David Thayer

Back in the late Nineties, when many of today’s editors were in high school, information was hard to come by. Damned hard. Let’s say you were a writer without portfolio, a writer in an informational void, a writer coming up for air after six or seven years of continuous typing. Maybe you had the audacity to think after all that you might want to see about selling some of the stuff you’d written, get it read. Remember, this is the Nineties. We launched a cruise missile at Sudan. There were only a few hundred bloggers. Gasoline was cheap, productivity was up. You wanted to own a million shares of WebPizza.com before the bubble burst. So, you’re the writer, you’ve got stuff to sell, but you don’t know much about how the publishing business works. Once it was clear that the new millenium or Y2K as it was known, was not the end of the world, your thoughts returned to selling your work in the markteplace of ideas. But where could you turn?

Todd James Pierce. Yeah, this guy from FSU which over time you came to realize stands for Florida State University, before Gerard Jones pulled everyone whose anyone’s pants down, revealing email addresses within the Sancto Sanctorum, before anyone understood the nature of the game, there was Todd with his Fiction Writers Resource website. Even as Maureen Dowd was winning the Pulitzer Prize, Todd was delivering news and information about agents, literary agents, agents looking for clients, as opposed to agents not looking for clients. And, hey, you’re not Maureen Dowd, so this was big news. Todd slugged away for several years, offering his updated agents info with red squiggly lines you came to understand were links. Red squiggly lines, man! Who knew?

It pisses me off to have Miss Snark and Theresa Hayden and Patrick Nielsen dissing Todd about some dumb shit letter entry from May of 2004. Todd, wherever you are, thanks for trying to educate us about the publishing business. Thanks for all the work you put into your website. I hope your novel sells and Steven Spielberg calls you, and Santa Claus slides down your chimney and Pamela Anderson decides that you’re the man for her. Maybe Pam is actively looking, maybe she’s not. Todd, you’re the Dude.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 11:36 am and is filed under Ripped from Headlines Still Oozing Ink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.