Uncreated Conscience

I have a confession to make.

I am completely and utterly addicted to making stopmotion and hand drawn animation films. From whence does this latent desire from filmmaking arise? I have no idea.

Storyboarding

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In a few short weeks my internship at Ye Olde Literary Agency will come to an end and then I shall be put to the task of finding entry-level positions in the sinking industry that is publishing. Oh god. Why, oh why, did I choose to make this lateral career move right as the industry decides to implode? Are there any literary agencies looking to hire an assistant? (As much as El Jefe adores me, there is no position open at Ye Olde Literary Agency.) I promise I shall be good and fetch the agents coffee and read their slush and write good reader’s reports!

In some ways I feel like I’m back at university because my parents keep asking me when I’ll come home to Los Angeles for vacation. I need to cover for La Junior Agent when she is at a conference in May, but afterwards I figured I would go and bask in my parents’ love and hospitality for a week before starting the job hunt in earnest.

The difference, of course, between Student!JJ and Current!JJ is that I am financially independent of my parents. They paid my rent and bills three years ago; I pay my own rent and bills now. Financially Independent!JJ needs to find a salaried job with benefits soon (I can strain Uncle Sam’s grace no longer). My parents know this, yet they seem to cling to this happy idea that I will be home for an extended “summer holiday”. Case in point: they have invited me to vacation with them in Cancun for a week in June (they have a timeshare there). Expenses paid, as though I were 17 again.

It is so tempting.

But what if I find a job before then? Jobs are so scarce in publishing as it is, I’d better make myself readily available for any and all opportunities.

But…! I’ve never been to Mexico! (Sad for someone having grown up in California, eh?) Pyramids! Caribbean blue water! MY PARENTS ARE PAYING. Gaaah, what to do?

I think I may have to go. After all, when will I be able to travel to Cancun by my own means? Probably never.

Well! Regardless, just to prove that I am really am dedicated to books and my love of stories, here is a “liveblog” of a few queries we’ve received. I read a lot more manuscripts than I read slush as El Jefe is established in agenting and not as hungry for new clients. Also, he doesn’t accept email queries.

I had some thoughts about high fantasy the other day as I was talking with my friend Jess (the other intern on my floor), but those shall wait for another day.

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According to Abner, I am on the wrong career path; instead of publishing, I ought to be in the espionage business. Here is a girl, he says, who is fluent in three languages and conversant in a handful of others, jumps out of perfectly good airplanes and scuba dives for fun, knows martial arts, fencing, and horseback riding, who can also behave properly at formal social functions (thanks to cotillion). On top of that, who would suspect the cute little Asian girl with hipster glasses and a bowler hat of being a spy? Certainly not our enemies! Uncle Sam would snap me up in a second, Abner claims.

Ah, but you see, Abner, Uncle Sam has already had me on the radar for a long time. I can’t count the number of times the FBI, the CIA, and the military have tried to recruit me (mostly for my language abilities). Unfortunately I am chronically uninterested in working for the government as bureaucracy and I don’t mesh very well. I love my country, don’t get me wrong, but my love of books and stories far outweighs my patriotism. Besides, I think being a skydiving pirate would be far more fun.

Although a diplomatic passport does sound tempting, considering JJ’s Law (in which the world conspires to prevent JJ from having a pleasant flying experience…EVER).

However, despite incentives to the contrary, I do think publishing is the right business for me, even if reading queries does give me a horrific headache.

More liveblogging of queries!

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You know, the longer I live on the East Coast, the more I’m convinced the gorgeous spring day where it is warm and clear and full of sunshine is a complete myth. It has rained nearly everyday without fail since April decided to show up. While I’m grateful it isn’t ass-cold anymore, the new sogginess I could do without. It doesn’t help that my hair has reached that annoying length where it is just too long to be straight and just too short to wave properly. Any hint of dampness in the air = JJ’s hair going out of control. Back into a ponytail it is, then.

Yesterday I got my first request for an explanation of why I passed on a query. I will say first that the writer will never get a response. I am sorry and I wish I could help him/her out, but unfortunately I just can’t. The first is an issue of time. It takes me anywhere from a half-hour to 2 hours (or more) to craft a reader’s report or an editorial letter. (Longer if I have nothing positive to say about the partial or full. Because it isn’t constructive criticism to send the writer a letter that reads “THIS SUCKS.”) What with reading manuscripts and dealing with existing clients, I haven’t had time to blog as much as much as I used to, let alone individually reply to the bazillion queries we receive.

The second is I can’t remember to which work the writer is referring. I read so many queries that they all end up blurring together. If it had been memorable, it would have already been requested or else relegated to the “batshit insane” pile. (I love those. I admit to photocopying a few to keep in a file to giggle over when I am having a tough day.) There are many reasons I would pass on a query (the first being vagueness), but I can’t possibly remember why I passed on this particular one if I can’t even remember the original query in the first place.

Part the last of my 100+ query liveblog. I trudge onward to work now in the pouring rain where the editorial letter from Hell awaits me. What do I say? “Dear Author, your first 100 pages were cute with some revisions that I think it needs here. However, on page 101 it went somewhere from where I’m not sure it can recover”? La Junior Agent told me to write down my first impressions before toning it down to professional politeness otherwise I’ll end up with editorial constipation. It might be a good idea.

