One nice thing about PCW Today is that our kindly editor doesn't muck around with what you write. Usually I dread reading my own bits in magazines or newspapers, for fear of finding what atrocities the subeditor has wrought.
In fact the worst disaster that ever befell a Langford column was accidental. This was in 8000 Plus for January 1991, when I wrote up the horrors of the literary life as a joke PCW text adventure game whose player typed commands at the > prompt. Like this:
You are in an indescribably sordid hallway. Shabbily carpeted stairs lead up to your workroom.
> HELP
Kindly remember you are a freelance writer. That is: you're on your own, sunshine.
> GO NORTH
Stop kidding around. You have no idea which way is north.
At 8000 Plus HQ it was an open secret that the magazine was designed on Macintosh computers. What I didn't know, and what the editors were too (let's be tactful) busy to notice, was that the Mac publishing software ignored lines starting with >. So only one side of that dialogue with the computer game was printed, lending the column a certain surrealism which made people ask what I'd been smoking that month.
Then came The Guardian, which hired me to write batches of quickie SF reviews with just 70 words allowed for each book. That wordcount included title, author and full publishing details, so Eon by Greg Bear would get a less cramped review than something like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, and I was grateful not to have to cover D.G. Compton's classic title Hot Wireless Sets, Aspirin Tablets, The Sandpaper Sides of Used Matchboxes and Something That Might Have Been Castor Oil.
Unfortunately, after I'd performed miracles of critical compression, the Guardian subeditors would then change everything around to fit the text into too small a space. Once they evened up their print columns by cutting a review's final sentence of praise for a book I'd liked, and sticking it on to my 70 words about one I'd hated. Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers.
Fortunately I've so far avoided the Times Literary Supplement. A fellow SF critic found that after commissioning a review, the poxy TLS would not only edit it savagely but would then pay only (say) 70% of the agreed fee, since they'd used only that percentage of a piece whose length had originally been specified with great precision. Shabby practice, indeed.
Then there's SFX magazine, for which I've been writing a column in every issue since it began in 1995. Even with that much experience and a page all to myself, I still can't judge the length of my contribution accurately enough to be safe from editorial cuts. This is because SFX is addicted to a trick of layout called the drop-quote, whereby the designer picks a phrase from your article that seems particularly brilliant or idiotic, and puts this in huge type inside a flashy box to make the page look more exciting.
Because you don't know how much space the drop-quote will take up, you can only guess at the needed word length. Every so often, a particularly oversized quote box forces cutting of less important stuff on the page. So my text gets trimmed, with the big knives homing in accurately on vital explanations and punchlines of jokes.
Most of the above cock-ups happen because of the mechanics of design and publishing, the never-ending tug-o'-war between text and presentation. Dorothy Sayers nailed this one back in 1933 when she set a detective novel in an advertising office and revealed "that the great aim and object of the studio artist was to crowd the copy out of the advertisement and that, conversely, the copy-writer was a designing villain whose ambition was to cram the space with verbiage and leave no room for the sketch." With electronic publishing, the same old battles are still fought on excitingly high-tech territory.
Well, you can be philosophical about all that. The worst annoyance comes when you meet an editor who wishes you'd written something different and tries to insert his ideas and opinions in place of yours. I had a nasty experience along these lines from New Scientist in the run-up to 2000....
It was a review feature based on futurology books. I made a point of digging out some less well-known differences between SF "predictions" and reality, avoiding hackneyed cliches like the idea of food pills. The subeditor crossed out what I'd written and inserted "food pills". One of the books mentioned, and I quoted, an interesting bit about radical approaches to carbon dioxide sequestration -- not planting trees in hope of soaking up greenhouse gases, but actually trapping and physically storing CO2 emissions. The subeditor crossed that out and inserted "planting trees". I'd avoided quoting Arthur C. Clarke's far too familiar laws of futurology; the subeditor shoved them in, deftly deleting my own examples and conclusion to make room. Oh, and -- being an SF fan myself -- I didn't include the usual journalistic sneer at science fiction. The subeditor ... but you're ahead of me, aren't you? Never again.
Oddly enough, the next SF article I sold was to the seriously upmarket science journal Nature. Unlike dumbed-down New Scientist, they didn't change a word. I hope there's a moral there.