If I were to call the magazine editor for whom I have written for the last five years a buffoon, I'd be complimenting him. The magazine he works for basically is in the business of selling biodegradable toilet paper and is contributed to by writers whose credentials consist of possessing a driver's license. It is not their fault, however, that they consider themselves writers—the editors who accept their material and pay them have helped foster that delusion. Yet it is damned well this buffoon's fault that he considers himself an editor. To paraphrase the great playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, the difference between who this guy is and who he thinks he is is embarrassingly large. As the ancient Buddhist koan goes: If an editor cannot identify a misplaced modifier and in fact introduces them into writers' copy, is he in fact an editor? His business cards confirm this fallacy, yet his magazine gives the lie to it in every issue, in nearly every sentence, in fact.
I have offered on various occasions to copyedit the magazine, but since the stories are not so much as proofread (or if they are, typos are apparently part of the magazine's editorial guidelines), I understand why my offer was turned down. I do not, however, understand how a guy masquerading as an editor, a guy who has repeatedly lied to me, who has failed on numerous occasions to pay me in anything vaguely resembling a timely manner, who has injected second-person "edits" into first-person narratives, who, basically, is completely out of his depths and who is an embarrassment to the legacy of the founders of the magazine and to the various editors who have preceded him can repeatedly reject my columns on the grounds that they do not feature enough of a particular kind of travel, though my columns were not conceived of, pitched, accepted or written for the last nine years with that kind of travel in mind (I'm being coy because even though he cannot edit, I suspect he may be able to read, or at least know someone who knows someone who can). I write an outdoor adventure column, and yet the buffoon has rejected two of my adventure columns without having read them because they were too adventurous. By this point in this blog, readers are probably hip to the idea that the buffoon and I will not be exchanging holiday cards, nor do I plan to continue to write for the guy. But that doesn't mean that I will likely become any less angry!