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I read a manuscript yesterday that was so searingly bad I swear it singed off my eyebrows. I can only suspend my disbelief so far. And it was all going along so swimmingly in the first 100 pages or so and them bam! it jumped the shark. Well, it wasn’t that it jumped the shark so much as it got eaten by Jaws and left me with a mangled corpse that I am somehow expected to fix. El Jefe has left the editing and editorial letter to me and I’m not quite sure how to go about this. There are only so many ways you can nicely say “WHAT IN HOLY FUCKING HELL???????”

Anyhow, part three of my query “liveblog” follows beneath the cut. I’ve noticed that I’m an eternal optimist. I’ll request many things from slush, hopeful that it will be brilliant. Unfortunately, so many fail the partial stage. But that’s another post.

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Hopefully today will be slightly less slushful at work so I can concentrate on these editorial letters I have to write. One is a direct request from the author; I wrote a reader’s report for El Jefe a few weeks ago and he liked it so much he took me out to lunch and then attached it DIRECTLY in an email to the author. The author emailed back specifically asking me to “give him guidance” on where to go next with the manuscript. El Jefe called me “brilliant” in the email which is incredibly flattering, but now there’s all this pressure to live up to that too.

Anyhow, I now submit for some more amusement, the next 25 of the 100+ queries I read yesterday under the cut.

P.S. For those who wanted to know what the “batshit insane query” was, all I can say is that it involved schizophrenia and Anakin Skywalker. I wish I could make this sort of stuff up.

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I’m a bit burned out; I have two editorial letters to write, a manuscript to read and write a report for, and another for one of my newest critique partners. Unfortunately I think I am completely “read out” at the moment. I went through about 100 queries today for El Jefe and my brain isn’t functioning enough to write anything else coherent.

For your amusement, under the cut I submit my thoughts about the first 25 queries I read and why they did or did not work for me (and El Jefe). A few requests are in there which I think illuminates more my own personal tastes than anything else. Clearly I love anything with zombies. I love zombie fiction. (Still unsure about PRIDE & PREJUDICE & ZOMBIES though.) Mind you, anything I like has to be within the umbrella of what El Jefe would like, but my boss’s reading tastes are just about as broad and varied as mine.

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You know, when I was younger, I used to think that being a housewife would be one of the worst occupations ever. Cleaning? Cooking? Doing chores? Ew! But the older I get, the more joy I take in small domestic tasks like decorating my apartment and keeping it clean. Playing Wifey for Bear this past week gave me a taste of what being a hausfrau would be like and I’ll admit it, it was kind of nice to keep house and cook for him while I frittered away on my computer and worked on editorial letters and revised my novel. I could totally work from home. I might even enjoy it. When I left New Jersey last night, I left Bear a week’s worth of crustless shrimp and mushroom mini-quiches in the freezer to take for lunch. My poor Bear has no time to sleep, let alone eat while he studies for med school exams.

But then again, I take just as much joy walking into the office and doing my job. Today we had a subrights tutorial at Ye Olde Literary Agency which was fascinating and educational (yes, I am stodgy and boring that way) and I spent the rest of the day reading manuscripts, fretting over editorial letters I have to write (why does everything I write sound offensive?), and going through the slush. I am rather ashamed to say I have an enormous backlog of slush to wade through—El Jefe only takes snail mail submissions and sometimes the paper queries just get pushed aside for more important things.

I’m noticing a big trend in many of the queries I receive and that’s a general sort of vagueness. I’ll admit that I thoroughly love reading slush because I like to pick out the crazies and shake my head in disbelief but I equally love finding diamonds in the rough. (I’m still waiting on pins and needles for a requested partial about a time-travelling prankster to arrive!) Excitement (or any strong reaction in general) is a large part of what makes slush-slogging so enjoyable but a sort of ennui has settled over me as I rifle through the submissions. It isn’t that the queries are bad, but they’re not great either.

Someone once said God is in the details and the same applies to a query. Details, details, details are crucial. I’ve read dozens of submissions that say things like “the story contains tragedy and suspense and is a moving love story” without giving me any of the specific elements that make it so. “A man grows up in a small town, discovers secrets about his family, and comes to a new understanding of himself.” In and of itself, this is not a bad query. But there’s absolutely nothing about it that stands out. Which town? What secret? How does his view of himself change?

Why, why, why? That’s the question “wh” word I find myself using the most often. “Why does the protagonist do what s/he does? Why should we care?” If the query isn’t too vague, sometimes the stakes aren’t high enough. Physical consequences may be high (“If we don’t retrieve the Sword of Destiny the world will end!”) but personal investment is low. Why does this sleuth want to solve the mystery? It isn’t enough to go on a quest for the Sword of Destiny or solve the mystery simply for the sake of going on a quest or solving the mystery. The characters need to have motivation. The writer might know what these character’s motivations are, but the rest of us don’t unless it is specified.

I’m sure I will have more thoughts on queries at a later date, being as I have a pile LARGER THAN MY HEAD to slog through this week. This is me unconscious.

P.S. I have officially lived in New York long enough that I read “Houston, TX” as “HOW-ston” in my head instead of “HEW-ston.”

For those of you on Twitter, go and follow #queryfail for real-time Twittering by agents (and an intern–yours truly) going through their slush. I love my job!

Dear “Award-Winning” Slush Slogger:
Don’t claim you’ve won awards when you haven’t. With the advent of Google, it’s quite possible to sniff out fraudulent claims via a little internet searching. Just look at what The Smart Bitches did to Cassie Edwards.

Dear We Did Not Request This Particular Project Slush Slogger:
We might have requested you, but we certainly didn’t request this. Cheap and sneaky and underhanded is NOT the way to attain representation.