All posts by jkkblog

I'm a freelance editor and writer with a background in history and foreign languages.

How to get free feedback from your editor friends/family

October 28, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

My colleagues will kill me. This is like taking pictures in the co-ed team locker room and putting them online.

Here’s the problem: everyone seems to want to write, everyone seems to think his or her personal story is fascinating, and everyone is realizing that self-publishing has perforated the Great Wall of Publishing. Yet most people don’t write very well, most personal stories are no more interesting than anyone else’s, and most people don’t want to do their own marketing.

What is it you want feedback on?

My whole story, damn it! No. Don’t ask your editor friends for that. I’ve gone into the reasons before, but in short, you put your friend in a position where s/he cannot win, and will invariably disappoint you and damage the relationship.

My writing ability. Okay. In that case, ask your friend if s/he will dissect a single paragraph for you as if you were a paying client, with commentary and corrections–with the proviso that it’s all you want, or will want. I think most would go that far.

My storytelling ability. No, can’t do, because that means reading the whole thing. Then I have to explain the difference between writing and storytelling, which are very different skills. Don’t believe me? Okay. How many wonderful oral storytellers do you know who couldn’t even write a decent marquee for Grocery Outlet?

My story/book concept. That’s doable. Offer to digest it in 300 words (not 301, not 299; show some discipline), and ask simply for an evaluation of the strength of the concept, and what it might lack/need.

My kid’s writing. Never, no, absolutely not, and do not ask unless you’re perfectly happy to impair the friendship. It’s the ultimate no-win situation for your friend, simply because you asked.

How to get published. Doable. Take your friend to lunch, saying that you’d like to pick his/her brain on the various publishing choices. Lunch is a fair bribe for that.

How to market a book. Please don’t ask unless you are willing to make effort beyond “self-publish it and hope for the world to discover my greatness.” If you are passionate about marketing, then yeah, ask away, but always remember this. If editors were any good at marketing, or enjoyed it, wouldn’t they be doing that?

Where to get all of the above without paying? I’ll just answer that here. You have to endure a writers’ group. Take time to find a good one, bearing in mind that you will be asked to read and comment on plenty of types of writing you may not enjoy. You don’t like screenplays? Too bad; one hand washes the other. Your ego is fragile? You’ll either get over that, or you’ll leave the group. You find other writers to be narcissistic, pretentious, addicted au bon mot, and conceited? You will just have to deal, because there are probably few “writers’ groups for writers who do not have the customary personality tendencies of writers.” Your best option may be online, where at least you don’t have to send any words you haven’t reviewed and massaged before you commit to them.

If this seems cold, do remember that it emanated from a good number of bad experiences, and from a sincere desire to be helpful in spite of those experiences. It would be unfortunate if one could not construe that as kind at heart, because the easy route was to say nothing at all.

Editing/writing life

Alan Smithees

October 23, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

I do a lot of work that will never show up on my credit list, on my insistence. I call these Alan Smithees, after the crediting pseudonym used in the film industry.

Why wouldn’t I want to be credited?

One reason would be that an author overruled much of my guidance. Since the reader can’t know that, the outcome will reflect on me even if the author ignores all of it–unless I opt not to be credited.
In some cases, I consider the subject matter highly controversial, or representing views I consider terminally flawed or even odious, and I don’t mind editing it but I don’t want to be associated with it professionally.
In others, I have told the author quite clearly that I don’t think it’s a good or viable story idea, but the author disagrees, and asks that I do my best to help it anyway.
Now and then, it’ll occur to me that the author might face repercussions, and I may not want to share in them. Not that I am sure this would shield me, and not that I’m sure a risk could exist, but I’ve run into it.

Me going Alan Smithee doesn’t mean that the author shouldn’t publish the book. I’m not an infallible judge of literary worth. I most often have a better mental picture of how the readership will react than does the author, but not always, and I can’t know or govern how the author will go about marketing. All an Alan Smithee means is that I do not desire print credit for my role.

All the same, when I request not to be credited, a majority of authors find it disconcerting. The authorial psyche tends to contain a fair bit of false bravado masking a lack of confidence, so while the reaction may be very defiant on the surface, in many cases the author has begun to question something, or perhaps everything. One of the chiefest such questions is, of course, whether I’m the right editor for the project. Thus, any time I mention the possibility, I am prepared to see this happen.

