I haven't done a corner in a bit but this week requires one for two reasons: last week's edition and a report this week.
Last week was our summer fiction read. We got a record number of e-mails, clearly the most of any our five summer fiction reads.
Some enjoyed a story or many of the stories or all of the stories and, if there's time, I'll note some of that. However, at least 30% of the e-mails were from people who loathed it. Loathed, hated, detested.
After Mike revealed (Monday) that Ava and C.I. really didn't work on the issue, a fresh wave of anger came in insisting that was why the edition "sucked" (a popular term but used 35 times in a single e-mail by regular reader Jonas).
Why did the edition "suck"?
It may have sucked, it may not. The reality is that we were supposed to have done it two weeks ago and were actually ready. (Jim's June 14th note: "As the never ending writing edition produced one failure that couldn't be saved after another -- and as Ava and C.I. pointed out that this was supposed to be our summer fiction edition . . . . Our summer fiction edition? Yeah. But we were convinced that there was too much news needing coverage.") That included Ava and C.I. planning to write of the Letterman controversy in a fictional manner to fit the theme.
That didn't happen. And as was noted, Ava and C.I. were ticked off. They did not, however, boycott last week's edition as a number of readers seem to feel.
This is probably a good time to note this week's report. It's by Dallas, Dona, Isaiah and Jess. (Alphabetical order, "A Rucka, a Batwoman, a Zeus and a Heatwave.") This is the one we told you was coming back in May, that there would be travel for. Dallas remained in Dallas, Texas the others traveled to Dallas. (All flew to C.I.'s house here in California Saturday night.) [Added by Ty 6-29-09, drive-bys are asking when were they told about the planned feature? Repeatedly including in a solo piece Jim wrote entitled "Jim's World."]
As most readers know, C.I. and Ava (of this site and C.I., of course, also does The Common Ills) and Elaine (of Like Maria Said Paz) are past ready to end online life. C.I. hoped to shut things down right after the 2008 election. Because Stan wanted to start a site but didn't want to be starting it just as everyone else was closing down, C.I. agreed to go for another six months. Elaine has said she shuts down when The Common Ills goes dark, C.I. is only agreeing to six months at a time. April ended the first six months renewal and C.I.'s question here was what were we going to do that would justify continuing? Were we going to do anything new?
In March and April, we were discussing that. At some point, Dallas mentioned that Greg Rucka was coming to his area (Dallas, Texas) for a signing. It meant nothing to Jim, who was talking with Dallas on the phone about other issues, but he mentioned it to Jess, Dona and myself. Like Jim, I drew a blank.
Jess and Dona knew his work. They were big fans. Greg Rucka writes in many formats but, among those formats is comic books, and Jess and Dona knew his Daredevil and Wonder Woman work. Jess was on the phone with Ava (Ava's on the road with C.I., Kat and Wally each week speaking out against the illegal war) and she said, "Uh, ask Dona about her secret stash." Jess did and Dona pulled out every Greg Rucka Wonder Woman issue.
He did, she showed it, they rushed to phone Dallas who told him he'd mentioned it to Isaiah who'd decided to attend. So they were all going to attend and they thought, "We could write about this."
Dona and Jess presented that over a Saturday dinner here (present were Kat, Jim, Dona, Jess, Ava, C.I., Betty, Betty's kids and myself) and it quickly became, "Why don't we cover comics?"
The reason TV is covered every week is because Jim fought for it. There wasn't a lot of interest that first weekend and Ava and C.I. were dead set against it. But Jim insisted that college students logged a lot of TV hours and we had to cover it if we were going to be serving a college audience. That was our original goal. And originally, we wrote the TV pieces as a group effort but, by week three or four, we'd turned it over to Ava and C.I. So why didn't we cover comics?
Anytime we'd done any feature article that was about or even just mentioned comics, we got positive e-mails from regular readers.
And that soon became, "Okay, this is one thing we can do that we haven't been doing."
And the plan was that we'd begin to increase our comic book coverage and that would lead up to this week's article.
This factors into the summer read. It was supposed to be two weeks ago. Due to events in the news cycle, Jim insisted we couldn't do a summer fiction read. He said too much was going on which led to a loud argument of how things are always going on and that point is raised every week. But Jim was adamant and stuck to it. For various reasons, last week wasn't good for the summer read. And, due to the article that Dona, Jess, Dallas and Isaiah had planned for this week, the summer read really shouldn't be done now because it could be confusing (I'll come back to confusing) for readers if it ran in the fiction edition. ("Wait, did this really happen, or was it a short story?")
