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Friday, May 14, 2010

Friday Fricassee

Wow, folks! 83 comments and only 1 was from a troll. Guess I ought to dig out weird emails more often!

Actually, that's the only one I have. Well, unless you include the disjointed, misspelled emails from my ex-agent. They're not funny, though.

A few thoughts on yesterday's oddball showcase:

  • If you haven't begun the querying process yet, DON'T LET THIS SCARE YOU. I'm not in the business of scaring aspiring authors; I'm in the business of informing and encouraging. Trust me when I tell you that nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and I don't anticipate a repeat performance. Do your homework, query widely but selectively. You'll be okay.
  • I DID NOT QUERY this agent! I queried a different agent at the same agency, someone I'd researched and decided was a potential fit. This is the first time I've ever received a rejection from someone other than the agent I queried or his/her assistant. (No, the oddball email was not from an assistant.)
  • Jokes about drunkenness aside, a few comments about potential mental illness got me thinking. Honestly, it hadn't crossed my mind (I think I was too stunned). But you know, there are all manner of personality disorders out there, and some of them are...well, scary. (Yes, I know a person or two with a personality disorder. It's no laughing matter.) Best bet? When you're smacked with a largely inappropriate, imbalanced response from someone, whether in a query or in *real* life (because, yanno, this whole querying process is SO not real life), the thing to do is to step back and draw your boundary line. We can't allow ourselves to have potentially debilitating emotional responses to the behavior of others, which is out of our control. And which is also not our responsibility.
  • Ultimately, life is strange! But it's also wonderful. And laughing together at the weird stuff feels good.
Thanks for walking through the wackiness with me! Just goes to show that we can do all the right things and still get hit with something from left field. Or beyond. We simply keep pressing forward, yes?

Swimming in your awesomeness!

14 comments:

  1. That is a very thoughtful, reasoned response. I never got past a flashback to an old Saturday Night Live skit, where one of the actors was being Ted Kennedy and asking, "Were you, ah, drunk at the time?"

    Word verification: "dunce." No joke.

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  2. I didn't realize you'd been agented before, Authoress.

    Thanks again for all your hard work. Looking forward to next week's Secret Agent contest.

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  3. I just read the rejection. Okay, you've won the prize for the weirdest one, no contest. I thought the two-page, rambling, form rejection was strange (so did everyone else who received it), but the one you received borders on insanity.

    Have a great weekend!

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  4. I will admit that I got a form rejection once from an agent whom I had turned down a month earlier. I'd given him warning that I was starting to get offers and told him when I'd made my decision, and had gotten a nice email back, which made the "rejection" all the more puzzling. I did write him about it, and he responded - apparently my SASE got dumped in the wrong pile instead of recycled.

    Publishing is a mad, mad world - but I love it.

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  5. Have you considered the agent you did query had his/her email hacked? Or perhaps a disgruntled assistant responded? I would seriously bring this letter to the attention of that agent that you did query. Who knows if others had this problem and the agent is not aware. This could damage that person's reputation. Just a thought.

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  6. This person is bitter. HE is working for others BECAUSE he basically is unsuccessful himself. Despite the obvious advantage he might have it was not working. He wasn't successful on his own book because he qualifies it "almost nobody knows what they're doing" (bitter justification) and "if you really know" (he does)"you could scare people" (rejection).

    So we take this super human to the conference where he will be careful to be 'dumb' because he has to flog his business to all those stupid publishers (who rejected his own work).

    In a way I feel sorry for him because it reads more like a suicide note to me now than even before. Careerwise if not anything else.

    ZP

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  7. I thought I was pretty nice yesterday. I didn't want to say something mean like you're not ready to publish.

    Or

    I think you use this blog to stroke your ego.

    But because all your "friends" kiss your anus you don't get good critiques like everybody else. You get drippy we love you's. Your writing isn't that much different now than it was two and three years ago. You think you've made leaps and bounds.

    Where are the personalized rejections? (Exibit A was yesterday) Where are the requests for fulls? Really if the writing is good, these things aren't unicorns.

    I kind of like you and I told you the truth as I see it. If your response is to call me a troll, fine. But trolls come around to stir the pot. You can rest assured after today, you'll get not one word from me.

    I don't hate you, I kind of like you, but you've got this personality trait that drives me up the wall. (Compare what I'm saying to other trolls on other blogs, Princess) You only like blather and everything else is mute. You don't think your **it stinks and I'm not being figurative here. I'm being literal. If you took a dump in toilet you'd come out swearing it smells like roses. And then you'd blog about it:

    "Mr. A says my **it stinks." And when everybody says it doesn't you believe that's proof. (BTW you're husband's going to have trouble not laughing here.)

