Frustrations of an Editor (or Some of This Shit is So Good it’s Blowing My Mind…)

Editoress?  ;)

Laying out a literary journal is hard work.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you differently.  In fact, editing a literary journal is hard work.  It’s a far cry from the, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do this…?’ that started me down this path.  There are so many questions to ask yourself.  Do I put two small poems on a page?  Does that take away from the significance of each poem?  Is this journal going to be five hundred pages long if I give each tiny poem its own page?  What font should I use?  Shit is getting weird when you are up at three in the morning asking yourself if a particular font looks arrogant.  Then there are photograps to fit and resolution to think about and printing preferences and well, money to spend.

My website, LiteraryMary.com was not originally created to be something taken very seriously.  Mostly, it was created as a middle finger salute to the writingforums I had been using at the time.  All the sudden, we turn around and there are almost five hundred members, a hell of a lot of great writers, great writing and really great people.  I remember when we knew every single person who registered, and I remember that initial feeling of weirdness when people started registering that we didn’t know.

I don’t really know why I’m rambling all this out onto the page except maybe that I have been doing layout for so long my fingers are aching to actually type something.

So the journal comes out January 1st and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit the deadline is stressing me out.  I’ve never worked with a serious deadline.  In reality, my deadlines are all for essays due for school, and on top of all this it’s almost finals time at school.  So all the sudden I’m in a world of important deadlines.  Maybe some things I just said there are contradictory, but that’s how I roll – or so I’m told anyway.

For those of you who don’t know who we are, come visit:

www.LiteraryMary.com

You may be surprised to find out exactly how addictive we are.


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: