July 28th, 2008
How low? One of the free houses ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition gave away is being foreclosed on.
But maybe the government can bail them out, too!
0 commentsOn Writing
July 28th, 2008
There are few things in the world as silly as a pretentious writer. Man is a vain animal, but writers have their own special sort of vanity. For exhibit 1,116, I submit this newspaper writer’s tirade against a copy editor for removing an indefinite article–an “a”–from his copy. Here’s a taste:
I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn’t going to happen anymore, so I’m really hoping it wasn’t you that fucked up my review on saturday.
It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.
You probably think it couldn’t get any worse, but it does. (And not just because the tirade is being performed in public.)
What few readers–and sadly, few writers–seem to understand is that while writing is a solitary act, publishing is not. Publishing is a group effort. Someone writes the piece. Someone else lays it out. Some other worker finds art to accompany it. Another person works the code to post it online. A whole army of people lug the papers to the news stands so that the public can purchase them. The writer does the most work in the production, and gets nearly all of the credit, but there’s a huge apparatus helping to make the publication of his work possible.
Look, every working writer gets a bad edit from time to time. Editors can sometimes make your copy less elegant and even insert mistakes. But they can also vastly improve your work. And I don’t know any writer who hasn’t found himself on both sides of the equation.
But when an editor subtracts value, to go after them in public, acting as though they were making happy-to-glad changes to Shakespeare is ridiculous and betrays a lack of understanding as to what a writer’s job entails: a large part of which is enduring edits, even those which you may not like.
0 commentsDept. of Shoot Yourself Now
July 28th, 2008
Via Galley Friend B.W. comes this amazing stat on home prices in Detroit. Don’t click just yet.
First, if I told you that mean home price in 2003 was $97,850, what would you guess mean home price in Detroit was today?
If you guessed $19,448, you’d be the big winner.
As one of the commenters asks, “How low do house prices have to drop in Detroit before it pays to gut them for their parts?”
0 commentsNews Alert for Galley Friend T.R.!
July 28th, 2008
It’s great to have a blog readership measured by the half-dozens because (a) it frees you up to do nothing but Dark Knight for a week month year while; and (b) it allows you to do items for individual readers.
So this is for T.R.: Pushing Daisies is doing a Wonderfalls crossover episode. Rock on.
0 commentsThe Internet
July 28th, 2008
So I guess we don’t need newspapers anymore.
0 commentsThe Other Galley Slaves
July 28th, 2008
0 comments
Cue Lefty Dark Knight Backlash
July 25th, 2008
0 comments
The Downside of Dark Knight
July 24th, 2008
Studios are going to continue throwing money at comic-book projects, and probably more indiscriminately than before, even. Witness this depressing story about a Rob Liefeld book which has been optioned before it’s even been published.
Couldn’t get worse, right? Wrong. The screenwriters attached are writers for Ryan Seacrest’s LA radio show.
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