Fiction Bitch
Teleread has a short bit about the Fiction Bitch, an author who will critique your purply prose in no uncertain terms (I wonder what this sentence would net me) out of hatred for bad and mediocre writing.
When I was about twenty I had a pen friend who was nuts about so-called ‘student’ magazine Propria Cures. PC, as it is generally abbreviated, is a satirical magazine. Supposedly written and edited by students, it often has staff that would have been kicked out of university decades ago.
Not sure if I remember this correctly: but apparently, my friend and her friends thought it way cool if you got a mention in the magazine. The editors used the letters page to bitch about bad prose, and sometimes praise good writing.
I had as few illusions about the quality of my writing then as I have now; in order to be printed, thus to be cool, I had to write something that would strike the right level of badness.
I managed to craft a song, a cheerless little ditty about ‘the environment’, of which they printed the refrain. I cannot remember it all, but it went something like: “De bomen gaan dood / De bomen gaan dood / Milieuproblematiek / Groot is de nood”. (The trees are dying / The trees are dying / Environmental problems / Large is the distress. It rhymes in Dutch. Honest, it does!)
Their comment: “Our waste-paper basket shares your pain.”
It appears the Fiction Bitch is no more. Now leads the link to ghastly pink.