    But it's meaningless. Nobody actually smelled your **it just as nobody here read your query except the agent in question did.

    "I DID NOT QUERY this agent!"

    This is a mute point.

    "The email address, however, was one of those generic-to-the-agency addresses that many agencies use."

    For someone riding on the coattails of Miss Snark you ought to know that your query doesn't always end up with the agent you sent it to, especially in a big house where they have a general email. But email aside, queries end up with different agents all the time.
    (This is a much better response to the knives your "friends" were throwing with that "be careful who you query" helpfulness. )

    This "I didn't put his name on it, therefore he was crazy to read it" makes me want to set my hair on fire.

    And you know how I know lots of people would love to see you splat? Because the comments have underhanded quills all the time, your just extremely good at believing only what you want to.

    "I never had anything like this before except for my agent..."

    Denial isn't always a river in Egypt and birds of a feather flock together.

    Now take a deep breath. Like I said, these are my last words. I won't push you to wake up again. You'll be right here next year and the year after that and so on. This troll is going back to its little cave where there are three requests for fulls waiting to be rejected since I just signed with an agent. It shall bother you no more, Princess.

    Have a nice day,


    Troll

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  8. If you have just been accepted why are you getting your knickers in such a knot? (Silent K there, Troll FYI)
    And exibit is spelled with an h (it goes in between the x and the i FYI).

    I hope hope your writing is as good as the bile you waste your (not you're) time on. But it is certainly better than your (not you're) manners - though that isn't hard because you don't have any of them.

    ZP

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  9. Dear Troll,

    I wish you all the success you deserve.

    Jodi

    --

    Dear everyone else,

    Now we can go back to being happy, troll-less people. Yay! (And maybe the next one will know the difference between moot point and mute point. Wait, did I just type that out loud? *not on mute apparently*)

    Jodi

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  10. “makes me want to set my hair on fire”- strong words for something that isn't at all personal, although you've made this personal in your crazy little mind.

    Incoherent ramblings aside, Anonymous, be assured no one takes you seriously or even believes anything you say. Wonder if you’re the one who delivered the “rejection” letter in question, since your posts sound as nutty as that letter.

    PS: why not use your name if you actually believe anything you wrote here?

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  11. *Don't feed the trolls* is one of the hardest principles I try to live by sometimes.

    All I'll say is it's chickensh*t to hide behind "Anonymous"

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  12. I read a thread about the guy who I think might've sent you this rejection. Here's an excerpt:

    "Agent: 'My biggest failure to date is called "the 'zine," which I conceived and coined in 1985. I commandeered a somewhat immature engineer in Wisconsin to print it up on his copy machine, using whatever he liked out of my letters. He'd print up 250 copies a month. I'd stick them in a news stall at Sather Gate, UC Berkeley. Kids snapped them up and started imitating them right away, eventually, into the millions. I haven't checked a dictionary to see if "'zine" is now listed as a word. Anyway I expected it'd be imitated, and there we have it.'

    Comment on a thread: Is he stupid, an astounding narcissist, or just batsh*t crazy? Zine is short for fanzine. The word was invented by Louis Russell Chauvenet in October 1940. (Citations: Wikipedia. The OED. Fancyclopedia I (1944). Fancyclopedia II (1959).) Science fiction fandom had been using zine as an informal short form for decades before the wave of punk zines picked up the term in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, Mike Gunderloy was broadcasting the concept and term to the world. As for Tom Dark's claim that he conceived of and published the first fanzine, any ful kno that was Ray Palmer's The Comet, in 1930.

    If he cares about the issue so much, why hasn't he looked any of that up?

    The episode may explain why TD is a failed writer, but if so, it's not for the reasons he thinks.

    The story about Tom Dark claiming to have gotten an editor fired at Bantam is only fractionally less damning. A minor employee of a minor agency got an editor fired for rejecting a book about the application of Plato's philosophy to physical fitness? WTF? NFW."

    To me, this confirms this guy is an undiagnosed schizophrenic. This kind of delusion (I invented the Zine) is common among those with disturbed thought processes.

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  13. Fantastic blog. Keep on rockin, Radu Prisacaru – UK Internet Marketer & Web Developer

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  14. Crap! I might be disturbed, too, because I *swear* I invented the acronym TMI. LOL!

    Anonymous sounds like a lot of guys I know who don't like girls much and are always trying to put them in their place. Just saying.

    No underhanded quills here! I've found your blog helpful and exciting. Looking forward to future posts!

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