While I reserve the right to opt out of credit at any time prior to the book’s going gold, it would be what’s called a ‘bitch move’ for me to spring that at the end without any hint beforehand. The reason should be obvious, but here’s my nutshell version: any situation that might bring on an Alan Smithee is one that it is my job to notice or anticipate at the project’s start, not at the finish. In one noteworthy case, the original writing required a complete rewrite. I advised the author that if s/he rejected edits or added material, the voice would be disrupted–that is, that there’d be inexplicable bursts of grammar, tense, and other mistakes in the final product. In the end, I asked not to be credited because I didn’t want people to see those and conclude that I hadn’t done my job correctly. It wouldn’t mean that, but any quick session with a few Amazon reviews will tell you that most readers don’t realize that the final result doesn’t necessarily reflect the editor’s full influence. The author can overrule me at will, and then I have a decision to make. In the end, if upon final review I do not want my name in the book, the author will have known of the possibility up front, and then made decisions, followed by me making decisions.

In the ideal world, I would always want to have my name in every project in which I was a participant. Until that ideal world comes, we will have some Alan Smithees. And that’s okay.

Sports

I think I’m about done attending actual college football games

October 20, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

It’s my favorite sport to watch; in fact, it’s the only sport I watch on a consistent basis. But I think I’ll be doing it from my recliner for the rest of my life. I just don’t much like going to the games.

Reasons, in no particular order:

Stadium: long march and/or climb to uncomfortable seat–and I’m not even counting the weather as a negative, since I’m pretty hardy. Recliner: short walk into living room with dedicated, comfortable chair.

Stadium: bathrooms force me to miss action or join enormous scrum in foul-smelling wait. Recliner: bathroom is down hall, can pause DVR so no action is missed, and is as clean as I choose to make it.

Stadium: drunk, noisy assholes who believe they bought a daylong asshole license. Recliner: no one even gets in the house without my will to unlock the door, and no one who would become drunk and abusive is getting in at all.

Stadium: can’t see the action too well. Recliner: can see all the action, as many times as I might wish.

Stadium: subjected to garish, paid-for displays of ostentatious patriotism. Recliner: can choose my own level of patriotism, from total fast-forward to standing up and singing along with the anthem, without peer pressure.

Stadium: total cost of attendance exceeds $100 per person at the very least, at least for major college action. Recliner: total cost of attendance involves paying my satellite bill of about $64 per month.

Stadium: food is either great but leaves me feeling like a mooch (tailgating) or meh and hugely overpriced after a long hike and a longer wait (concessions). Recliner: food is whatever I decided it should be, prepared and obtained when and how it suits me, priced reasonably.

Stadium: either take a bus, or hike from an adjoining state, or park in a nightmare scrum at high cost. Recliner: walk from office to living room, for free, without becoming annoyed at anyone.

Stadium: pretty much stuck watching halftime show, as there’s nothing else to do. Recliner: either build up footage and fast forward through halftime show, or watch instead updates and commentary on the day’s action.

Stadium: for the introvert, four hours of hard work trying to forget that one is surrounded by a crowd of random people. Recliner: for the introvert, four hours of relaxation surrounded only by people one wants around.

Stadium: analysis provided by random clods sitting in vicinity. Recliner: analysis provided by professionals experienced in the game, and sometimes even able to convey insight and/or humor.

Stadium: phone calls mostly happen to other people nearby, who then must yell into the phone so we can all hear. Recliner: if phone rings, pause DVR and answer it in civilized voice

Stadium: swearing frowned upon. Recliner: swear at will without penalty, and without harming the sensibilities of any elderly people or destroying the fragile innocence of youth.

Stadium: many people whom it would be morally okay to punch. Recliner: no one it would be morally okay to punch, because people who need to be punched aren’t welcome.

Stadium: potential for ejection if one objects to abuse, especially as a visitor. Recliner: no abuse, no potential for ejection.

Stadium: people may stand up and want past me at any time, including during a play, to get more brats or nachos with plastic cheese. Recliner: if someone needs to go in front of me, I pause the DVR.

Stadium: garbage thrown at random, leaving entire place looking like a slum by the fourth quarter. Recliner: garbage thrown in suitable receptacles.

Stadium: decent seats usually cost one kidney, and student seats are usually crappy. Great seats require enormous wealth. Recliner: all seats are great, and are the same price, and I’m welcome to invite students to partake as equals.

Stadium: pouring money into the increasingly corporate college football machine no matter how expensive they make it. Recliner: only money pour is by having premium TV to begin with, and whatever sponsored fan gear I felt inspired to buy.

Stadium: all marketing, all the time. Recliner: fast forward through all marketing I find annoying, which is substantially all of it.

Stadium: when everyone else stands up, I must as well or miss the action, and I were very short, it might do no good. Recliner: when I stand up, it’s because I have a reason, and it never relates to ability to see what’s happening on the field.

Stadium: watch one game. Recliner: watch for up to fifteen hours if I want, taking in up to five full games.

