#Agentlove

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Remember that self-aggrandizing goofball I linked to earlier? (Hmm. I guess that one was LiveJournal only. Anyway…) Some of the commenters there, at the Agentfail blog, and elsewhere has been full of anger and resentment. In that first link, you can read a comment from agent Nathan Bransford stating that the amount of anger he’s been seeing lately makes him very nervous.

So. Author Beth Bernobich suggested an #Agentlove post. I think it’s a great idea.

Except, you know, I’m not going to talk about “love” because I’m a married, she’s married, and we have a business relationship. And I know very well that the author/agent relationship can be fraught–some writers can be a little crazy about it. So I’m skipping over the word “love” here.

Let me start off by saying my agent is a former editor–I get fantastic notes. Seriously, I have two editors working with me to iron out the trouble spots and check for flubs. And one thing I learned with the back and forthing over the end of ELBD is that, even if she disagrees with the choices I want to make, she’s on my side.

I’m really, really lucky to be working with her. When she sold my book last year, I about fell over at the deal she got me. It was utterly outside of my expectations, and I’ve been trying damn hard to be worthy of the work she’s done.

Another great thing about working with her is that she always gets back to me quickly. When I have a question about how the publishing business works–Is this a good thing? How rare is this? Should I try this or not?–she gets me the info I need promptly.

And she laughs at my jokes, mostly.

For the record, I didn’t sign with her because a pal of mine got me an in. I didn’t pitch to her at a conference. I didn’t do any of the crazy things people say writers should do.

I wrote the book. I wrote the query. I revised both thoroughly. Then I queried widely and carefully. Out of sixty I sent out, eight responded with a request to read more. Of those, three offered to sign me. It was all textbook, people. I went to Miss Snark’s archives and followed her directions step by step. And now I’m doing this professionally.

My agent is made of awesome, and I’m damn lucky to be working with her.

Hey, if you want to talk about how great your agent is, or if you want to sing the praises of an agent who did right by you, please do so.

I’ve been wanting to write a couple of more substantive posts…

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But that’s going to have to wait until I have some quite time. With Salad Eater attending a conference this weekend and working today, I’ve had a couple of Midays in a row.

Meanwhile, I will shock and surprise you all by posting a link.

Darths and Droids, a fumetti (as in: a webcomic made from photographs) that justifies the utterly random plot of THE PHANTOM MENACE in the only way imaginable–it was a fictionalization of an rpg campaign.

All the photos are stills from the movie, and I swear it is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Just as funny as DM of the Rings, which is a couple of years old (in case you haven’t seen it). The dialog for the comic is the dialog between the game master and the players.

And, God, does it bring back memories. Seen via AntickMusings.

6 things make a post

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* Check out this short “video” which I guess is supposed to advertise a new TV. Actually, I probably shouldn’t have quote marks around that word, because this is a digital video at 30 frames a second, but it’s really more of a technical acheivement than a short film. Basically, it’s “bullet-time” on red kryptonite.

* Health care reform without a public insurance option=the German model. Money quote: “Finally, premiums for children are covered by government out of general revenues, on the theory that children are not the human analogue of pets whose health care should be their owners’ (parents’) fiscal responsibility. Instead, children are viewed as national treasures whose health care should be the entire nation’s fiscal responsibility.”

* Seven year old boys prefer store-bought lemon-lime soda to the homemade variety.

* On NPR this morning, the father of Roxana Saberi, the journalist sentenced to 8 years in prison in what appears to be an Iranian kangaroo court, has been trying to make waves by telling people that his daughter was tricked into confessing to spying. According to him, they promised to let her go if she admitted to the crimes, which he thought was illegitimate. I hope someone explains to him that this happens in the U.S.A. all the time–the teenagers wrongfully convicted in the Central Park “wilding” case were nailed because of exactly this tactic, and that the FBI wanted Richard Jewel to confess to the Olympic bombing as part of a “training video.” While the Iranian government is deeply fucked up and in desperate need of reform, there’s no point in criticizing them for doing the same thing we do.

