Sentiments Not Included

I get nothing but terrible submissions from private morons looking to go public with their idiocy. Terrible titles. Terrible grammar. Terrible stories with terrible narration.

This is what it’s like to run a literary magazine. This is where we are at with the current state of the written word. History’s just a dashed-off text that one sent a few months ago, back when one couldn’t even conceive of a time when what one was doing at that exact moment would ever matter. Precision’s lack is handy. The cost of rewriting and editing is apparently a debt that most folks aren’t concerned with taking on. First drafts are the only drafts that I ever get. Plangent and unobtrusive with limited attention to word choice. Diligence and nuanced care have been swapped out for expedience’s lower denominators. Grammar has been handed over to the Artificial Intelligence gods. I’ve now fired my last editor over what she believed was a, “perfectly normal comma.” I told her, “You’re spliced.” And that, as they say, was that.

I get even with strong coffee and fancy, unusual pastries. I placate myself with the tattered books of my past. Stuff that goes like this:

“Let’s have us some low-end scotch around the table here.”

The sound her hand made against the walnut table when she fell. It was like a dropped zither. And her drink ran all over the carpet…