Stadium: searched at gate like common criminal, Dayquil taken away from sick person attending game two thousand miles from home, foldable stadium cushions taken away from persons who drove twelve hours and spent hundreds of dollars to be there. Recliner: bring anything I want, including a blanket fort over my chair if I so desire, or my heroin and syringes, or Scotch, or a cigar, or cold medicine; no one cares who is in a position to object.

Let’s be fair. The stadium does have advantages:

Home crowd energy can be good, and some venues treat visiting fans quite acceptably.

One will not have to miss part of the game because the Pac-12 Netbucks, Faux Sports 1 or 2, or the Eternal SEC Pimpage Network did a bad job of scheduling coverage.

Lots of calories burnt walking, climbing, hiking, and enduring weather.

Some stadiums have gorgeous views.

Direct experience of traditions: the Stanford band, Jump Around, calling the Hogs, singing the fight song, snickering at people with odd objects on their heads.

To people for whom it matters, they get to claim they were present.

Some halftime events which one might want to see, one will not be denied in favor of listening to Lou Holtz give his opinions.

Petros Papadakis is not doing the analysis.

The compensations exist, but are not worth what is asked of one.

Book reviews, Social comment

Recent read: Assholes*, a theory

October 13, 2015 jkkblog 4 Comments

No, that’s not for shock value. My dear and longtime friend Melissa recommended this book to me.

Melissa is not a constant or pushy TV, book, or movie recommender. She is an advanced thinker currently studying at an institution where ‘advanced thinker’ is a baseline expectation, and a hell of a nice lady. We disagree on a lot of things, but I respect her viewpoint.

Thus, when she recommended Assholes* to me, there were many possibilities, including ‘good read,’ ‘thoughtful discourse,’ and ‘broad hint.’ Such is our friendship that, had it been a broad hint, I would have valued the hint. I struggle in some ways with social situations; they do not come naturally to me. Now that I’ve read it, I’m glad to see it wasn’t a broad hint (or if it was, it sailed over my head), but an analysis of how to see and evaluate some of society’s bad actors. Including, at times, ourselves.

Prof. James proposes a straightforward definition of the Asshole. The Asshole considers him or herself exempt from social conventions (waiting in line, using a turn signal, tipping the waitress, taking the cell phone call outside the restaurant, taking the screaming baby outside the restaurant, holding the door so it doesn’t slam in the next person’s face). But motive matters: the Asshole is exempt because s/he is entitled to exemption. No other reason. The Asshole is special, and entitled to ignore the social contract, just by existing.

Thus, the person who acts like an Asshole once in a while on a bad day is not an Asshole, because most of the time that person knows and does better. The person who acts that way but knows it and seeks to dial it back is not an Asshole, because unrepentant privilege is part of the core definition. The Asshole does not self-examine, except perhaps to self-admire in a mirror.

Melissa and I had been engaged in a discussion of racial privilege that afternoon, and her intent may have been to illustrate how the privileged appear in the eyes of the unprivileged. I see the point. I can drive through most areas without risk of being pulled over for being black, since I’m not black. I get different and more favorable reactions in some situations, because I’m white. I probably got paid more because I was male. It represents a natural advantage. Because of that, goes the logic, I should seek to forgo this privilege. We don’t agree about the suitable reaction to that reality, but we agree that it exists and is unjust. The author brought the question up as it applies to his own favorite pastime, surfing. Evidently surfing has an accepted etiquette, and some people show no regard for it.

For me, nothing says Asshole like bad cell phone etiquette. You can be in the middle of a restaurant, having a conversation, and someone two booths away blares in with his outside voice. His cell phone rang. He would not want all of us to do that, but he is entitled, so he does it. He feels no remorse for behavior to which he is entitled. I do not understand how a group of people can gather around a meal table, or in a room together, and all stare down at electronic devices. When it happens, I just want to leave. Yet it does, and with increasing frequency, and evidently it’s the social consensus. Perhaps it is so much the social consensus that I’m being an Asshole by believing myself entitled to interaction when the expected behavior involves staring at a small rectangular communication and research tool. Who do I think I am, anyway? By not owning one, or wanting one, am I spitting on the social convention, making everyone around me uncomfortable as they post selfies, photograph their food, seek a video for the Daily Outrage, argue with strangers on Facebook, and manipulate the fall of multicolored candy pieces?

I liked the book. James’s style is readably articulate, the tone of a learned person not out to prove that to anyone. His examples will resonate with many. There’s only one issue I have with James’ stance, and it comes late in the book, where he has the discussion of how best to respond to the Asshole. His proposed solutions never involve the one I consider most obvious, which is to give the Asshole a consequence beyond “Hey, asshole, get to the back of the line.” I think James is right; if the Asshole were correctable, we would see evidence of the correction in progress. If there is no way to reform the Asshole, then the question is how we take least harm from him or her. James proposes selective assertion, which makes sense in that it’s not practical to challenge every instance, and we have to pick our spots. What he does not propose is selective assertion with real consequences, something that makes the Asshole actually suffer. Not to help correct the Asshole, but to warm the souls of the non-Assholes present.

