June 24th, 2019 - Back Then

Dear TNY,

So, I just skimmed “Back Then”.  I did read the first three pages, but definitely skimmed the rest. 

I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to write you guys about summary vs scene.  It’s really not getting through, though.  You don’t seem to get it.  A story like this, which is almost completely devoid of scene, is like someone telling a really, really boring story at a dinner party where, instead of listening, you imagine how you could kill yourself with items in and around the house.  I say almost devoid because there were less than ten lines of dialog, but they were stuffed into the summary parts so even they seemed like summary.  Like, it doesn’t fucking work.  Tell the author to write a fucking novel and make this pile of summary trash into a bunch of scenes.  Or throw this version of the story in the trash.  Because this is a waste of our time as readers of your “prestigious” magazine. 

I do want to thank you, though, for insisting on publishing so many terrible stories.  See, if everything you printed was breathtaking, I’d believe that I didn’t know anything about literature or storytelling or writing or editing because your name, TNY, is synonymous with great writing.  But what you’ve shown me is that morons run almost everything in the world and that any person, “qualified” or not, can be an expert if they put the work in, study, and maintain a high level of passion for that subject.  So I want to thank you for a level of confidence in the literary arts that I am continuing to develop while simultaneously you continue to show me that it doesn’t take any qualification, knowledge, expertise, wisdom, and/or passion to be in the literature business these days and that it’s acceptable, in fact, to run a magazine’s reputation into the ground and destroy a fucking artform all at the expense of an ego.  I believe wholeheartedly that you will continue down this path of narcissism, just like our angry, orange, moronic “president”, and the world will eventually leave you behind, where you’ll be stroking your reflection in the mirror, a slight smile on your face, alone, in a house covered in dust, without a care in the world for the location of the doorknob.

Fuck you, right where the poop comes from.

Nick