A word about commercial editing and publishing...

Commercial magazine publishing in the United States is driven by advertising. Pure and simple. It would be nice to think that content is king, but it's not. Content is just an excuse to get all those ads in front of you. Those are what pay the bills.

It's not surprising, therefore, that in the inevitable crunch between advertising and content - advertising always wins.

Or, put another way, the story I wrote may not be exactly the one you end up reading. Section breaks get dropped in order to make space. Subtle points of emphasis - an intalicized word, for instance - get unemphasized. And words or sentences get dropped or changed in order to meet the stylistic bias of the editor. That's all normal stuff in the publishing world.

Alas, like most good writers, I think I provide pretty clean copy. Sure, there'll be the odd mistake now and again - the natural result of having read the same thing over and over again as it moves towards completion (you eventually start to read what you think something says, or what you wish it to say, rather than what it actually does). But those are rare. For the most part what I end up submitting is what I intended, down to its most subtle details.

We're fortunate to have Kent Kunitsugu at the helm of Sport Rider magazine. He is an able editor who wields his red pen with a light touch. But even Kent is not immune to the strictures of modern American publishing. At the end of the day he must make the magazine layout - all the puzzle pieces which go into making up an issue... fit. And in that process the content of contributors like me sometimes gets changed.

Here, then, are the original, unvarnished versions. These are what I intended you to see.