I'm a terribly ham-handed designer, and my s erver, Interport, doesn't support imagemaps, believe it or not, but I took this step after receiving one too many comments that the previous homepages were starting to look a little tacky.
One review even called this site "Web Retro." Oh dear.
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To break up all that verbage, I've added cartoon dingbats to each of the stories, except for Fireworks and Soup, for which I can't think of anything suitable.
Ply me with suggestions! The best idea will win a 24" x 36" poster version of this site, sent anywhere in the world.
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But in circumventing traditional publishers, I've also missed having the services of a good fiction editor. The fact is, major publishing houses don't do much editing any more, either. And as a journalist, I know how important an editor is. J.D. Salinger's short stories were terrible before he met up with the New Yorker's fiction editors, and sublime afterwards; Maxwell Perkins reportedly did so much work on F. Scott Fitzgerald's books that he should have been credited as a co-author.
A good editor midwifes a story, shapes it, kicks the writer in the butt, points out gaps and contradictions and self-indulgences the writer never sees. A good editor allows a writer to be more ambitious, knowing she that if she attempts amazing things an d fails, someone will catch her.
That's why I've actually engaged a professional editor to hack through the stories and make them better. After considering about a dozen candidates who replied to an ad with the Editoral Freelancer's Association, I chose one man and one woman. The firs t professionally-edited version of a story, Charlotte's Mirror, will appear on the site July 1st.
