This comment, or castigation, seems to have been to be applied to all self-published fiction, and to a lesser extent non-fiction, since sometime around the late nineties. The SmallPowers saga is indeed unedited, and I would hope that it does indeed classify as dreck. Most pulp fiction, by definition, is dreck, and delightfully so. Stories full of tropes and obvious references, to a host of trends and ideas that have filtered into our collective memories, have remained popular throughout the history of publishing. Much to the dismay of pundits and social critics, since the very beginning of publishing. Yet, somehow, this derision has never stopped writers and readers from participating and even wallowing in what they call spurious and ill-conceived twaddle. Trashy romances to the mock-historical hack-n-slash and on to the turgid murder mystery, every one of them has been decried as being of no value and people should just stop reading them. And more importantly, authors should stop writing them. Of publishers, there the castigations seems suspiciously less strident. I would suggest this is due to the fact that most of the critics don’t want to end up unpublished themselves. All too many of them, in my opinion, could not exist without publishers and the tripe that has been published.
This leads back to the first part of the criticism, that being the unedited part. It is important to note that many of the publishers are themselves editors. The overlap is and has been quite large, and so is the overlap into the critics described above. As some of this wrath might be generated by the qualities of the material that a publisher must wade through, and yet, the quality and frequency of trash hurriedly stuffed onto shelves, in hopes of jumping a trending gravy-train, lends one to think some of that is mostly a reaction to being bypassed so effectively. Mark Twain, for example, ended up taking the self-publishing route as a reaction to the refusal of publishers to even consider many of his works. And what had been taken up was brutalised and reworked in such a way as to remove all of the parts he felt were the most important bits. Some of that was the insistence that grammar punctuation rules, as defined by that particular day and period, was, and still is in many ways, nearly a divine commandment. As though the same press that produce holy-books would somehow become defiled by the printing of a simple ain’t or an undashed damn. There also seems to be a trend among the publisher/editor crowd to reduce and remove simple words with the replacement of semicolons and colons. On one hand, as clear evidence of their heavy-hand. And on the other hand, a cost saving effort that, if applied with vigour, could save them from paying the author for mere conjugation. With a book, such methods can reduce the word-count by quite a bit. The length, and thereby pages consumed, is also reduced. Again saving a few coins, here and there. At the expense of clarity and desired qualities of the author.
The advent of cheap paper and now digital-book formats has thrown open the doors to whatever authors wish to present. And in whatever manner or style they wish to present it in. There has been an explosion of style, and an attending expansion of styles, that allows for more than a faux historical voice and small bits of racist patois. Venomous hip-hop to vulgar heathens, and on to nerds that cannot look at a semicolon without thinking it is the end of a statement in C, or some other programming language. Bring on the sporadic commas, Oxford for only half and run-on sentences to the end of the margins with the rest, fill your lines full of verbs irregular and contrived adverbs of purple, and be free to gerund every mother’s son. After all, the important bit is what is being said and whether the reader can find enjoyment in what an author has written.