Jim was saying it would take place in July and no way on that. There are too many who believe it should come early in June (too many readers) and they start writing in May of each year. If we put it off to July, then I was going to need a lot of help with the e-mails. (E-mail address is thirdestatesundayreview@yahoo.com.)
Last Sunday, there was no understanding or agreement that it was going to be the summer fiction read. Jim announced that in the pitch session we do before we start writing. (The pitch session may be preceded by a pre-pitch session involving just Third. The pitch session proper includes all participating in the writing via conference call.)
Right away, Ava and C.I. hit the roof. They pointed out that no one had thought about it all week so there were no prepared ideas coming in and that idea prepared for the week before may be stale now or the enthusiasm gone. Most importantly, next week (that would be today), the feature article by Isaiah, Dallas, Jess and Dona would run and we'd done nothing to prepare for it.
That was a point they'd regularly brought up in the last weeks. One week, Isaiah worked with us all night/morning for a feature we were supposed to do but that Jim decided we wouldn't because there wasn't time. That feature was on comics and was part of our new efforts to highlight comics.
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This blocked off section is added by Ty 6-29-09 because drive-bys are saying, "What? I missed it?"
And ran May 17th, "Where is the love?" -- Mike noted it was junked from the May 10th edition where it was supposed to run and where it would fit and he notes Ava and C.I. were furious because Isaiah had worked with us all night solely for that future and he covers Jim's response the next day -- and Jim explains in his May 17th note that this is the article. C.I. was still bothered enough by it to write about it on May 11th:
On not being in the mood yesterday, Mike's already called and you can read his site tonight. He's going to write about some of the issues during the latest edition and my problem was and is, if people are preparing a report and we need to do a rollout, we do one. There was a short feature that was either completed or would have taken two seconds to complete that got killed and may run next week but it is part of a rollout for a feature Dona, Jess, Isaiah and Dallas will be writing next month. It's also part of a new focus we'll be doing at Third. I'm not mad at anyone (including Jim) but I did think it was incredibly rude to have had Isaiah participating ALL NIGHT during the writing edition when the only reason he was participating was for the feature that got killed. (Isaiah asked that his name not be listed in Jim's note to the readers, lest anyone think he's been forgotten.) On Ava and my end, we were talking to friends working on Fringe when they mentioned something that we worked into one sentence and did so because it was part of what we thought was the rollout for the upcoming article and for part of Third's new focus. It's a funny line so it's fine that's it's still in there but it was supposed to be part of a focus that didn't happen. Mike'll go into this at length tonight. He didn't ask (maybe because he knew) so I'll note this here. We're going through next November. We may go past that, but we made the decision to go through November. Elaine, Ava and I want to bail, we're tired of it. Others wanted to continue so we'll do another six months or so. My one request was that, for Third, we think of one thing we're not doing that we could be doing to make it worth six more months. I tossed that out two weeks ago and Dona, Ty and Jess came up with an emphasis which I think is a good one (and has been hugely popular the other times we've accidentally stumbled upon it). That new thing being brought in is part of the story Dona, Jess, Dallas and Isaiah will be doing. And three of them will have to fly somewhere for this story. I think it's an interesting story, I think it's a new element, I'm looking foward to seeing the photos and reading the copy.
That's what you missed.
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We have done that here but not in the way that we wanted.
Last week's most popular feature was, as always, Ava and C.I. ("TV: Fiction"). The next four most popular were:
The curse
Hey there! Marilyn Monroe is using Twitter.
Clooney's Dark Secrets
Summer reads
The Clooney short story resulted in some strange e-mails. But the final of the four ("Summer reads") was what Ava and C.I. devoted their time to.
They did not work on the writing of any of the short stories. They were sounding boards and offered feedback that was utilized. But they focused on "Summer reads."
That's the article on comic books.
And Ava and C.I. made it clear last weekend -- when Jim sprung the, "We're doing the short story edition this week!" -- that something on comics, anything on comics, needed to be written. It had to be because we'd done very little to lead into the article that runs here despite the fact that every week we were supposed to be doing something.
Ava and C.I. phoned a friend who has a comics store and got him to open it at ten at night. They went over and bought over $300 worth of new comics. They spent the night reading through all of those comics to select ten out that were worth highlighting. They then brought the ten to the rest of us before we started writing. No Hero made the top ten list and is Mike's personal favorite. We were all supposed to be reading at least one comic in the last months and Mike is the only one who did. He focused on No Hero.
When Ava and C.I. pitched the ten, they explained nine titles and turned over to Mike for No Hero.
We then selected five from the ten and wrote up our feature (with Ava and C.I. working on it and, as I remember it, their big contribution was noting the S&M in a comic -- paddling of a male -- and insisting that The Infinite Horizon come after it because it featured a shirtless male and would work well with that -- e-mails prove they were right).
