; my brother was the first. He's now in the process of writing his fifth book and I'm a senior editor at the third largest publishing company in the world. Which I raise merely to point out that at least some of Appel's clients got what they paid for. I would certainly agree that towards the end they were taking in nearly any nincompoop the street - Mr. Warner being a case in point - but it wasn't always that way.
-- I was offered the office manager job at the Edit Ink plant about 18 months before the stuff hit the fan. When I went out to talk to them about it I knew IMMEDIATELY when I walked in the door that something was amiss. There were piles of manuscripts everywhere, hundreds of them -- piled on the stairs, on shelves, on desks, in closets; and a herd of scruffy undereducated English majors red lining them. Something was clearly rotten in Buffalo. It is IMPOSSIBLE that someone who actually worked there didn't know what was going on. I figured it out in a couple hours. (Why didn't I think of that, I thought)
-- The most offensive, stupid and mean-spirited part of the article are the unjustified digs that Mr. Warner takes against poor Kelley Culmer. Talk about your man scorned. The guy starts out his article talking about how fantasized about her sexually immediately upon meeting her, about how "voluptuous" she was, and then when he ends up in bed with her nekkid all drunk and can't close the deal all of a sudden it's: waa waa waa I was sexually harassed. Which is, incidentally, part of a larger pattern where absolutely nothing that happened was Mr. Warner's fault: waa, I didn't know it was a scam; waa Kelley harassed me; waa, Kelley didn't get me a good apartment; waa, Kelley sent me a fake email; waa, Bill lied to me; waa, mommy and daddy will you support me if I get an internship; waa, I got fired for no reason; waa waa waa waa waa. Well, for the record, Kelley sexually harassed the hell out of me on a number of occasions -- in parked cars, in parking lots, in a number of seedy motels, and this one time on the floor of Bill's office when . . . well, nevermind. But suffice it to say that I enjoyed the hell out of every minute of it.
Oh, and by the way, Warner: they're real, and they're spectacular.
Regarding the scam, I didn't know it was going on until later and left their employ pretty soon after I turned down the Buffalo gig. (Not because I was offended, just because.) But I was certainly happy for the work then and felt bad for the people I knew there after things shook out with the AG. My own feeling about writers is that there's too many bad ones writing too many bad books -- and that's from J Franzen and Robert Waller on down to the dopes who epublish their scifi potboilers about 21st century vampires who run haunted hair salons in the Andromeda Galaxy. They shouldn't be writing novels anyway - the world'd be better off if they spent a little less time writing and a little more time picking trash off the side of the road. If the Appels of the world convince a couple of them to put their pens down, well, I'm all for it.
PS The over under on how long it'll take before this post is deleted is 14 minutes. I'll take the under.