Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Dumb and Frustrating

Here's a dilemma:

When otherwise nice people send you an email that's been forwarded 728 times, with all 852,639 "to" addresses still attached, advising you in 36-point font that THIS IS NOT A HOAX! and THIS WAS ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA--IT'S REAL!!!! ... and what follows is so clearly a hoax and a pile of manure that no sensible person over eight years old could possibly believe it to be true, and Snopes and every debunking site in the f-ing world has exposed it and no one but a moron would believe that Bill Gates wants to send them a check because he's testing a new email system ... and yet the person who sent it to you is a decent person--stupid and naive, yes, but still not someone you want to insult and burn bridges between ... so what do you do?

Blog out your frustrations.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Shout out!

How exciting--my writing pal has moved fast in the last 2 months. She went from being a (sigh) writer-in-search-of-an-agent who (like me) sent over 150 queries on her fantastic book idea, wondering about the meaning of life and joining me in a weekly rant about the unfairness of the agenting world to poor, struggling authors like ourselves, to being zapped with the magic wand of a real, live, fairy god-agent! Within weeks she had a contract with a publisher and is now being mentioned in Publishers Weekly and (today) The Biographer's Craft.

Debra Ann Pawlak; remember the name.

Actually, she was two up on me to start with--she's authored two books already. The Arcadia book at left, and the Bruce Lee bio at left-left.

Still, those agents are slippery little buggers and very hard to catch.  Go, Deb!