Lawyers and Agents and Writers and Young Adults

This is going to be brief and freeform, for two reasons. One, I just spent over an hour and a half reading about literary agents in general, one agent in particular, and the agent's court case, and writing an email on the subject that disappeared into the ether due to AOL Mail glitching out on me. Dang, I wish they would completely debug one or the other of their webmail clients and get it online. I never know from one refresh to the next which version of the page I'm going to get, much less whether I'm likely to receive my most recent email. And Google has been glitchy too, with many of my recent alerts based on entries to this very blog arriving as mailer daemon notices, and some of your comment alerts not arriving at all. If I don't comment right away on your Weekend Assignment or Monday Photo Shoot entry, that may be why. I'll find you, though.

But I digress. The point is, all that research has eaten up a fair amount of time, and I need to go to bed now.

The other reason I want to keep this brief is the twinge of paranoid fear that one of the subjects of this post sometimes give me. I'm going to talk about it anyway, but briefly and carefully.

First, though, the positive stuff. Sara directed me tonight to a post on Whatever, noting that YA fantasy is a fairly lucrative market nowadays for writers, more so that sf and fantasy for the adults. This tallies pretty well with my own observations in recent years, not so much the money angle as the large amount, variety and quality of fantasy in Young Adult sections of bookstores. Adult science fiction sections don't seem to have all that much new fantasy these days, and what is there seems to be primarily concerned with sexy young vampires or the dark destiny of the sorceress of Snog, who will take at least three books to achieve it.

Since I've always considered the Mâvarin books at least marginally YA anyhow, this is a good incentive for me to cut back on other obsessions for a bit and get on with finding an agent and publisher. I've never actually submitted Heirs to a YA publisher per se. The few I've researched took agented submissions only. Clearly I need to take action, submitting to the Young Adult market instead of the adult one. After all, the books are about three teenagers and their friends, and nobody has sex. The only thing that's stopped me from definitively calling it YA is the cannibalism incident in Mages. Perhaps I can get away with that; as Sara points out, the scenes aren't all that explicit or gory. There's a definite ick factor, though, and they aren't scenes I can cut from the story.

So I did a little half-hearted digging tonight on the subject of literary agents, and found out two interesting things. One, a well-known writer and critic who liked an early version of Heirs of Mâvarin at Clarion all those years ago is now a literary agent. I will definitely write to him soon.

And two, a certain less savory literary agent has been the subject of a legal motion this month from Wikimedia Foundation, the parent of Wikipedia. Their motion to dismiss her defamation case against them makes interesting reading. Well, you may not think so, but I do. For whatever reason, I've developed a minor fascination with legal principles, especially in the field of communications law. My favorite courses at the University of Phoenix, by far, were in Business Law, and Nina Totenberg, who covers Supreme Court cases, is my favorite NPR reporter.

The motion to dismiss thingy refutes Wikimedia's liability for defamation to Barbara Bauer based on a number of legal principles, the biggest of which is that an interactive website with user-generated content is protected from being held liable for one some third party posted on it. The injured party can only go after the person who posted the offending material. And that's the part where I get nervous, since I was only of a handful of principal editors of the article about Bauer on Wikipedia, which was later deleted. My main contribution consisted of trying to find positive (or at least neutral) material to balance the negative stuff, and I've tried never to call her names or insult her, although I don't absolutely promise that I never have done so. Still, there's a tiny chance she could come after me someday. But I hope not!

Anyway, other legal defenses against her claim include the fact that the article was citing another source, clearly labeled as such, and making no claim on its own authority; the fact that the article never calls her (as is claimed) the "Dumbest of the Twenty worst," which is the title of a blog post on Making Light; the right of fair comment in a matter of public interest (e.g. consumer protection); the lack of a claim by Bauer's lawyers that anything in the article is factually inaccurate, the fact that one of the things they say the article said was refuted in the article itself; and the lack of evidence that Wikimedia acted with malice, a knowledge that a damaging statement was false, or a reckless disregard for whether it was false or not. I'm not going to go into all this in detail tonight, but I agree with all of this.

I just deleted a further sentence or two. Best not say any more for now.

Karen

A Good Friday

The reading of the Passion according to John

I don't mean to be flippant about one of the holiest days of the church year. It's just that it really has been a good day for me.

After the service, a stark reminder
remains of what the day commemorates.

It didn't start out great. I spent half of my work day trying to track down a $2400 discrepancy. I narrowed down the source of the problem, but was unable to solve it. Drat. Eventually I ran out of numbers to check and had to give up on it for this week.