Of course, not everyone is equipped to do this in safety. If the Asshole is trying to bull to the front of the line, and he’s built like an NFL lineman, the woman standing five feet high and weighing one hundred pounds only after a chocolate binge isn’t going to stop him. It could be risky for her. But what if, where possible, the Asshole gets a real consequence? ‘Vigilante justice,’ people will complain, as if that phrase is an automatic invalidation. Now and then it does happen, and we applaud. I think we need more of it, not less. While it doesn’t have to involve violence (could be as simple as a milky coffee thrown on the Asshole, or a bumper sticker that says “Certified Asshole” slapped onto a Mercedes taking up two parking spaces), I’m not opposed to the notion that it might now and then take tangible and painful form.

Some people really are Assholes, and now and then, someone will kick their asses. I’m in favor.

Editing/writing life

Don’t book-format it yet

October 9, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

Every ms I get is already gussied up to be as much like a book as possible. Cute typeface. Graphics sometimes inserted. Ornate capital first letters of chapters. Tables, carefully aligned. And the worst, pagination by numerous hard returns. They didn’t know how to use the hard page break, so they just hit Enter over and over until they got a new dotted line.

No good, and here is a simple analogy. Suppose you had to rake leaves and clean eave-troughs before going out to dinner. In what order would you perform the tasks?

Put on beat-up work clothing
Gather rake, ladder
Clean eave-troughs, throwing as much as possible into bin
Rake yard and pick up errant eave-trough crud
Put away tools
Take off filthy clothing
Shower
Put on nice clean clothes

Yeah. But if you were the typical author, you would:

Shower
Put on nice clean clothes
Gather rake, ladder
Clean eave-troughs, throwing as much as possible into bin
Rake yard and pick up errant eave-trough crud
Put away tools
Take off now-filthy, partly damaged, once-nice clothing
Shower again
Put on more nice clean clothes

Don’t do it this way, all right? All the frippery, fonts, cutesiness, illustrations, inserted graphics, and so on–save them until we have finalized what your book actually says. That’s the difficult and exhausting part, the one where we confer, edit, debate, brainstorm, reconsider, shift, declare war on adverbs, sign a temporary armistice with adverbs, violate the armistice and ambush the adverbs, and so on. The result is the completed, proofread, verified, exhaustively scrutinized full body of what you want to say to the world. Everything we do to it while editing will be hampered by graphics, tables, and cutesy typeface decisions. All that prettying-up can happen once we decide what the book will say.

I’m all in favor of prettying-up. Chefs put work into presentation because it matters. They also do it at the pass, not at the prep table. At most, they carve or shape this or that so that it will fit the future presentation, just as when you are cleaning the eave-troughs, you will try not to cut your forehead wide open by mistake.

Text first. Formatting and beautification later.

Sports

Our greatest father-and-son moment: the Sooner Schooner game

September 27, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

For every good moment I can remember of my father, I can remember many bad ones. A mechanical, electrical, and electronic wizard, he obtained a master’s in a subject to which his bachelor’s degree did not pertain. With honors. While working full time and coming to all my Little League games. When I joined the Cub Scouts, he volunteered as Cubmaster.

How he could go from that to religious fanaticism and domestic violence, I am not sure I will ever understand, but he died in my twenties within two weeks of the attempt to reboot our relationship. In any case, most of what I learned from him was negative, as in “never be that kind of man.” We only had a few truly great moments, and at halftime Saturday, my alma mater celebrated one of them. (It was all we had to celebrate, as we lost to Cal. But we didn’t lose as badly as Oregon did to Utah. Even during our anniversary dinner, I had Deb keep checking the score. Just the look on her face was golden, especially when she would burst out laughing.)

On New Year’s Day 1985, I was home from UW for the holidays. When in school, I honestly didn’t care that much about football, and with all the foolhardiness of youth, I took the Huskies’ success for granted. I did respect the players as fellow students, because Don James ensured that they behaved themselves. In my first year as an RA, I had a tailback, a tackle, and a defensive tackle living in the cluster right next to me. Some of the nicest ‘dents I had, and that year, I had very many. I had trouble with men’s basketball players, and the men’s crew, but never football players. One of the quarterbacks, whom I knew from a Willis class (non-UW folks: to understand this, google ‘Willis Konick’, and believe me when I tell you that nothing you read is exaggerated), had a sister living in my floor’s elevator cluster. Paul Sicuro was bright, personable, and was destined to start under center for the Huskies in the Orange Bowl on January 1, 1985. He is now an oncologist, and I suspect a very good one.

