by Patrick Malone
In his editorial this month, David waxes lyrical, nay even philosophical about the importance of grammatical correctness in sending in "Teemings" submissions. As an adjunct to this, and because some people may be curious, I thought I should also give a little insight into how we put this rough beast together.
Submissions are sent in by you, the loyal readers and writers. Most times they're sent in to both of us. Sometimes they're sent to just one of us and we have to throw e-mails back and forth to each other to sort out who got what. We read every single one except for the poetry which, for the most part we can't make heads or tails out of, both of us being uncultured buffoons.
After we've read each piece and picked ourselves off the floor from incredulous laughter at what someone had the temerity to submit, we dust ourselves off, tell ourselves "Okay, maybe it wasn't that bad" (the baby/bathwater ratio currently running about 95 / 5), usually decide to run it and set your piece on the publishing schedule.
This is where David's part really comes in and why he gets so snippy. David does all the copy editing, and he has to make your piece conforms to the rules of Strunk and White, Robert's Rules of Order, and insure that it doesn't fall into the oh-so-common error of using language that calls some Lovecraftian formula for invoking ancient Gods. This is much more difficult than it sounds and does take a lot of time and effort, not to mention rigorous application of the modified Bible Code.
Once he finishes that, he sends them onto me. My part in this whole charade is generally to keep track of deadlines, e-mail authors to let them know we'll be running their piece, set up the HTML, and generally whine, "C'mon, people, can't we please get this stuff together on time!" I'm also in charge of the cheese dip.
I actually have the easier job.
So, if we ask you to show a little mercy and proofread yourself, it's only because we're proud of what we've accomplished here in these few issues. We're committed to presenting you with the best of what the Teeming Millions have to offer. It just makes it much easier on us if half the job is done by you, gentle readers and writers, beforehand.
In this spirit also, we're proud to announce that Troy Smith (Chef Troy) will be joining our editorial staff with the next issue helping David out with the proofreading and editorial duties. We wish him luck in this new position, knowing full well that, in some ways, he'll never know what hit him.