(Yes, I do like to kick dead horses. Why do you ask?)
Alright, so the whining bugs me. The "helplessness" bugs me, too.
The other day Marcy Tweeted that she was teaching little D problem-solving skills: if you walk around the chair, you can reach your toy. It's amazing how many adults cannot follow this same thought process.
The #agentfail martyrs fall into this category.
Look, dude, if you really want a venue for your venting, then walk around the chair. Uh... ever heard of an anonymous blog? Create and "agentFAIL" blog, remain anonymous, and ask people to email you their stories, which will be posted anonymously. They can send their stories to agentfail@hotmail.com; nobody will know who you are, no agents will deploy their flying monkeys to get you. If it REALLY bugs you that much, do something about it. Don't just whine about how you can't whine the way you want to.
In other news, Spring Break Cleaning is going not so well. Because of sickness in the form of nausea. Not enough to be sick-sick, just enough to be annoying because I can't really stand up.
"I'm Sick During Spring Break." I should add that song to No Child Left Behind: The Musical! In the style of "It's Raining on Prom Night," if you were wondering.
Script Frenzy is less than two weeks away. Guess who has not done A THING to get ready? Need to figure out a Kick-Off location...
Why is it when agents complain about writers, they're "educating", but when writers complain about agents, they're "whining"?
ReplyDelete1) Because of the tone and content of the complaints (the ones I was thinking of when I wrote these two posts), and
ReplyDelete2) Because writers have much to learn from agents; not so much the other way around.
We writers are asking agents to give us something; we need something from them. Yes, the agents need a good book from the writers, but there is no shortage of writers. The "balance of power" favors them greatly -- just like when I apply for a job and 17 other people apply for the same job. HR has the power, I don't.
Writers don't know what it's like to be an agent. We don't understand the quantity or the (lack of) quality of the queries they receive (on one blog, someone said he was sure the #queryfails some of the agents were posting were fake, that the writer made the letter that bad on purpose, in an attempt to catch the agent's eye. Uh... reality check fail?) We writers don't know what all is involved in an agent's day. We need to be "educated." I think agents already know how frustrating it is to wait for a response, even past the "deadline," but there's not much they can do (besides keep trudging through the slush, which they are doing. The good ones, at least).
Getting unprofessional queries is a valid complaint, in my opinion (especially when you get that many of them). I didn't see the agents as "complaining," I saw it more as "pointing out:" showing us what they do and deal with. But the backlash that has ensued (what I have read) is "complaining."