* I don’t have whatever cable channel showed THE WIRE, but I know it has a lot of fans. If you’re interested, here’s the original pitch and series bible. (Warning, that’s a .pdf file) I haven’t looked at it myself, because I plan to watch the series someday.

* Finally, putting my wife on a bus for her second day at her conference pretty much wasted my writing time today. My son is up, too, and once that happens I’ll have no time to focus on the book at all. Which sucks, but hey, that’s what family is about. Now we’re off for our Saturday library run.

I have only two things to say about yesterday’s “teabagger” protests

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First: Yes, I giggled like the middle-aged schoolboy I am at the name.

Second: Remember all those anti-Iraq war protests from six years ago? All those giant puppets and silly costumes? Remember how many people(including me) thought they were a ridiculous freak show?

Those people were right.

And I was wrong not to see it. Sure, I looked at them and thought They don’t represent me, but they didn’t have to, and it was narcissistic of me to think they should. They were in the right, and we would be in a better place right now if we’d listened. I would be in a better place.

So, yeah, the tax protests yesterday (I passed a small one on my bus ride home yesterday) had a bunch of silly signs and whatnot, but I’m not going to assume that makes them wrong on the issues[1]. I’m not planning to make that mistake twice.

Having Glenn Fucking Beck on their side makes them wrong, but that’s a post for another time.

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Today, I pored over Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and accomplished nothing. Also, the book my wife gave me to read couldn’t be renewed. I had to strip out all her bookmarks and slip it into the conveyor belt at the library.

As for the LiveJournal feed for Nathan Bransford’s blog, it turns out that Mr. Bransford himself ask that it be suspended. I have no idea why; LJ syndication is just another kind of RSS, but whatever. No more “This Week in Publishing” I guess.

At work, I discovered that the intranet policy book pages I’d spent a good part of last week working on were completely useless now. The manager copy and pasted them into .mht files elsewhere on the network, breaking all the links. There were good reasons to move them to another part of the network–our system is criminally slow–but damn.

Finally, do you know what my company and I both pay, per month, for the basic health insurance my wife, son and I have? Not just what I contribute, but everything?

Over $1,600. Per month.

We need reform in this country, and we need it now.

Links! The Top 16 Worst Movie Quotes to Utter During Sex. Is it wrong of me to laugh so hard at this?

Next, another amazing animation, this one done with stop-motion. Sorta. Check it out.

Finally, tweenbots, a video art project via Jay Lake. His link described it as teh cute, but I think that misses the point. The really, really cool thing about this is that the robot is a cute, nearly helpless little thing that relies on complete strangers to help it get where it needs to go. Even if you can’t watch the video at that page, the write up is fascinating.

It seems that a lot of my posts lately have been straight link farms. I feel boring. Is there something I should post about? Something I said I would talk about but haven’t? Let me know.

A post on a sunny day

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Agent Nathan Bransford is running an Agent for a Day event. Basically, he’s posted 50 queries in his blog, and his commenters get to reject or ask for more. Three of the queries are for books that went on to be published.

It’s pretty interesting stuff. I could never be an agent, because I would reject everything. Still, I wish the LiveJournal feed for his blog would be fixed.

Today I went back (yet again) to Everyone Loves Blue Dog. The changes that need to be made are pretty straightforward and shouldn’t take more than a week or two, depending. And for the future, I’ll have to be aware that I need to prompt the reader’s memory when a character re-enters the story after being out of it for 200 pages or so. An unusual name simply won’t cut it.

It’s that time of year again (5 links)

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The stellar bluejays and hummingbirds are back. To celebrate, here are some links.

A pretty cool book trailer for A Madness of Angels. Check it out.

Writers get so much respect: here’s a job opening for a screenwriter/office assistant. Because what you really want for your films is a writer who can answer phones in a professional manner.