Now, the old man loved college football. His viewpoints on it were dogmatic and Big 8-biased, but he watched it all day every Saturday in fall. My mother still hates even the mention of the sport. I didn’t watch very often, but here we had a rare convergence of his ideas and mine. You see, my father was a Jayhawk who also liked Nebraska, and he hated Oklahoma Sooners football like I hate Oregon D*cks football. I’m fond of saying that if the University of Pyongyang showed up to play Oregon, I’d be out there holding up a big picture of the Dear Leader, chanting communist slogans in Korean. Well, if there were a school titled the New York Atheist University Fighting Evolutionists, and they showed up to play the Sooners, my father would have been out there waving a copy of Origin of Species. Knowing him, he would have been drawing vocal and unflattering inferences with regard to the covered wagon opposition and the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder.

I have enough friends from Oklahoma not to feel quite as strongly about this as my father, but I certainly didn’t mind it. For my part, I was a Husky of Kansan origin, and this was the Orange Bowl, and it was obvious which team I would support. Our interests and opinions were aligned if not identical, a rare arrangement indeed.

The game didn’t begin too well for my Dawgs. Switzer had a good football team in Norman, with stud defenders like Tony Casillas and Brian Bosworth (who failed in the pros but was a force of nature in college ball). My man Sicuro didn’t have his best game. Three quarters in, with the score tied, Oklahoma lined up for a chip shot field goal to take the lead. Their kicker made it, but the referees called the play back for illegal procedure. Another try, right, but surely a 27-yarder isn’t much harder than a 22-yarder? Might even be easier, depending on the location of the ball between the hash marks? Then as now, no Division I-A kicker considers 30 yards or less to be a distance issue.

Ah, but…you see, the Oklahoma mascot is a Conestoga wagon maintained by a pep group, drawn by impressive horses and titled the ‘Sooner Schooner.’ Having not seen the penalty flag, the drivers brought it onto the field to celebrate. It got stuck in mud in front of the UW bench in a gesture that surely wasn’t meant as a deliberate middle finger, but looked like one to an observer. My father and I watched in disbelieving, unrestrained hilarity: did the Okies really just bring their covered wagon onto the football field in the Orange Bowl? Yes, they had.

Being killjoys, the officials didn’t think it was very funny. They tacked unsportsmanlike conduct onto the Sooners, and the former chip shot was now a 42-yarder. For longer field goals, a kicker will generally go for lower trajectory in search of distance. Oklahoma lined up to kick again, and Husky safety Tim Peoples blocked this attempt. My dad and I came unglued again. He was actually in tears of laughter, face the color of a brand new breast cancer ribbon, emitting his peculiar rutting-rhino laugh. (Imagine Arnold Horschack with real lungs.) It was hard to credit the TV evidence. Looking back, I still have a hard time believing it. I’m reading a retrospective news article from an authoritative source, and it’s still hard to believe what I saw.

The Huskies went on to win that game with two fourth-quarter touchdowns, as father and son broke out in periodic snickers, chuckles, giggles, and guffaws.

As I approach the age at which he died, I guess it’s natural to reflect on my father and compare. Too often, I think of the face frozen in ruddy and violent fury, the indifference he showed as I spiraled down to a very dark time in life, the oppressive religious fanaticism, and how much more I hated the man every time I saw the way he treated my mother (and us). Now and then, I think of one of the good moments. This was one.

Social comment

Cosby allegations: breaking it down

September 24, 2015 jkkblog 2 Comments

The ‘Lancer doesn’t seek out too many polarizing social issues, but I think we’re about due for some societal self-honesty on this one. After watching a show in which about a dozen of the victims spoke their pieces, let’s make this simple.

First: some fifty women have come forward, telling tales similar enough to reveal a consistent drugging and assault modus operandi, distinct enough not to be copycat. Their messages are consistent and credible: it happened decades ago, no one would have believed me, I had no power. Okay. While I think we all agree two rapes are worse than one, and fifty are worse than forty-nine, the largest gap is between zero and one. One true account would be enough to render someone guilty, in moral fact if not in legal prosecution. Thus: you either believe that all fifty-plus stories are fabrications–not just most, but every last one–or you believe that at least one rape occurred, which would render the rapist a…well, a rapist. All of the stories I’ve heard sounded quite credible, whereas the notion that all of them are fabricated beggars believability. And even one would be quite bad enough, because one is far worse than zero. Zero is the only acceptable number of rapes.

