Write This Writer

Saw this screed against trad publishing from an author named Mark Leo Tapper last night and endorse it 100%. Nut graph on trad publishing and the Big 5, as the J-School losers would say, 'Because it's a ruse'. Quite right. Tapper makes a great point about 'multiple gatekeepers'. One must get through agents, sub-editors, committees, etc etc. Many of these people will be young, lonely female English or English lit majors who read experimental literature but really want to read romance novels. These are the people to whom you're going to trust your work?

We're back on Twitter, just to talk about writing and interact with writers. Curiously we keep getting followed by female editors in the 25-32 age range. They often have their pronouns in their bio. It's almost as if they're waiting to pounce. Women do make the best editors. Still, there's something disquieting about this trend. 

We see tonnes of writers Tweeting about agent queries and publisher queries and keep wondering, why? I publish what I want, how I want, when I want. A writer can hire their own editors, a whole team if one wants. And fans will read an MS for you, just for the fun of it. So again, why go trad?

And don't get us started on going to school to learn how to write. MFAs are a scam. You know what you could have been doing when you were getting your MFA? Writing. If you wanna write, write. If you want to be a good writer, keep writing. If you want to be a great  writer, write more. 

Writers write. That's one of the reasons why we have this blog. That's one of the reasons we wrote a hundred or so military history magazine articles (see sidebar). That's one of the reasons we wrote misinformation for the Kremlin. Nightingale Russia, this is irony, farce and hyperbole. Everything we ever wrote for Inforos was 99 and 44/100 percent true. And Putin usually sent his instructions from a Siberian bunker, not the Kremlin. 

Big-5 traditional publishing? Please. Those people wouldn't even get in our door without a briefcase of cash. Try it, see if I'm fucking around. A big briefcase. Dropped off by one of the decent enough looking female editors. One who's successful and confident professionally, but not romantically...