How professional athletes lose all their money. I’m so going to use this in my current book.

Amazon rank. Hey, folks. If you’re looking for a good alternative to Amazon.com, consider Indiebound.org. They’re an online ordering system for a network of independent bookstores. When you order a book from them, the sale goes to an independent near you. And it’s not just books, either.

Finally, the Kinda Sutra. A short, partially-animated film about the screwed-up ways people are taught about sex. I think it’s SFW, but you might have different situation.

State of the Writer (and the writing, too)

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Taxes are done. Yesterday, I emptied most of our CD to cover the check (which is why I opened that CD in the first place) but it’s not going to be a hardship. We’ve been socking it away, just the way the internet recommends.

Page proofs are done. I actually finished them yesterday morning, and spent today’s writing time scanning the corrected pages and backing them up. If something goes wrong with the usps, I’ll have pages to resend or email. Paranoid? Moi?

Tomorrow I start back in on Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and I have to admit I had a little epiphany about one of the notes I’ve been getting. There’s a secondary character who’s not as… vivid as some of the others, and folks keep asking me to bring her out more.

For me, the problem is that she’s a reserved person and a bit of a cipher–she changes her outward personality to match the situation, and she doesn’t want to be too noticeable.

Earlier this week, I had a revelation while I was reading Bill Martell’s blog Sex in a Submarine (which is not a take on the SNAKES ON A PLANE film from a couple years back–the name of the blog comes from an entirely different clusterfuck). Bill writes low-budget movies, and one thing he’s always talking about is the pressure of getting a recognizable name for the front of the DVD box. It’s very difficult to market a movie without one.

What Bill does (and he talks about this often) is create a “confined cameo.” It’s a role for a name actor to play, with several scenes spread across the movie, but which all take place in a single location. So you have a general giving orders back at the command center, or the sexy barista at the corner coffee shop. Or whatever. The name actor has several scenes, but they can all be shot in a day or two because they’re all on the same set.

And while that keeps the price for that actor down, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll sign them. For that, you have to also make sure that it’s a juicy role. The actors are looking for ways to show their range and their skills.

I feel a little like a dummy. I spent so long studying screenwriting as a way to tell stories, but I never tried to translate this lesson from that form to fiction. Obviously, the character everyone wants to be stronger doesn’t need a confined cameo, but she does deserve a juicy, personality-defining scene–something that would startle and excite an actor reading for the part.

Now I just have to come up with one.

Finally, folks may have heard that Amazon.com has decided to stop listing certain “adult” materials on their best-seller lists, and the means to read that end was that they would no longer show sales rankings.

And one of the ways they defined “adult” was “gay.” Even YA novels with gay characters were too “adult” to be listed.

How could they be so stupid, you ask? I have no clue. See this post by an author affected by the change to read Amazon.com’s response, and Dear Author weighs in on the romance writers who’ve been affected, and finally here’s the start of a link farm to check out.

Proofs question

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Do other people stet their own corrections? I mean, make a correction on the proof, then decide that change is utterly stupid, scribble it out and write “stet” next to it?

Please answer yes.

I’m so damn tired I feel a little sick

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I really shouldn’t still be up. In fact, a smart person would have gone to bed two hours ago.

Not me. I’ve been zoning out in front of the TV–I haven’t even had time to read all the online stuff I’m supposed to read.

Ah well. Tomorrow morning I will finish the page proofs and maybe take it a little easy. I’ll skim through my sorta-final-I-should-be-so-lucky revision of Everyone Loves Blue Dog and dabble at it, then pop over to the library for some quality wireless internet time. That’ll catch me up.

Meanwhile, check out this comment from SF archivist Lynn Thomas (aka: rarelylynne on LJ) all about the best ways to organize and archive your writing work.

Meanwhile, it’s after 10:30 here, and I’m wiped. I’m going to bed before I pass out on my keyboard.