Second: why is it hard for us to swallow? I’ll tell you why. Because Bill Cosby was very comforting and congenial to white America. I can’t speak for black America, but for us, the natural reaction was like that toward Shoeless Joe Jackson: “say it ain’t so!” We don’t want it to be true. Much shatters under its impact. It causes discomfort, plus embarrassment at a sense of having been sold a bill of goods. I put it to you this way: whatever discomfort it causes me, or any non-victim, pales before the discomfort suffered by a single victim. My discomfort is trivial. It wasn’t my trust that was shattered in person. It wasn’t my body that suffered violation. It wasn’t my psyche that spent decades trying to come to terms with sexual assault. Our system is criticized, and fairly, for kissing up to the victimizer and doing too little for the victim. I’m not going to play into that. Yes, the accusations have wrecked a once-adored legacy. They have not wrecked his personal fortune. Whatever discomfort he has suffered, which is far more than anything I have, likewise pales in comparison to that of a single victim. I’m going to reserve my compassion for the victims, and my respect for their choices to speak out.

Third: an accusation of sexual assault is a heinous thing. If false, well, I do not have the letters JD after my name, but I have a strong suspicion that an uttered false accusation falls into the category of ‘slander.’ If written, I believe it is called ‘libel.’ Either way, it might give rise to those words ‘irreparably damaged,’ involving such remedy as the law might allow. All right, suppose one is libeled, or slandered, or both. Suppose one also has unlimited wealth. If it were me, and the accusation were groundless calumny, and I could afford to buy justice, I’d sure as hell go to justice Costco and get a flatcart. I’d sue every last accuser for $10 plus a public retraction and apology, just to make the point that it wasn’t about crushing the accuser beyond the legal fees s/he incurred. (It would also seem to be far easier, goes the evil side of my mind, to persuade a jury to award that, and easier to collect than a large sum of money the individual did not have and I didn’t need.) With that much money, one could do such things. If the accusation were truly false, who would not seek one’s own vindicating day in court? My logic, again uninformed by study of the law but reasonably well informed by an understanding of tactical thought and dirty tricks, goes like this: the only reason I don’t go to court in that case is if I’m terrified of what would go on the record, and if I have some sense that the truth stated in open court would be the one thing I could do to make my situation worse. Better to depend upon the sound-bite attention span of the public, and wait for the media to order the public to care about fresher and more lurid stories.

That seems to have occurred.

One can add many arguments, and people already have, beginning with the one about what a false accuser would have to gain from exposing herself to all the public inquiry when the incidents in question are surely beyond the statutes of limitations. Many such arguments are valid, but none are needed. Based upon the foregoing alone, it makes no sense to disbelieve the women, the victims–the ones about whom we should care most. And if we believe them, they must be our priority. They deserve the support of honest men and women, but men in particular, because the number of male rapists dwarfs the number of female rapists. And if honest men want that to improve, we need to take our stand. It begins by choosing to believe victims’ statements, where our reason deems them credible. Anyone who doesn’t think that’s an important service to victims is welcome to find a victim and ask him or her if being believed (or disbelieved) makes a difference. You won’t have to ask two.

I’m not writing this for my friends who are survivors, because my viewpoint is no news to them. I’m writing this for people I may not know, who have never told a soul, who live with the pain in psychological jails they constructed to get them through life. They most need the support. And if the event didn’t actually happen, no one would build such a psychological jail and live within it. The descriptions of the impact ring true with those I have heard from others. The only reasonable conclusion is to believe them.

I’m not going to feel guilty for laughing at good comedy in the past, but I’ll just have to accept that good comedy doesn’t necessarily imply good character, nor does an acclaimed family sitcom.

I’m not laughing anymore.

Editing/writing life

Print magazines: hunting down and alienating the remaining customer base

September 17, 2015 jkkblog 6 Comments

In these days of declining print subscription, you’d think that the print magazine business model would do its level best to make its remaining customers stick around. Wouldn’t you?

It’s stuff like this that makes me say to people: “When you are looking at organizations you think are surely more sophisticated and know things you don’t, and assuming you must be missing something because they could not possibly be this stupid, guess what. They could. They are. It’s not you. They are stupid.”

At last count, I take Mother Jones (a hellraiser mag that drew me in with its first subscription pitch, which used naughty words and seemed as independent as it got), mental_floss, PC Gamer, Smithsonian, Consumer Reports, Strategy & Tactics, and Modern War. Until recently, I took The Week. I also get the UW alumni magazines for free, but since they’re free, they don’t really count here. I’ll keep MoJo, CR, S&T, and MW. The rest, I’m done with.

Of course, all the mags hope that you will do all business through their websites, so most of them make their phone numbers kind of hard to find. They send out numerous resubscription and gift subscription offers, often in deceptive envelopes (“IMPORTANT INFORMATION ENCLOSED”, OR “IMMEDIATE PAYMENT DUE”), and one thing I notice is that they keep getting better at munging the printed date of your subscription’s expiration. On top of that, the issue date is typically a month and a half in the future. It all seems calculated to make you think your subscription is about to expire, when it probably isn’t. They’ll start shelling you with offers months before expiration, to the point where you forget whether you’ve actually renewed. There’s a good chance, if you weren’t paying too much attention, that they will get you to double-renew. That happened with The Week, and it annoyed me.

