Sorry, Dear Agent, I’m Too

Swamped To Write This

To You Personally . . .

     Well now, if you’re a serious writer, you know what I’m talking about here. 

But, if you’re a literary agent, you probably don’t because:

A) If you communicate clearly and honestly and with some sense of cultivating a positive reputation –if not a relationship– then you already communicate clearly and honestly with some sense of cultivating a positive reputation, if not a relationship, OR

B) If you are and you don’t (a literary agent who doesn’t communicate . . .), which unfortunately seems to me to constitute the vast majority, maybe no one has put it in your face that Communication Deficit Disorder (CDD) is an affliction common to –and rampaging through– your profession.

     It’s one thing, for instance (and extraordinarily rare I might add), for a writer to receive a pleasant, thoughtful rejection notice from an agent you’ve queried or submitted material requested for review, and quite another still (the “rule” it appears to me and scores of other writers I’ve asked) to get back a snotty, arrogant, auto-formatted reply that’s about as personal as used cardboard . . . or the other extreme: one that’s over-the-top patronizing.

     It’s especially demeaning to get the same nonsense wording returned in response to three separate submissions over a long time period –each noting that the agent has been “too swamped lately with work to give proper attention” to a submission.  Actually, the guy I’m referring to has been “too swamped” for four years.  Somebody should send him a towel and dry clothes!

     Did all literary agents take the same “How To Reject and Dismiss Writer Submissions” course?  Did all of them hire the same lifecoach to give them all the same sets of words to use?  I have read over and over how literary agent “decisions are very subjective ones, and what doesn’t work for one may work for another.”  How helpful and empathetic.  Then there’s “It might be useful to review agent listings in the Guide to Literary Agents or . . .”  Duh!  No kidding?  How does this genius think I found her or him to start with?

     Oh, and ten agents have found my work “intriguing” but all ten were “afraid it’s not interesting enough for me, and good luck . . .”  Thanks all!  I’m simply thrilled to know you’re intrigued but not interested.  I never realized it was possible to be both of those things at the same time.  Aaaah, what we can learn when we subject ourselves to experts!

     Well, probably all the wrong folks are reading this.  Serious writers are probably still with me, and odds are most of them are in agreement about at least parts of what I’ve said.  Agents though who need to read this and have their cages rattled, have no doubt disconnected back up front at the first suggestion that they might be subjected to the same subjectivity they dispense.

     Oh, well.  I got it off my chest.  Now it’s time to move on . . . have you been following my 7-words-or-less-sentence story?                         halalpiar 

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