Once again, your selection of winners of the 55 Fiction contest (July 3) is the same old schlock. If you received 863 entries, why did you have to use the same few authors multiple times?
Your editorial blurb claims that “you just can’t dispute the instinctive, irrational glow that quality reading material produces.” It’s too bad you forgot to publish any “quality reading material.” These lame “winning stories” are the same boring, formulaic dreck that’s dished up over and over. Let’s see: There’s the sappy, sentimental “message” story (five of those); the cutesy, stale, gosh-what-a-clever-irony story (seven stories); the unfunny pathetic attempt at humor (three of them); and the ever-popular “Dig this, I’m on LSD” stream-of-consciousness genre (five this time).
Absent this year, however, were a couple of old standbys: the acerbic indictment of some schmuck who once dissed you and now must die horribly; and the clumsy macho story line that you plagiarized from that tattered Hemingway anthology you keep right next to your elephant gun.
No, thank you. If I want a gem of a short story, one that actually entertains me, I’ll stick to succinct literary classics that grab me with brilliant opening lines and hold me spell-bound: “It was a dark and stormy night …” “There once was a man from Nantucket …” Now, there’s some “quality reading material.”
Okay, so maybe I’m having a bad day. “The wind is blowing strong.” “Half naked Pussycat dolls dance in porcelain bathtubs above me.” I’ll get over it. Keep writing!
This article appears in Jul 10-17, 2008.