Father Ed Harnsberger

At 11:00 AM I went to Confession, during which I was given a suggestion for amendment of life that will be fairly time intensive. We'll see how far I get with that one, but I'm not rejecting it out of hand. While I was there I finally got a decent photo of one of the priests. (Previous attempts at photographing him had not turned out well.) It's now edited and uploaded to the Clergy page, replacing an old, not very good photo which didn't even match the others in format.

I also tweaked the formatting on the Holy Week listings on the web site's main page. Somehow I'd forgotten to finish setting up the days and dates to look consistent all the way down through the table. It's still missing a space after one comma, but oh, well.

Father Smith, subdeacon Howard, and Rev. Angie

Once I had that page (almost) fixed, it was time to go off to church. I didn't serve, but I did take pictures, obviously. The clergy and subdeacons are breaking in some brand new vestments, including these red ones, after the parish saved up for years to buy them. I was also reminded that I still owe two of the three people above a picture of themselves from Palm Sunday, wearing ecclesiastic berets. Too bad those photos didn't turn out very well, but I need to send them along anyway.

Back at home after church, I discovered that the Wikipedia admin that closed the debate on the future of the Barbara Bauer article let an interpretation of Wikipolicy trump the clear majority of people who believed that the subject was sufficiently notable and the criticisms well-sourced. The article was deleted. This may surprise those of you who have followed my tribulations as I've worked on the article over the past 11 months, but I'm not heartbroken that it's gone. It was a tricky thing, trying to have a fair and balanced article about someone for whom nearly all the extant information is either negative, factually suspect or both. I did save the Google cached version to my hard drive, though. If this lawsuit she filed ever gains traction and there are mainstream news reports about her, that may affect whether she merits a Wikipedia article in the eyes of those who wanted it deleted before. In the meantime I don't have to worry about it any more.

What else have I don't tonight? I've watched some Doctor Who, researched the agent I'm submitting to next, and finally broken through the tricky bit of dialogue I've been stuck on in the Fayubi and Jor scene. It's posted on the fiction blog, and I'd appreciate a comment from someone just to know that it's been read. Can you guess where the sticking point was?

The agent I have in mind this time is one who wants three chapters, so I won't be doing simultaneous submissions. Nor will I mention his name here unless he expresses interest in my work. Suffice it to say that I'm going after an agent who is the very antithesis of Bauer, a highly respected and respectable one who nevertheless, according to his web site, is still interested in signing new authors. He charges no fees, of course, only commissions. I've had this particular guy in mind for years, ever since reading some advice he wrote in one of the annual writers' resource books. The only reason I'm not going to name him here is that I don't want to give the impression that I'm complaining about him if things don't work out between us.

Enough. Good night!

I'm Not Fooling Anyone....

I just wrote a rather long post on my LiveJournal, listing in extreme detail the contrasting timelines between my most recent submission to a publisher and my extremely recent submission to a literary agent. I won't repeat it all here; go take a look if you're curious. Here's the gist of it. On Friday it will have been 13 months since my three chapters, synopsis and cover letter for Heirs of Mâvarin arrived at Tor Books. I'm not blaming or complaining, just reporting. Meanwhile, less than 23 hours after sending a one-page query by email to a literary agent who specifically says to send queries by email, I received her form rejection tonight by return email. Drat.

It's hard not to be depressed about this, even though the agent's standard form rejection is as nice as an unpersonalized form rejection can possibly be. I know what my emotional response is supposed to be, too. I should be an adult about this, a professional. As Tom Hanks says in You've Got Mail, probably quoting from The Godfather, "It's not personal, it's business." As John Scalzi (who also quotes this) points out in his recent book, You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing, "If you take rejection personally as a writer, you will go mad, because every writer gets rejected. A lot." (The link is to the Whatever posting that sentence originally came from.)

Scalzi also says that a lot of the time, a writer will never even know why the work was rejected. That's just how it is. There are generally far more submissions than any given agent, editor or publisher can possibly accept, even if every one of them were great. Therefore a lot of rejections must be sent out. Time is at a premium for these folks, so they're not likely to waste it on personalized rejections for all, not when the stuff that's actually being published or pitched requires their attention. Thus: the standard form rejection. Jill's novel is brilliant, but the publisher just bought a similar one from Stephen King. Result: form rejection. Fred can't even write in complete sentences, but he wants the publisher to fly out and read Fred's manifesto while Fred watches (so that the publisher doesn't steal it). Result: form rejection. Karen's query matches the guidelines perfectly, but... the one-paragraph description just doesn't sound original enough catch the agent's imagination. Result: form rejection.

