DECLARING OPEN WAR ON THE ARROGANCE OF EDITORS!
I like WordPress’ instant proofreader, and the tools it gives to get more or less corrected text up there. When I think of the sloppiness of some sub-editors, but more especially the arrogance of editors, and people at the top of big publishers too, who seem to have no knowledge of writer’s lives and struggles, sometimes it makes my blood boil, with dragon fire! Twelve hard years I fought to create my books, to win 300,000 readers, to survive as a writer, and only 1% do so as I did, but in just a year a New York publisher, and more especially people I knew intimately, took me, my life and work apart. HOW DARE THEY?
But although they protect each other, sit in cosy offices, indulged by share profits and pension plans, and even though they sometimes do good work to find talent too, it is not editors at all that make the stories. I make the stories, and people like me. I put my heart and mind on the line, to do something I am damned good at, care about, and in order to engage with readers, meaning and the world. It can be the same with the arrogance on Newspapers, when an editor on the news desk on the Daily Telegraph recently did not even find the courtesy to acknowledge a piece I sent him, straight from the heart of the letter bomb attack on the Chilean Embassy in Rome.
They should be utterly ashamed of the prevailing climate of arrogance, and with a revolution in communication, I warn them that they will drive the true storytellers away, in the end, and find that we all get sick of the Celebrity biogs, the repeated formulas, and the pap. It’s time authors and writers took their power back, and kicked against the system. We do not believe in the big news fronts anymore, the careful marketing machines, the hunt for vast profits alone, and the degradation of human and literary value, by the spin and carefully presented face. Perhaps we would like to hear some deeper and more lasting truths. If I can, I am going to make Phoenix into a publisher, a newspaper, and a little film studio too. The irony is, that in the mad age of media, if it works, it might turn into a version of the brilliant film satire Network – with Peter Finch exhorting us to throw open our windows and shout out loud “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” DCD
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