Wanna Be Need Not Apply

Ugh! I've started down the "Looking for an Agent" path for Festival Madness. I have compiled a new list. As always, it seems promising, but while compiling, I once again ran into the situation where some agents forbid queries by the unrecommended, unpublished writer. No self-published or POD writers, either. POD is a technology and it is hard to see why there is a taint to a technology, but so be it.

I am vindictive enough to hope that all of these so snooty, exclusive agents miss the next Dan Brown, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovich and Joseph Conrad.

Anyway, there is now a list and "how to contact" advice and all those good things, so just do it, as the commercial advices.

Email contacts, while quick , seem fraught with danger. They don't friggin' answer if they don't feel like it. Did the agent even receive the email? Off into cyberspace. It ain't fun. It ain't easy. It definitely ain't for the fragile ego or the faint of heart.

Onward.

The world I must live in always seems to encompass an exclusivity beyond me. As a kid, I lived places where you were shit unless you were born in that town. In college, I came from the wrong state, wrong high school, belonged to the wrong literary society. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

When I was a young suburban mom, for a few years, things were O.K. Right house, right neighborhood, right everything. Not exclusive, but welcoming.

Moved to Boston. Right suburb, wrong precinct. Not a native. Not a Brahmin. Not ethnic. Not Catholic, not much of anything. Most of my friends (not quite all) are from somewhere else. Boston is not a friendly town.

As a computer programmer, I wrote in COBOL, the least respected language, old mainframe technology. The sneering never stopped. Of course, the paychecks didn't either.

Became a writer. A genre writer. Oh shit, now it's worse than junior high. Not published properly, not young and skinny, not ethnic, nor foreign, not literary, not visible. There is the story oft told at writer's conferences that one day a published writer will ask to see your work, offer some pithy comments and will recommend you to his/her agent or publisher or whatever. Folks, this is bull. Everybody is running scared and well, it's like the convoy driving down a dangerous neighborhood in Baghdad and you are in Arab dress and thumbing a ride. Will the convoy stop?

So, gloom and doom. I must be the world's biggest masochist, because after four books, I'm en route to promote the 5th. Why? Why? Why?

Dunno. Just gotta do it. Must have succumbed to Festival Madness. (!)

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