Cannot Access Brain
This past week has felt like The Pixies’ song “Where Is My Mind?” Where has been my mind lately? Not anywhere I need it. Today I am covering for two different agents’ assistants (thankfully not at once although actually simultaneously) and I am so scattered. I blame the fact that the coffee machine is broken. And the legalese in this book contract.
My legalese skills are rusty. The last time I had to deal with contract language was when I was working at a corporate law firm and in the corporate environment there are nifty programmes through which you may run the agreement so that blacklines it against against an earlier version of itself! Here in Ye Olde Literary Agency, I have no such luxury and must sit and read word by word, comma by comma, semi-colon by semi-colon to ensure that there are no mistakes. My brain hurts. It doesn’t help that legalese is not written to be “easy to read” and “beautiful”; it is written to include every possible clause, consequence, or outcome of a situation. Commas are my grammatical nightmare (I have writing tics—overuse of parentheses and adverbs—but commas sometimes have me waking up screaming in the middle of the night) and they are everywhere in a legal document. Sentences run 10 lines long. This is not pretty! Why must I read it?
But that is not what I wanted to discuss. I noticed that I must head over to Barnes & Noble today to renew my membership (yes, yes, I know, bad JJ for supporting the big corporate monsters instead her local independent bookstore! …of which there are hardly any in New York City) and realised that it’s been forever since I’ve reviewed a book. I haven’t been reading “new” books recently—most of my time is spent reading slush for El Jefe and now for another agent on the same floor. Chuck Palahniuk’s PYGMY is on my nightstand at the moment (courtesy of Russ) but I remember that I read Melissa Marr‘s FRAGILE ETERNITY a while back and didn’t want to review it until was it was released.
