Month: April 2008

I remember once being taken to task by Rachel Pollack for something in a short story I’d written. “But that’s the only bit in the story that’s true!” I told her. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true,” she said. “What matters is if, in the context of the story, it’s believable.” And I knew that she was right.

I was recently taken to task myself — actually, I believe the word used was “asshole” — by a writer submitting a story to Kaleidotrope, who felt that I’d somehow insulted him by not falling instantly in love with it. Obviously I was rejecting the story only because I couldn’t handle its deep and affecting truth. It wasn’t, as I thought I had politely alluded to in my rejection letter, that I felt the story was over-written, sloppy, and difficult to get into — or even that it simply wasn’t the type of story I was looking to publish in the pages of Kaleidtrope. No, when I rejected it, I was obviously rejecting and insulting its truth — and, by extension, rejecting and insulting its author, to whom, presumably, that truth had happened.

I’m very sorry to announce that I will be leaving my position as editor of the Washington Post Sunday crossword.

For financial reasons, the Post has decided to discontinue its own Sunday crossword in favor of a syndicated one.

I missed this announcement when he made it back in September — I’m a crossword puzzle enthusiast, possibly even a cruciverbalist, but I don’t hang out in online crossword constructor communities as a general rule. Still, I’d been having some trouble lately printing the Sunday puzzle from the Post‘s website. Turns out, it’s because there hasn’t been one since the last Sunday in March.

I’ve been a big fan of Piscop’s edited Sunday puzzle since college, when our student paper started syndicating it every Friday. I still remember one puzzle I toiled on during my lunch break when I worked at the campus bookstore. The themed clues were all four-double-letter combinations, with just ridiculously punny answers, which I seem to remember it took more than a few of us to figure out. For instance, the answer to the clue “BBBB” was “waxmakers,” because that’s what bees are. I know, people have been shot for puns not as bad as that, but it was funny at the time and made an impression. And I’ve been happily doing the Sunday puzzle every week since then, even when I stopped picking up the college paper regularly (and then moved away altogether), by printing it out from the Washington Post‘s website.