The Great Communication Fail...

A couple of weeks back, I read about the twitter project, #queryfail on someone else's blog. Intrigued, since I presently don't deal with an agent but had hoped to one day, I read all about it. Needless to say, I was a little disgusted by the attitude around it, more than I was by the overall idea behind it. The woman who started it *rubbed her hands with glee* which made the whole thing sound like a witch hunt, more than an exercise designed to show writers the types of mistakes that are likely to not only make agents laugh at you, but toss your query right into file thirteen.

A lot of writers were outraged by the idea. #queryfail was cruel, many said. Even if it was done anonymously, there was still the potential for some poor author to log in and see a mockery of their own query. Anonymous or no, the humiliation of rejection is often enough to put some writers off of submitting their work. Seeing their query get torn apart right there in front of thousands of Tweeters could do some damage.

So in response, #agentfail was set up to give writers a chance to talk back and address some of the problems authors have with agents. In an anonymous forum, maybe that would be better, because though authors can pick and choose the agents they deal with using a certain degree of choosiness, agents tend to hold all the cards in the writer/agent relationship. Many writers don't want to step on proverbial toes, get caught up in some web that is going to hold them back from even getting representation.

I think the whole thing is a little sad. I thought about starting a twitter movement called #youallfail. Why? Because more and more often, it seems that people are only happy when they are making other people miserable. The whole you stepped on me, I'll break your arm mentality is so high school, and I really did believe (probably foolishly,) for a long time that adults were different; the knew how to behave and get along with each other in ways kids didn't understand. Talk about naivete.

I write because it's my passion. It is all I have ever wanted to do with my life. I don't think about things like making agents and editors giggle when I write a query letter, I think about taking the next step in my career. I think about how it takes guts to slap your soul down on a three hundred and twenty page manuscript and then put it out there to be torn apart. Then I find myself thinking that it's no wonder there are so many writers publishing and podcasting their own books. The traditional medium has been such a joke for years that soon the snooty and persnickety may find themselves out of jobs. They may tune in one morning to check the book ratings and find a manuscript they took a dump on once is now a #1 best seller on the NY Times.

It doesn't matter if you're an agent, an editor or a writer. At times in my life I have been both on the writers end and the editorial end. I've had manuscripts fly across my desk with the craziest cover letters, and have seen so many writers who didn't even know there were rules, but I took a look at their manuscript anyway. There were times I was incredibly glad I did, because if I judged every manuscript that happened across my desk, before reading it mind you, on the cover letter or query that accompanied it, I'd probably pass up the opportunity to read and publish quite a few amazing stories.

The same type of garbage goes on in the music business, and the representation are the first people to start crying when they find themselves out of work.

In the end, it boils down to how we treat each other. Not just in the publishing world and the music business, but in every day life. I'm a bitch, I won't lie. I've been mean to people both on and off the internet, but I don't walk around looking for a fight. I don't push buttons for the sake of pushing buttons. Most times it's because I feel like I'm in a position that requires me to fight back. I'd just really like to see the world change, and for the better. It'd be fantastic to wake up one day and find people more willing to help each other, rather than crush each other on the ladder to the top.

The Communication Age... all that lost data

My friend Pru, after recently reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, brought up some really thought-provoking things about the communication age as we know it.

I grew up during the 1970's and 1980's, a time when it was popular to have penpals from overseas that you could share your cultural differences with in order to broaden your perspective. My husband, who also grew up during this time fondly recalls one of his penpals and the gifts they exchanged with each other bridging the differences between them. While my husband and I were dating we spent a couple of years living far apart and talking for hours on end on the telephone long-distance at that time was a financial no-no. We had limited chats here and there and visits, but some of our most memorable conversations were done through letters. Remember those? No, silly, not emails. These were letters. They arrived in your post box, stamped and addressed. If you were friends with an artist, envelopes often arrived decorated in knotwork or strange creatures playing guitars.

During the time that he lived in Pittsburgh and I was finishing high school, I remember rushing home nearly every day to check the mailbox for some kind of letter or token from him. Though he'd probably blush profusely and deny it today, he occasionally wrote me poetry and romantic short stories. Unfortunately, we moved around quite a bit after we were together and there is very little left from this time. I think in all my vast collection there are only three or four of his letters left in a box on the top shelf of my closet. It made me sad when I realized this because our relationship was very intense and beautiful in those early years, the kind of legendary love you want your grandchildren to discover inside a box of old letters found in a dusty corner of the attic.

One of the things Pru mentioned was how even though we write to each other on forums, in blogs and via email these days, the data is all too often quickly swiped from memory. Sure, some print out emails and tuck them away, but the novelty of doing that wore off for me right around the time I upgraded to my very own dial-up service and stopped dialing in from a shared account with my parents. Here we are in the world communicating with people all day long, all across the world, but how will all of it be archived or remembered? Say some strange catastrophe were to come along and wipe out the internet and all of its memories. Cherished conversations on favorite forums would wither away like dust in our own memories. Loving emails exchanged between those held apart by circumstances, all gone just like that.

It pains me somewhat to think that letter writing has become something of a lost art. Why sit down with ink and paper when you can drop down at the keyboard and tap away to your heart's content? Pru talked about the legacy left behind in the great letters of the world. Think of all we know about history and how much of it was confirmed or disproved by evidence found in written exchanged between people from that time. Letters from great presidents and kings left behind a piece of memory we can refer to. As we move away from written books and newspapers to rely on eFiles and eBooks, what happens to those tomes when the last batteries die?

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for change and evolution. I think it's a wonderful thing that some of my closest and most intimate friends are people I've never met face to face, but have opened up to thanks to the great Communication Age. There is just a sense of sadness that pervades when I think of how all of this communication seems to push us further apart as a whole today, rather than bringing us closer together.

Color me nostalgic for simpler times today.

Now, enjoy the letters Thomas Jefferson and John Adams once shared: