Q & A 18 Tell us about yourself, EE.

I was wondering how you got into publishing and what you majored in during college.


Evil Editor has been asked many personal questions over the past few weeks, everything from, "For which publishing house do you work?" to "May I have your baby," to "Where do you get off criticizing my writing, you #$&%#$ bastard." Thus he's throwing together a brief biography.

I started out as a reader, which was somewhat time-consuming. I then progressed to writer, which required the performance of work. Eventually it occurred to me that editor was the perfect compromise: aspiring writers do all the work, and reading their books isn't time-consuming at all, as I generally need read only a few sentences.

The Early Years

I guess you could say my first book was the one my mother would read aloud to me during her third trimester as I waited in her womb, that book being Finnegans Wake. The earliest books I can recall reading myself, at the age of about three, were The Little Engine that Could, Have You Seen My Duckling?, and Dante's Inferno. I still pick these books up every so often, especially Have You Seen My Duckling?, which my son enjoys hearing me read, whenever he's home on break from college.

In college, I received a degree in English, which I discovered (after graduation) would get me a meal at Denny's, assuming I also had five dollars. Needing income, I wrote my first novel, a 900-page tome entitled Sherlock Holmes Versus The Cat in the Hat. In it, Holmes introduces the Cat to cocaine, whereupon the feline leaves London looking like a war zone. Although my Holmes wore a tall red and white striped hat, and my Cat wore a deerstalker, Publishers Weekly still had the nerve to call the book derivative.

My first attempt at nonfiction was based on my theory that, like icebergs, only one ninth of the volume of the Egyptian pyramids is visible, and thus the big question is not how they built them so high, but how they built them so deep. My answer to this question was revealed in my book, Bulldozers of the Gods.

I also tried my hand at writing a mystery, which was entitled, The Butler Didn't Do It. I'm thinking that not too many people guessed the ending, as the butler actually did do it. The title was just a red herring.

Coming soon: The Later Years