Rarely will the renewal pitch entertain you. While MAD went way downhill as the old guard retired, it had a great renewal pitch. “When you subscribed to MAD, you proved you had bad taste. Now it’s time to show that you don’t learn from your mistakes!” Mostly it’s false urgency, a lot of self-gratification, and firm assurances that the rate will never be lower. None of it rings as anything but Standard Marketing Crap.

If you plan to renew by credit card, get a fine point pen. It’ll take one to write all sixteen numbers in that tiny space. And if you renew saying Bill Me Later, some will get very grouchy when their bill arrives two days after your billpaying day, and they simply have to wait a month. Recently I tried writing to one Leslie Guarnieri, listed as the consumer marketing director at m_f, who had just sent me my ‘third notice’ (when I wasn’t even sure there’d been a renewal, and definitely hadn’t seen a first or second notice) worded in collection agency tones. I decided that if Ms. Guarnieri could allow her name to be signed to threats, she could take time to discuss them, so I attempted to call and speak with her. Not that I imagined I’d be able to; it was just a necessary prelude to a letter. m_f is supposed to be a brainy magazine, so I figured they could not be that stupid.

They are. By the way, Leslie’s name is on the notices for another mag I get. I forget which one, but since I’m not renewing that one either, I do not care. Anyway, I decided it was time to rattle Leslie’s cage a bit. Even looked her up to make sure I got the salutation right:

===

July 27, 2015

Ms. Leslie Guarnieri, Consumer Marketing Director, mental_floss Magazine

8051 Mayfield Rd, Chesterland, OH 44026

Re: threatening notice

Dear Ms. Guarnieri:

Please see the attached ‘3rd Notice’ threatening to discontinue my subscription. Since your name is ‘signed’ to it, with no evidence of falsification, I take it as coming from you.

I attempted to phone you, to discuss why you would send me a third notice when I had received neither a second nor a first notice, but the representative I spoke with could or would not assist me. I find that very bad business. You shouldn’t allow threats to be sent out under your name unless you’re willing to face the music for mistakes.

Many magazines send out subscription offers that imply that one’s subscription is nearly over, when in fact it remains good for another year and a half. For this reason, one cannot even take the leap of faith to assume that the USPS, by incredible coincidence, managed to misplace the first two notices. What is certain: I did not simply ignore a clearly labeled first or second invoice in proper form. I did not obtain a gleaming credit rating by being the deadbeat that a ‘3rd Notice’ implies, and I resent the notice’s implication.

That said, let’s put the cards on the table. Right now, I stand offended, and inclined to simply write ‘cancel’ on the ‘3rd Notice.’ I like the magazine, but it presents the pretense of higher intellect, with which this entire handling is inconsistent. Also, lately, I’m not so sure I’d miss the magazine. The paid print magazines can ill afford to lose subscribers from the dwindling number of literate Americans who still want to read a paper magazine, so it’s up to you to determine if or how it’s worthwhile to make this up to me.

According to your letter, by August 17 this all becomes moot. Too bad. If I’d received a normal invoice, I’d have paid without delay or complaint. I dug through my records and can’t even find where I sent in a resubscription request, but surely you would not just send invoices without first determining whether a client intended to renew. That would be unthinkably dishonest in a reputable business, so I am sure that did not occur. Thus, I take on faith that you have evidence on file that I ordered a renewal in the first place, and that the action has slipped my mind over a few months.

Your move.

J.K. Kelley

===

You don’t suppose I’ve heard back, do you?

The print magazine industry will not rest until it has hunted down every vestige of good business and kicked its ass, tracked down every remaining customer and invented some way to alienate him or her.

I’m done with it, for the most part. I don’t like it, but they worked at it, and hard work does pay off.

Married life

Grandma Kelley

September 1, 2015 jkkblog 4 Comments

Today, were she still with us, my paternal grandmother Clara Caroline would be celebrating her 113th birthday. She always said “Ah was born in nahn-teen two.” She spoke with the gentle drawl of the rural Flint Hills, her homeland.

I am very fond of Grandma Kelley’s memory, because she seems to have been the good gal among a number of bad people, and because she was pretty fond of me. Her only grandson, and first grandchild…well, I’d have had to be pretty awful to disappoint her.

My grandmother came from a typical, large, religiously grim Kansas German farming family. She spoke only German until she was seven. Clara grew into a somewhat awkward young lady, tall for her age. There is every reason to believe her father was abusive, and that at least some adult male in that family was molesting the girls, though I have never known either for sure. My family isn’t very forthright about past closet skeletons, on either side, nor has it ever been.

She married very late for her era, I believe in her early thirties, to a man who turned out to have a violent temper. I don’t know how abusive he was to her and my father, the only issue of the marriage, but I have trustworthy evidence that he (a hardscrabble laboring man) was brutal to horses he worked with. Based upon my father’s behavior as a husband and father, I’m betting that’s where he learned to be so dogmatic, emotionally abusive, and violent. In any case, my grandfather died when my father was about fifteen, and my grandmother became a widow. She never remarried. One suspects that she’d had enough of that type of life. She worked at cleaning and other laboring tasks, helped get my father through college, and was elated when I came along in her early sixties.

She often watched her grandchildren, and we enjoyed visiting her. After we moved to Colorado, then Washington, we saw less of her for a time, but when I was in junior high school, she came out to live with us. Grandma was in her seventies, and a bit forgetful. My mother would get frustrated with her, but I could understand that, because it’s not easy for any woman to have her mother-in-law living in the house. Even so, my mother saw that she was taken care of, and Grandma often took the senior citizens’ bus to town, where she could hang out with her peers. She had in effect a one-bedroom apartment in our enormous house, with a refrigerator and hot plate, and managed her own basic affairs.

During that time, I took as my duty to be the voice of the real world: a loud but loving teenage boy. I’d bang on her door, too loudly, and when invited in: “Howdy, Granny! How’s your day! Not those soap operas again, good lord!” I’d give her a big hug, visit with her a bit, and then see if somehow any interesting food items had materialized in her pantry since yesterday’s raid. They rarely had. In hindsight, I was very obnoxious and failed to show suitable deference, but I was one thing she got nowhere else. I was authentic in all things. Authentically opinionated, authentically selfish, but always authentically loving. I especially enjoyed when the senior citizens’ bus would drop her off with a couple of bags of groceries. The driver, a very kind fellow, would always offer to carry them in for her. I was having none of it. And on some level I knew that she was enjoying having her burly grandson insist that if her groceries were going to be carried, he’d be doing the carrying, where it would give her face before her peers.

Whenever I went back to college from vacation, she wept.

What she never really knew was that the chain was going to break here. I looked at my father’s behavior and swore to myself never to have a home that was emotionally or physically abusive. I also swore to kick his ass some day. Kept both commitments.

My grandmother’s hobby was quilting, and my word, did she quilt. Many of them came to me, artworks in cross-stitch. None of them were the fluffy batting duvet type; Grandma’s quilts were made of multiple bedsheets, and felt like sheet lead conforming to the body. I remember when Deb moved in with me and we were opening boxes after a move, and she opened a box of quilts.

“What the hell are these?” My wife doesn’t use her inside voice when she is animated.

“They are quilts, dear. You know what quilts are?”

“Of course I know what they are! These are beautiful! What the hell are they doing in a box?”

“Well, I wasn’t using them, so…”

“You dork! People pay hundreds of dollars for quilts that aren’t as good as these! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I never thought of it. I mean, doesn’t everyone have quilts? I thought all grandmothers were biologically compelled to quilt.”

“NO! They aren’t! Take these to the washing machine, they smell like mothballs. We’re going to put them on our bed!”

“Good idea, dear. They are good quilts.”

At that point, I think, my future wife realized there was nothing useful to say to such a slow-witted fiancé, who would have to be guided carefully through life lest his clearly impaired judgment of value lead him to commit further errors.

We are still using the quilts. When the stager for our Boise house, whose job it is to tell homeowners that their decor sucks, took a look around the master bedroom, her eyes fell upon my grandma’s state flowers quilt. “That stays,” she said. “That makes this whole room feel homey.”

Yes, ma’am. Reckon so.

My grandmother passed away on December 9, 1988. I was two years out of college. While I suspect she was very bright, and I know for sure she was quite creative else how did all those quilts happen, I knew her as a very quiet, simple, loving, unobtrusively religious Kansas German farm woman. And she would pardon my numerous shortcomings, because every day, I stopped by to sit with her a bit and hug her and tell her I loved her.

Such is grandmotherhood.

She would have loved Deb, but she would love best that her grandson and his bride, in a home of peace and kindness, take their rest at night covered in the artworks she assembled with those veiny, calcium-deposited hands, ignoring her increasing arthritic pain to create functional beauty.

I miss her. She was a great lady.

The Editorial Maverick

All posts by jkkblog

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Alan Smithees

I think I’m about done attending actual college football games

Don’t book-format it yet

Our greatest father-and-son moment: the Sooner Schooner game

Print magazines: hunting down and alienating the remaining customer base

Grandma Kelley

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.