At the risk of getting into trouble (again) with this community, I think it only fair to ask the question that no one has yet bothered to posit.

What were the editors doing?

Well, that's a huge question. Every editor has his or her way of doing things and the editor's chair is a hydra in the publishing world, whether mainstream or niche. An editor in chief lords it over all the other editors on his or her staff and writers cower at the thought of being "called into" that person's office because God only knows what they've done to garner such attention - it could be good or bad.

I can speak only to my way of operating, and it has put me in a position of losing chairs and in cases resigning from them. A hundred years ago, when I first started in this business, I worked with Richard Valley on Scarlet Street. He was the editor, I was the publisher. Richard called me one day to say that an article that had been submitted had seemed very familiar to him and he started searching his vast library for other pieces on the particular subject. Sure enough, in a very famous book on a very famous auteur, Rich found what he was looking for. Two complete paragraphs, copied word for word into this "author's" feature article.

This was fairly early on in our publishing days. Needless to say, the writer was contacted, informed of the discovery and told the article would not be running. That person also learned that we would no longer be interested in anything they had to present. From that day to this, every article I receive is vetted. One does the best that one can. I hope nothing has slipped by me over the years, but really, there's no way to know for sure.

That having been said, in this digital age, dropping a paragraph from a review into a search engine is a simple task and search results are almost instantaneous. So why was this woman's stuff accepted at face value? Many of my writers may not like it, but they all get dropped into a search engine. I don't care who they are. Call me an OCD case, but I check everybody and if it's a writer I've never worked with in the past, I have spent the money at http://www.ithenticate.com/. It's not fool proof. Nothing is. But finding internet reviews is this things meat. And if something gets past me, then shame on me for missing it - but it's on me and no one else. The buck lands on and stops at the editor's chair - like it or not.

So, my point is, shame on Lianne for doing this in the first place. We women in horror have a hard enough time existing and being taken seriously in a predominantly male "club" - let alone having our work considered worthwhile - but shame on the editors as well, who ran her stuff without doing their jobs. What a person looks like or who that person is dating has nothing to do with whether or not they can conceive an original thought and actually get it down on paper in a coherent manner.

Checking the article after the fact proves two things - 1) the argument that it takes too long to check every piece is a load of hooey - as proven by how quickly the theft was proven when the search was done properly and 2)  had this been done in the first place, we wouldn't be having this discussion today.

Go ahead, nail me to the cross. That's my two cents.

Jessie Lilley
Editor-In-Chief, Mondo Cult


Last Edited By: JessieLilley Jul 17 13 11:36 AM. Edited 1 times.