April 12th, 2021 - Separation
Dear TNY,
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Let’s take a perfectly decent (not good) premise and turn that into a summarized short story that should have been a shitty novel that I would never read but would be on a bestseller’s list (read: rogue’s gallery of formulaic drivel); let’s keep going and make that a story in which we grow closer to exactly zero of the characters because they only exist as finger-puppets for the mediocre plot and/or author’s desire for them and not figures of their own agency, and finally we can make sure none of the scenes presented have the capability of creating actual feels, yet all the scenes left out or summarized hold all the true empathy away from us, the reader, such that an errant fart would distract us from this skidmark of a tale.
Can we do that?
Excellent.
We did that.
And, I know, I normally don’t look at the little blurb below the story. Seems unfair. Seems like it would taint the read. Maybe it did, I don’t know. But I saw that the author was actually part of your fucking TNY editorial staff? For fuck’s sake. It’s like you write these fucking letters for me. You know what NO author should be able to live with? That they were selected because of their connections and not the work, like this pile of loose stool was. But good on you. Pass off more inconsequential, non-empathetic, lackluster, MFA-voiced splooge! Change the world one dumbed-down reader at a time! Invest in our mediocrity! Create a level of “literature” akin to See Dick Run!
Yay literature! Winning!
Fuck my face. I’ll keep it short.
Nick
P.S. There is a part of me that finds it delicious that the author has likely read some of these letters from times past (that’s not just my ego, motherfuckers; I watch my IPs and I get hella hits from Conde Nast feeds!). And if so, BIG kudos for bravery! Very nice! High five!
