The Outside invoice clock is ticking

It appears that remarking on the continued passivity of the most unprofessional editor I've ever worked with was sufficient to accomplish what my initial series of complaints about my dealings with Outside could not: I finally got a direct response. At the end of the day on Friday, the traditional time for cowards to do things they desperately wish they could ignore altogether, she sent me this e-mail:

Hi Kevin,

I wanted to circle back here and let you know that we've decided to kill this piece. As I mentioned in my previous emails, it still needs more work in order to be publishable for us, and given the emails I've received from you in recent months I'm not convinced we'll be able to work together on the necessary edits to get there. I never take the decision to kill a story lightly, and I completely understand that the long wait time on this piece was frustrating. If you send me an invoice for 1/3 of the original rate (our standard kill fee), I'll submit for your payment, and you can feel free to take the story elsewhere if you like.

Where to even start? I guess my response to her is as good a place to circle back to as any.

Hi Molly,

Rather than waste more time litigating every dishonest observation and presumption you managed to pack into a one-paragraph e-mail, I'll settle for being relieved that this fiasco is officially over. Besides, you've taken zero responsibility for your assorted screw-ups with up this project, so I wouldn't expect you to start now, and I doubt you do more than scan my messages at this point since you already know how you'll respond.

My invoice is attached, although given your accounting department's reputation and the fact that I'm 49, I'll probably be dead before the check arrives (not that the money was ever an important aspect of this).
As you can see, she didn't admit that she had already seen me take the story off the table and describe in florid and irrefutable detail the events that had compelled me to do this, which I would bet any amount of money is true. So I didn't either, taking this as permission to keep it up. But if she had merely told me, "We've decided not to run the piece" and left it at that, without even offering a kill fee, I would not be writing this. But trying to pin the blame for this on me was a bad idea. So here goes.

For one thing, even if my getting fed up with the way things went really had been rooted in being anxious to see my byline, this would have been entirely justified. It's unheard of for pieces of this sort to sit untended for months on end -- full stop. But that's not the reason I was pissed, because I'm not one of Molly's twenty-something peers seeking to make a name for myself and gleefully masturbating to the notion of seeing something I wrote appear in an ostensibly professional media outlet. I have been through that over a hundred times. Though I don't even consider myself an accomplished writer, I've had two more books published with my name on the cover than she has, and I've interacted professionally with far more magazine and book editors than she perhaps realizes. I've had creative differences that were invariably resolved in a positive way -- often with me realizing that my work did in fact need to be improved. That wasn't the case here.

But more urgently, as I've explained at length, her sheer, unpretentious laziness and neglect had already ruined the story for specific reasons I pointed out. There was really nothing left to "kill." Even if she wants to argue that the article needed more work, she was not working on it. All of this is perfectly evident in my previous posts about this, where I pointed out that, at the time I gave up and decided to blog about the mess. Molly hadn't even looked at our Google Docs file in three months. (As I also indicated, it was right after that last pointless glance that she started up her women's running newsletter. People who claim to have too much on their plate at work who are nevertheless starting side projects have absolutely zero defense.)

She clearly doesn't understand that the very phrase "the emails I've received from you in recent months" attests to her own extreme inattention to the whole matter; no one should be in a position to even have to pester an editor for updates over so extended a period. And for the record, at the time I posted the story myself, in early March, I had sent her exactly one e-mail, on Feb. 18, in the previous eight weeks. She did not reply to it. Before that, I sent an e-mail to the editor-in-chief, on Jan. 14, which that editor ignored and Molly quickly responded to with another claim about how busy she was. This came on the heels of a quick "Hi Molly, Happy New Year. Do you have any sense yet of when the article might see daylight? Thanks," that I sent on Jan. 8, a message she also ignored, and would be hard to frame as combative. And before that...well, suffice it to say that her failure to publish the article was in no way related to the tone or content of my e-mails, and no sane person would say otherwise. Think of me and my stream of general blogging outrage what you will, but the idea that she and she alone didn't fuck this up is laughable.

Finally, this one would be nitpicky in isolation, but seems worthy of a mention in context: After I submitted my invoice, she replied (politely) a couple of days later saying she also needed a completed W-9. Every other outlet I've written for has provided one of these, with the company's name included. Not Outside, although I don't know if this is a company-wide policy or a specific "bite me" from this editor. Not a big deal in the grand scheme, I guess.

I realize I could just let all of this go, as it's not going to change a thing, although I do hope to discourage anyone from writing for that outlet for reasons that have nothing to do with my experience with Molly and everything to do with the fact that, with the exception of the work of the veritable deity named Alex Hutchinson and maybe a few random selections, Outside is shit anyway (business practices like this are one reason, but I'll be reviewing some specific pieces that have annoyed me and others for some time here soon). But ever since this beer-soaked shitwad decided to try to bury me, however ineffectually, under a pile of lies, my tolerance for dishonesty in my personal and business dealings has dropped to zero. This has admittedly been augmented to a great extent by the fact that the nation's boisterous halfwit element elected a human turd to the presidency and gleefully supports every one of his countless lies. The U.S. not only tolerates truly insane levels of dishonesty at the moment, but is basically powered by it.

So, to the extent anyone cares that I might lash out at them here or anywhere else, don't lie to or about me and I probably won't. If you find this rule difficult to follow, I am not your problem. As anyone who knows me will attest, like a lot of misanthropes, I am surprisingly cheerful in person, especially in relation to what I often ejaculate in this electronic salvage yard, but this is mainly because I'm able to avoid direct dealings with lying twits.

Anyway, if and when the check gets here -- and if you're wondering about the reason for the post title, see this video by Mark Remy, the mind behind the consistently excellent "Dumb Runner" site -- it's all going to the ASPCA. Since I gave up on seeing any money for this work at all a long time ago and especially after flipping the game board and stalking off a month ago, that money now looks like a gift, and it's probably not surprising to anyone reading this that the ASPCA has been my charity of choice for years. (In spite of myself, I have been known to donate to human causes as well, although I was more reliable about that when I was drunk and feeling sappy.) Feel free to hold me to this.\

Anyway, what's the over/under on the arrival date? I'm thinking August 10.