Emil Is My Editor
A Paradise Born of Hell
To save you a click, here’s the post:
If you’re part of the Substack fiction community, chances are you’ve heard the name
many a time already. You can read his fictionright here—as well as some of the most important and valuable free writing advice you’re ever likely to see printed anywhere, full stop.
Emil’s Autopsy series, where he performs a public developmental and line editing pass of a short story, free of charge, for any fiction writer brave enough to risk a punch or twelve in order to improve themselves, is at the essence of who the man is: he wants to lift his fellow writers up.
This winter, he and his family have been caught in a perfect storm of predatory insurance practices, rental application practices, and lawyer fees—not to mention the literal winter storm that dropped thousands of pounds of snow and ice on a hundred-year-old roof and forced them into this shitshow in the first place.
For someone who offers so much of himself to go through this sort of hideousness alone does not sit right with us, and we’ve decided to fucking do something about it.
It’s not a huge thing for any of us, individually. We’re simply insisting on paying Emil’s regular reading fee for our Autopsies.
And we’d like to encourage those of you who are waiting on an Autopsy (or have already had one, learned a ton about your own writing, and want more) to join us.
How does it work?
Our brave hypothetical author sends Emil his reading fee ($125 for up to 2,500 words) via Venmo to @emil-ottoman with the memo “EMIL IS MY EDITOR.”
Our hero sends the specimen (and a screenshot of the Venmo receipt for everyone’s records) to emilottoman@gmail.com under the same subject heading.
Everyone waits as patiently as possible under elevator music while the man does his thing.
When the edit is done, Emil sends it back to the author privately by email first—that way, if our hero decides they can’t go through with the public beatdown aspect of the process, no one outside the circle is any the wiser (and those of us who know about it promise not to judge).
Assuming our hero still has the stomach for it, Emil posts the autopsy, and we re-stack the living shit out of it in solidarity.
Later, when our hero has made the relevant edits, they post the final, improved piece—hopefully with some sort of acknowledgment of how much they learned in the process—and, again, we, the authors of this initiative, re-stack the living shit out of it in solidarity. Just tag us when you drop the story and we’ll send it as far and wide as we’re able.
That’s it. That’s the process.
We are currently lining our own specimens up to get the initiative started, so you’ll be seeing our pieces go through this process over the course of the next several weeks. The value to the writer will speak for itself.
If you want in, or you have questions, you’re welcome to get in touch with any of us directly via DM or just drop a comment below.
Yours,
Tom, Zani, Fitz, Nick, EK, Andrew, Slater, Luke, and Zivah.
These people saved my family’s ass.
THE ANTE
You buy an autopsy. You get in line. You get what you need done up. You get it returned. If you want, it doesn’t get posted. If you do, I post it. You rework what you wanted done up, you post it, I post it, we all boost it, your work gets a signal bump, I get paid, you get a professional editor and an in for any future work with me automatically because you saved my family’s ass when we needed saving.
THE STAKES
We create an ad hoc community and support network. You get your work gone over professionally for relatively cheap. So far this initiative has helped me move, saved my family’s ass, and seems to have brought together a lot of fun people doing a lot of very interesting stuff. I have bills to pay, yeah, but if you want to support me and guarantee you get your work done over professionally and not for show. There’s an element of showmanship to the autopsy series by design. There almost has to be. But we keep building community. Every autopsy I do keeps me sharp and every story I work on I go at it like you’re going to get published in Guernica. And then the next time some shit goes down with someone associated, we’re all there to help, and instead of being the person who gets all the help, I can organize the work of helping others with the free cognitive bandwidth.
THE FUTURE: Once a network is in place, we can do things with it. The community coalesced around me out of thin air in a time of great need. That garners my support of everyone who helped my family until I get my brains blown out (only a semi-likely scenario) I’m BIG on community building and self organizing support networks. I’ve built a few. I’ve started a few. A rising tide lifts all ships. And maybe we can help get the fiction tab out of the swamp Substack has put us in.
FICTION CREATES CULTURE
therefore
FICTION IS CULTURE
and so
WRITERS CREATE CULTURE
And what are we, but writers of fiction?
And we decide what comes next.
But if you want, this is the best way to get a quick leg up and support a fellow traveler.
THE RESULT:
THE RESULT:
