Syndrome
Over at Salon Laura Miller asks “When anyone can be a published author how do you find something good to read in a brave new self-published world?” That sentence started out strong, like Lindsay Lohan, before falling into a morass of mediocrity, cliche, painkillers, malfunctioning SCRAM-bracelets and faux-lesbianism. Since Ms. Miller seems to know her way around the editing process let me just get my blue pencil and make a correction: “When anyone can be a published writer no one will be.”
Punchy, on-point and a reference to The Incredibles. That’s how we do writing.
It also avoids the lazy gee-shucks-guess-we’d-better-just-accept-that-change-is-inevitable style beloved of anybody writing about technology in middlebrow news publications. Call me a luddite but I really can’t see how crowd-sourcing the slush pile when we can’t even keep the six-hundred year old paper books industry from churning about enough Twilight clones to necessitate their own aisle in most medium-sized bookstores (‘Dark Romance’, how sophisticated) will do anyone any good at any point, ever. It’s not something I have to be fair and balanced about, or leave to the reader to decide, because it’s the evil plan of a super-villain in a fucking cartoon.
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