They were not boycotting. They were working very hard to do what was supposed to be happening every week.
Mike's been very vocal about the failure to do what we'd planned as has Stan and so, in an effort to raise the profile community wide on comics, they proposed comics for the Tuesday night theme posts: "DMZ: The Hidden War," "gordon brown, wonder woman," "Naoki Urasawa's Monster," "Re-Gifters," "G.B. Trudeau Talk to the Hand!," "Heroes Volume Two," "Mark Evanier's Mad Art" and "Warren Ellis' No Hero, ACLU."
If there was a mistake, in my opinion, about last week's edition in terms of the writing, it was that we all participated in "Summer reads." That should have just been Ava, C.I. and Mike. Their presentation of the ten was better than the article produced and that will happen when people writing don't know what they're writing about (one of the fingers I'm pointing is pointing at me). They were not boycotting the edition, Ava and C.I., they were shopping for comics, then reading all of those comics and then doing the presentation (with Mike grabbing No Hero).
If you didn't like the short stories offered last week, you didn't like them. I haven't argued with any regular reader who e-mailed to say that (and about 30% of the e-mails from regular readers loathed last week's short stories). Some of you enjoyed them (or at least wrote that you did).
I don't think it was our strongest and I think that's due to a number of reasons including that we didn't have C.I. and Ava helping. Had C.I. and Ava helped, you would have, for example, had a humorous short story. Those have always been popular in the past. We came close to that with Clooney and Jess and Rebecca were proposing a humorous short story that we didn't have time for.
Some things work on a personal level. (The short story "The literary ranter" is based on someone Jim, Dona, Jess, Ava and I had in our classes back in New York. And that person is captured perfectly.) Some things work as a writing exercise. Possibly doing writing exercises hurt the quality? If so, that's the readers' fault because the biggest complaint about previous fiction editions has tended to be that it was all first person narratives.
The Clooney short story resulted in e-mails which resulted in angry e-mails from me. These weren't regular readers and they had this idea that we were saying George Clooney really did all of that. I would reply asking them what world they lived in where they couldn't surf around the site to see that it was a fiction edition and that Clooney wasn't a mutant and his father wasn't a numbat?
Replies revealed that these readers were outside of the United States, living in countries where English wasn't the primary language and they'd apparently picked up the short story from a feed on George Clooney and then used an online free translation service to translate the article into their own languages.
Clearly lost in translation.
I don't apologize for the anger in my replies because if you're reading something written in a language you don't understand, don't start an e-mail by shouting and accusing people of things. That's basic. I don't read Spanish and if I stumbled across a Spanish site and was offended by a mechanical translation (this assumes I didn't ask Ava or C.I. to translate it for me -- they both speak and read Spanish), I wouldn't fire off an angry e-mail accusing people of things. I'd write, "I'm not following this, is it a language issue?" Or I'd not write at all.
If anyone's offended (I exchanged repeated e-mails with about thirty people on this last week), too bad.
I found the e-mails offensive. If it's not clear, these were written by devoted Clooney fans. He's got a crazy bunch of fans.
To those regular readers who enjoyed the short stories, thank you. To those who didn't, I'm not going to argue with you. I don't think it was our strongest and I've outlined some of the reasons for that above. I do not, however, believe we failed because Ava and C.I. weren't participating in the group writing per se. They add a great deal and I don't deny that and I readily admit that they would have ensured we had a very funny short story (as we usually do) -- either by siding with Rebecca and Jess or by proposing another topic. But it was weak not because they didn't help but because it was supposed to take place the week before.
Ava and C.I. rightly noted, when Jim declared "Short story edition!," that some ideas might be stale now and that was true because people came in the week prior all excited. Cedric and Wally had a sci-fi idea that week, they really weren't in the mood to pitch it because it had cooled off for them. Betty worked like crazy and give her and Jess credit for last week being done at all. They worked like crazy asking questions about plot and keeping spirits up. But, to use Betty as an example, even she wasn't keen on an idea she had for the originally scheduled summer read. She couldn't get the enthusiasm back up for that. But she did come up with many ideas and keep us focused.
One positive note in the e-mails on the summer read edition was the illustrations. People enjoyed them. (Even the Clooney fan club enjoyed their Clooney drawing. Although some wrongly wrote that it was a "photo.") They really were great and we thank Betty's kids, Isaiah, Kat, Wally and C.I. for the work they did. Some readers (such as Noah) who were less than thrilled with the writing, felt that was due to our increased visuals and that "next year, I know you'll nail it." Noah, if we're still publishing next year, we'll see but I appreciate your faith in us.