Whatever Happened to Editors Anyhow?

And now, a diatribe about the publishing process.

Several of these works are unfinished, as their authors freely admit, meaning that they are incomplete. Fair enough--that's the nature of the beast. In addition--and this is not acknowledged--they are also unfinished in the sense of being unpolished, rough around the edges. With the notable exception of "Kokura"--by far the most polished piece here in terms of writing and presentation--all of them suffer markedly from one of the greatest pitfalls of self-publishing, the lack of good editing, copyediting, and proofreading.

The Unknown, while relatively clean at the level of basic grammar and mechanics--especially considering its surfeit of text--suffers greatly from the lack of a content editor. There is much good material in it--some of it funny, some of it insightful about writing in general and writing hypertext in particular--but it is hard to get to the berries for the thicket of briars around them. It calls to mind a reviewer's remark about the length of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song twenty odd years ago, that Mailer had apparently decided that if he couldn't get one any other way, he was going to shoot for a Nobel Prize in Typing. Here we have entire chat sessions included for our edification. Such transcriptions have their uses for archival and reference purposes certainly, but for any reader who was not there, reading a log of other people's chat is surely one of the more dispiriting experiences of modern life. The repetition, the confused references to the fourth exchange back, the self-described gestures and facial expressions that we were not present to experience in the moment--as my eye glazes over such text I begin to feel the moments of my life draining away and I have to wonder at how I spend my time. Although I recognize that over-the-topness is a goal here, the point is made long, long before one browses The Unknown's ten hundred nodes.

Other of these pieces suffer from various deficiencies in editing at more rudimentary levels. In Powhida's "The Projection Project," copyediting and fact-checking errors abound, marring the overall impression. The ubiquitous contemporary confusions over "lie" and "lay" and over "your" and "you're" rear their ugly heads more than once. This is probably a lost cause in American English. Worse, there is an extended discussion about a woman looking like "an Inges girl," by which I presume Ingres is meant (I should note that this could be interpreted as the character's, not the author's, misunderstanding, but all the other sloppiness in this piece leaves me uninclined to be generous on this score; at any rate, it's up to the author to make such an intent perfectly clear.). "*water always writes in *plural" is one of the more cleanly edited pieces, but even it offers such new words to the language as "cojole," "deferance," and "Alzeheimers" and refers to the TV show Dobbie Gillis. "The Straight Path" is the most sorely in need of an editor--the harsher the better--to strike out its many infelicitous tropes and sentences. In addition to a plethora of run-on sentences and comma splices we are treated to such metaphors as "And so, now, like a timed release capsule, E's information had achieved maturity, split its skin and flowered into an answer." It is better not to ponder that too long, just as it is advisable to hurry by such chalk-scraping-on-blackboard moments as "Suicide smiles appeciatively and frowns disconsolately, simultaneously." Hey, leave some adverbs for the rest of us!

Am I harping on this? Yes, and with good reason. These hypertexts are offered to the world as works of art, not as e-mail, or chat, or mailing lists, so all the things that don't count there--spelling, grammar, giving readers the impression that you just might have re-read your work a couple of times before sending it forth into the world--have to count. Otherwise the work looks amateurish, no matter how high the artists' aspirations and how subtle their coding, and literate readers will treat it accordingly. At some level they will tune it out, just as they would a singer who constantly comes in a half-step low or a beat too late. Fortunately, while the Web taketh away with one hand, it giveth with the other. All the professionals in the editing and publishing process--the people whom good writers are well aware they need--may get excised when authors have such direct access to publication, and sloppy work will be the result; on the other hand, that same direct access allows--requires, I would argue--that authors proof and revise their work after initial publication.

As of this writing I do not know the status of any future contests at either Salt Hill or the New York University Press. This year has already seen the second awarding of trAce/Alt-X prize as well as the Electronic Literature Organization's first award for new media work. At a later point I hope to discuss some of these more recent awardees and runners-up, as well as other contests I have yet to learn about or that have yet to be created. In the mean time, read "Kokura," wander through The Unknown, consider the nature of narrative with "*water always writes in *plural."