Stoopid Sub Editors (1 Viewer)

La La

i drink your milkshake
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JOURNALIST GILES COREN recently wrote a book review for the Times of London in which he dismissed a certain work as a literary stunt. Part of his review ran as follows:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Very clever. All 26 letters of the alphabet in a 35-letter sentence.

But a subeditor changed the "the" to an "a". Read Coren's calm, measured response to the alteration and subsequent error



Monday August 19, 2002
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. how fucking difficult is that? it's the sentence that bestrides the fucking book i reviewed for you. it is the sentence i wrote first in my fucking review. it is 35 fucking letters long, which is why i wrote that it was. and so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to "jumps over A lazy dog" can you fucking count? can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? so it looks as if i can't count, and the cunting author of the book, poor mr dunn, cannot count. the whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as i fucking wrote it. and that it is exactly 33 letters long. why do you meddle. what do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart-arsery? why do you change things you do not understand without consulting. why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all. jack shit.

that is as bad as editing can be. fuck, i hope you're proud. it will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine.

never ever ask me to write something for you. and don't pay me. i'd rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore's only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal - my integrity would be less compromised.

jesus fucking wept i don't know what else to say."


ha. brilliant. next time a sub fucks with one of my stories i'll simply copy and paste.....|..| :)
 
and proof that there really is no need for Copy Subs at all.....

"I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod uesdnatnrd waht I was rdeniag. The phaonemneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. aodccring to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dnsoe't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the hmuan mnid deos not raed ervery lteter by istief, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azmanig huh ? Yaeh and I awlyas tghouht slpeling was ipmorantt."
 
La La said:
JOURNALIST GILES COREN recently wrote a book review for the Times of London in which he dismissed a certain work as a literary stunt. Part of his review ran as follows:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Very clever. All 26 letters of the alphabet in a 35-letter sentence.

But a subeditor changed the "the" to an "a". Read Coren's calm, measured response to the alteration and subsequent error



Monday August 19, 2002
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. how fucking difficult is that? it's the sentence that bestrides the fucking book i reviewed for you. it is the sentence i wrote first in my fucking review. it is 35 fucking letters long, which is why i wrote that it was. and so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to "jumps over A lazy dog" can you fucking count? can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? so it looks as if i can't count, and the cunting author of the book, poor mr dunn, cannot count. the whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as i fucking wrote it. and that it is exactly 33 letters long. why do you meddle. what do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart-arsery? why do you change things you do not understand without consulting. why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all. jack shit.

that is as bad as editing can be. fuck, i hope you're proud. it will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine.

never ever ask me to write something for you. and don't pay me. i'd rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore's only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal - my integrity would be less compromised.

jesus fucking wept i don't know what else to say."


ha. brilliant. next time a sub fucks with one of my stories i'll simply copy and paste.....|..| :)

£400 for a book review? Holy shit. On what planet does that happen?
 
that's what i thought.......we were all talking about that the other day. i've never heard of a freelancer getting that much, especially not for a book review. some papers pay more by the word than others, but even so........

i'm a firm believer in the power of freelance, get whatever you can, i say!
 
La La said:
that's what i thought.......we were all talking about that the other day. i've never heard of a freelancer getting that much, especially not for a book review. some papers pay more by the word than others, but even so........

i'm a firm believer in the power of freelance, get whatever you can, i say!

I'm only getting started freelancing, and while it's great fun to come up with ideas and write about stuff, I try not to think about the fact that I could never afford to do this for a living. It's too bad, too, 'cause I think I'd really enjoy it.

Apparently, some US website for freelancers said something like, "You can expect to get about a dollar a word". I assume this means "once you are fairly well-known" but still! What! A dollar! A! Word! I can't imagine anyone gets that here. Even poor John Banville said that he made more as a school teacher than he EVER has from writing. Nutso stuff.

I'm thinking I might try to write some chicklit under a fake name just to fund the writing I want to do....It's that or the STREETS, it seems.
 
jane said:
I'm only getting started freelancing, and while it's great fun to come up with ideas and write about stuff, I try not to think about the fact that I could never afford to do this for a living. It's too bad, too, 'cause I think I'd really enjoy it.

Apparently, some US website for freelancers said something like, "You can expect to get about a dollar a word". I assume this means "once you are fairly well-known" but still! What! A dollar! A! Word! I can't imagine anyone gets that here. Even poor John Banville said that he made more as a school teacher than he EVER has from writing. Nutso stuff.

I'm thinking I might try to write some chicklit under a fake name just to fund the writing I want to do....It's that or the STREETS, it seems.

i never saw myself writing for an irish paper, but there's so much stuff happening here that i could so easily write about and sell to the media back in ireland, so i've been thinking about getting on that buzz for a while.
that american website; did it happen to be called featurewell.com? it's a rather well known site, heaps of stories get pulled off it all the time. when we're short we pull one off that site and i think it does pay pretty well.
the paper i work for pays a freelance rate of HK$2.50 a word which is about 25cents euro, but if you knock out 2000 words thats 500 euro....not bad i say!

and regarding chicklit vs the street. hmmm, its a toughie. chicklit is so overdone. i want my first novel to be something like Lord of the Flies. dream on lala, dream on.......
 
Igor said:
Priceless!!:D

i know, isnt it? we were crying with laughter in the office when we saw that last line. best closing line ever, in my opinion. i wish i could have been the one to write it.
 
jane said:
£400 for a book review? Holy shit. On what planet does that happen?
maybe it was one of those monster-sized new york review of books-type reviews.

oh, also, i hope that the sub was taken out and swiftly dispatched with a bolt in the back of the head.
 
La La said:
i never saw myself writing for an irish paper, but there's so much stuff happening here that i could so easily write about and sell to the media back in ireland, so i've been thinking about getting on that buzz for a while.
that american website; did it happen to be called featurewell.com? it's a rather well known site, heaps of stories get pulled off it all the time. when we're short we pull one off that site and i think it does pay pretty well.
the paper i work for pays a freelance rate of HK$2.50 a word which is about 25cents euro, but if you knock out 2000 words thats 500 euro....not bad i say!

and regarding chicklit vs the street. hmmm, its a toughie. chicklit is so overdone. i want my first novel to be something like Lord of the Flies. dream on lala, dream on.......

Personally, I have NO problem with writing something under a different name if it would make me financially healthy enough to do the things I want to do. But I'm sure that it's harder than it seems to actually get one of those things published and make any money off it, so it's probably more trouble than it's worth.

My first novel is...still on chapter bloody five. But it's a mystery of sorts, which is fun to write, and I'm not all that concerned about selling it, and I am not approaching anyone about it until it's in a more workable state. If ever.

Can't remember what the US website is...But 500 euro for a feature somewhere? Might have to look into that...
 
Crazy money, yeah, but Coren is very well known and, speaking of novels, his first one just came out.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0224074997/qid=1129209644/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-3989541-9745500?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

I can tell you one thing: You're right, Jane. Hardly anybody in this town is being paid that much for book reviews or any kind of feature. It's not so long ago that one of the best selling magazines in this country was paying 6 pence a word and when I started out I considered 10 pence a good rate.

I'm earning all my cash from freelancing at the moment which is, yeah, fun, but sometimes just fucking terrifying.

I'm still on bloody chapter four, by the way...
 
Psychotic no 2 said:
Hmmm, yes, but wouldn't that entail *actually* doing some writing?

Good point. We could always divide up the work. A chapter each a month until our patchwork masterpiece is complete? It'll be us getting savaged in the Guardian and the Independent this time next year. No question.
 

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