I know all this. I also know that writers, especially the ones who haven't sold their novels yet, are notoriously oversensitive about rejection letters. They often perceive condescension or hostility in the mildest of wordings, and take insult from the manuscript coming back too quickly or too slowly, with a response either too personalized or not personalized enough. I've been there, and I'm determined not to behave that way at this stage in my life.

Besides, it's clear from the tone of this particular agent's form rejection letter, which she posted on her blog a few days ago with annotations, that she's a genuinely nice person. She clearly wants writers to succeed, even the ones who don't make it past her initial email screening. Aside from the fact that she doesn't want to represent my book, I haven't the slightest basis for a complaint against her. I wish her well.

Similarly, I know enough about Tor and its editors to have a lot of respect for what they do and the way they do it. It is inconvenient for me, but not at all surprising, that the Nielsen Haydens didn't snatch my submission from the slush pile back in February or March, 2006, clutch it to their respective chests (they could take turns, maybe), and proclaim, rapturously, that this is the book they've been waiting for all their lives. I know it will take as long as it takes, and that there's no guarantee, even thirteen months out or longer, of my receiving anything more than a form rejection. It it happens that way, I promise to do nearly all my wailing and gnashing of teeth offline, and not lay a word of blame on anyone but (possibly) myself.

These are my good intentions, and the principles are sound. I know that there are other agents in the world, and even other publishers. I even know that the book is good, even if I seem to have trouble convincing the right people of this.

But you know that it's all a front, right? My intellectual good sense can't squelch the hurt child inside, the one saying, "Why didn't she like it? What did I do wrong?" That so-nice standard rejection hasn't drawn a single tear from me, but my throat is sore and tight, as if I have been crying. I am not angry with anyone, because everyone has done what they were supposed to do, even if it hasn't gotten me the result I want. Nevertheless, I'm depressed as heck.

Tomorrow I pull myself together and start again.

Karen

To the Point

As I mentioned last night, our last sightseeing of the "Big Five-Oh" trip, if you don't count IKEA, was a visit to a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Spire in Scottsdale, AZ. It was part of Wright's proposed 1957 design for the Arizona State Capitol, along with some shorter spires and other features that were too outre for lawmakers of the era. It was finally built all by itself in 2004 at the corner of Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard and Scottsdale Road, at the edge of The Promenade Mall. It weighs more than 75,000 pounds, according to the Roadside America tip about it, and is assembled with about 1,700 individual pieces of steel.

Yeah, well. The point is that it's this historic thing, designed by the best-known architect since Charles Eiffel; and yet it exists basically as a big turquoise-colored curiosity at the edge of a shopping mall.


But I got out of the car and walked over for a closer look and some better photos. Right away I came upon a big canvas-covered fence behind which the spire was apparently barricaded. The sign on the fence proclaimed the creation of a Frank Lloyd Wright Commemorative Park, to be opened in Spring, 2007. Peeking through the tears in the canvas told me two things: 1) they've barely started doing anything with that little block of land, and 2) the spire was not actually in the barricaded area. I walked on.


I'm glad I did! There already is a park covering perhaps a quarter acre around the spire. This bear sculpture is one of quite a few animal statues found in there, along with javalinas, a coyote and several bunnies. Real desert plants, including this youngish saguaro (perhaps 75 years old) and firecracker bushes, add natural elements to the landscaping.


According to our tour guide at Taliesin West yesterday, Wright liked the idea of a ship design in the desert. The spire and its surroundings seem to reflect this interest. Doesn't this water feature remind you of the prow of a ship? The bricks that box it in are the same kind John and I see around Tucson all the time, and want to incorporate into our house. And the water here attracts a natural, albeit ephemeral, element to this little park. Do you see what I'm talking about?


It's a whole flock of grackles, here to take advantage of the cool water on an unusually hot March day.

***

Now that I'm home again, I need to get on with a number of things, like packing stuff from my office into boxes, and getting on with diet and exercise, and updating a resume or two. I'm getting to the point where I can't put off such things much longer. After all, I said I was giving up avoidance for Lent!

To that end, I copied some leads off a Writer's Digest online article tonight. It was about 23 literary agencies currently accepting new clients. Of those, I found three that represent the magic combination fantasy/science fiction/young adult, and that didn't, to the best of my memory, reject a previous query years ago. If I don't announce by the end of the week that I've written at least a first draft of a query to one or more of these agents, you have my permission to start nagging me.

Karen