One of the things they tell you in the writing community is “Good, nice, professional: you need to be at least two of the three.”
What this means is, the writing community is filled good writers, nice people, and competent workers, but it’s also filled with crappy writers, genuine assholes, and flakey losers. You can get away with being one of the bad things: you can be a so-so writer, but be nice to people and turn things in on time, or you can be an asshole but produce great work in a timely fashion, or you can be good and nice but fail to deliver, and people will forgive most of those things and you will proceed, and succeed.
Douglas Adams is perhaps the best known “flakey, but good and nice” guy. The world’s oldest angry young man, the hardworking Harlan Ellison, was known as “asshole, but good and professional” until he gaffed the Last Dangerous Visions anthology project. I won’t disparage another writer’s work, but as a publisher and anthology editor, I can tell you that I’m much more likely to accommodate an author who I know will deliver than an awesome one I can’t count on – and I can tell you that I’ve heard the same from other publishers of anthologies.
This came up because I just had to essentially back out of a project. You need to roll with the punches on an editor’s comments, but what I just received was a request for a spec rewrite more than four months after the article had been approved, and that after a fairly intensive editorial round. That made me mad – but in a broader sense, I understand how it happened: the editor got feedback on another project and wanted to forestall that happening to my article. But I’d moved on from the project, and am neck deep in edits in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which was supposed to be out last year.
I swallowed my anger, thought carefully about the overall problem, and realized that despite what I perceived as an irregularity of process the editor is just trying to do the best job they can the best way they know how. I further realized the primary reason I couldn’t respond was simply my lack of time. If the request had landed in a dead zone, I’d have gladly have given it a shot.
So I wrote the editor what I hoped was a polite but firm note, emphasizing the problem was essentially my other committments. The editor got back to me promptly and was accommodating. I also discussed the problem with one of my fellow authors, who stepped up with suggestions, and we may bring him on board as a co-author so he can take this article the rest of the way.
I’m always angry, and I easily could have blown my stack and really ticked the editor off. But being nice, and being professional, I helped solve a problem, rather than creating a new one. As to whether my article was good … eh, if it ever gets released, be it authored, co-authored, or just salsa on this blog if rejected … I’ll let you be the judge.
-the Centaur
