Support Your Local Literary Agent
<p> You know its late in the business cycle when ravenous investors scoop up Initial Public Offerings having plans involving Wi or Fi or Spectrum Breadth or social networking. Even worse are the gatekeeper floats a variation on monkey in the middle wherein two tall people toss a ball over a short person’s head. Gatekeepers don’t produce anything, and that’s okay. They enhance, they tweak, they refine and serve the midstream, that gaping hole between producers and end users. Natural gas can’t heat your apartment without a midstream pipeline.
<p> If you’re a writer, you’re a producer. You’re a wildcat well in Irian Jaya. A volcano has swallowed your neighbor and triple canopy jungle shrouds your hideaway: life is good. Insects hum. You get the idea of sending a message to the outside world. But who are you going to contact? It’s like uh oh we ate the missionary, please send another. We’ll behave.
<p> Literary agents! As boiling lava fills Main Street you happened to grab a copy of Writers Digest from somebody’s cold dead fingers and scan the ads. Writers wanted. Your first thought may be wanted for what? The post office has photographs of writers who are wanted, but is this a good thing? At this point you have to resist the temptation to flee upriver: you gotta put some product in the pipeline.
<p> Year One: the letter you wrote to the agent may have gotten lost. It may have been stolen, shredded, lost at sea, vaporized, vulcanized, ionized, briefly pitied by a third party, misdirected, or subjected to extremes of heat and cold.
<p> Years Two and Three: Well, your letter may not have captured their imagination. Anyway you have more product. A wellhead fire kills your cousin. You write another letter.
<p> Year Nine: Phrases like “sorry, not for me,” now infest your vocabulary. If you don’t want a banana, just say so. You check the ads in Writers Digest: “Writers wanted!” Who are these people? What is the source of this insatiable want?
<p> Panic in the Year Zero: alligators eat people wearing pith helmets! This is the last straw. Those weren’t missionaries, they were literary agents and those are your gators. You better hope no one finds out about that. Wait a week, write another letter. Feed your pets.