Tim.
i am very sorry.
I was in a bit of a mood for the last few days, surfing the latest wave of
composition and got too uptight and carried away with myself.
Living in the imagination, i had cast myself as some poor victim and you the
wholly ficticious bogey-man.
I said some harsh things and was in the wrong, so sorry.
I am only human, you are only human and we both love poetry (whatever that
is, as charlie windsor said about love) and i have got over myself now. i
cannot claim to be an outsider or poor victim anymore as i have spent the
last two years sharpening the stilleto in public spaces, pretty much seeing
it as a continuation of my official learning and it's obvious to even me now
that i am not the type of lout most would fancy getting in a row with n the
cobbles of cyberspace.
In my defense, all i can say is, this online lark, is wholly brand new and i
am very lucky to be just coming into the zone of eloquence and understanding
exactly how the biz works (vis a vis editors sniffing round you, or boxing
you off as an untouchable) - eight years after falling into the game, and by
pure fluke of history, don't have to go through what Cobbing and the radz
did pre-net, because now - as i know - there is no difference between self
publishing with someone like Xlibris or youwriteon.com (which gives 60%
royalties, less production costs (which they do not state) which is three
and four times as much as the old days) and Salt.
I know as i recently got four Salt titles (including Poetry Wars) and one by
an Indian writer in Glasgow, Leela Soma, who published with youwriteon.com,
a title called Twice Born, and there is zero difference in the actual
product, both printed on the same machine at Lightning Source. Salt authors
(if it's industry standard) on 12-15% and Soma on 60% less production costs
and available from the exact same online places like Amazon and Waterstones.
So, there is no twenty years in the shed stapling pamphlets and the drip
drip drip of knawing unfairness in knowing there is an old bores network
.01% fluke into, when someone who writes their earliest juvenelia in Oxo
gets feted by their common room pals, a la Motion and Morrison as the
saviours of British verse - just because they won some tin pot prize as an
undergraduate.
So, sorry, Tim, no hard feelings, i am a dickhead, what can i say, an arty
waffler, dreamer and unfortunately as you say, in my issues, i unfairly cast
you as some figure to duel with on some pretty tame and slight pretext. Sorry.
~
I don't think we need moderating Sally, we are all adults here, we just need
to be honest about our mistakes. If we act like a moron, just say, oops,
sorry i was an idiot for a few minutes.
As Croggon said, online is different, we cannot expect the ettiquette of the
old one-way days to apply, as we are effectively making the rules up as we
go along, and there are two ways of looking at it.
A wild west heady time, history being made as we speak, and which the next
generation will sort out into who was who and what was happening, or as a
social network gaffe aside from the serious biz which happens only in the
one way print mode of yesteryear.
My own thinking, because i started in 2001, straight after deciding to try
my hand at the game falling into third level and couldn't have planned it
better coz i cut out the years in cafes malarky - the year i started at edge
hill university and which was the intake that they started all work
submitted via e mail - all this means that my own experience has
conditioned me to think, (and from the beginning) that everyting weas going
to migrate online, and it was just a question of when, and i think now we
are there, like mobile phones went ubiquitous in 1999 or so, that one
christmas the price was lowered and now, if you aint got a phone, you are
clearly mntally ill.
So, sorry for being a windy git, i am just a harmless artist and so sorry tim.
thanks very much.
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