It is sad that whinging writers give the rest of us a bad name. There is only one person responsible and that’s yourself … so no point in whining because there should only ever be one person listening – and who wants to hear the sound of their own voice (not me)

I know as an emerging writer I’m happy to get all the insider information to propel me one step closer to my dream of being published. Stephen King tells of the huge spike or rejection letters he got as an emerging writer – part of me thinks it’s part of the initiation process, the hardening up – the letting for of being preshus!

The ex you spoke about Paul sounds like a blocked artist (to use Julia Cameron… was stoked to see her and tAW mentioned in your post Lilith!) Probably a good thing to get the hell away from her.

The belief in entitlement is one that really irks me. Like an artistic welfare state, the publishing industry is supposed to just dole out (pun intended) contracts? Suuure. Gonna happen Right Now, too.

Ugh, I read that blog rant too. I’d be insulting if the author wasn’t completely cutting herself off in the process of ranting. I’m more than willing to let people show the world how stupid they can be.

When I first started dating my ex, she claimed she was a writer, and I figured that maybe I was distracting her to the point where she wasn’t writing. I backed off, but she told me she couldn’t write because I was still in the way. We moved to a two-bedroom apartment, with one bedroom reserved as office space, and then she couldn’t write because my stuff was distracting her. We then moved to a three-bedroom house, and she couldn’t write because her room didn’t have just the right light to it for two months out of the year. I offered to switch rooms with her, and then was told that she couldn’t write in it because the paint color wasn’t right. Every time I tried to make it easier for her to write, she’d find another excuse, and I fully expected to hear that she couldn’t write because a set of electrons on the other side of the galaxy was going counterclockwise instead of clockwise. By the time we divorced, her catch-all excuse for not writing was “depression”, and we divorced partly because I said “Yeah: the one your butt is leaving in the couch cushion from watching television for fourteen hours a day.”

The punchline? Over and over, the people who make the most noise about how they just can’t write are painfully jealous of anybody coming close to living the perceived writer’s lifestyle. They don’t want to work for it, but they’ll hang out at signing and reading events, telling you ALL about the ten-volume series that they’re going to write one of these days when “the book business stops being so commercial.” Of course, you just know those spinning electrons are going to get in the way when that happens.

I also have to thank you for noting the widdle darlings that have nothing better to do than whine in public about how the agents are “unprofessional”. Not to sound like a “Back in my day” post, but I remember when these idiots actually had to put something on the line to express their delusions, and that usually meant editing their own magazines. I remember very well the explosion of small-press science fiction and fantasy magazines in the late Eighties and early Nineties…almost every one put out by some snowflake who had been rejected by every serious magazine in the genre and responded with “Well, I’ll show you!” One of two things happened in those days. Either the new editor found him/herself buried in slush from fellow snowflakes (and death threats from the snowflakes if the editor asked them to subscribe in order to keep the magazine going) and learned a valuable lesson about the economics of the magazine business, or the new editor kept making the same mistakes until the insurance settlement that financed the magazine was frittered away. (I’m not kidding in the slightest when I relate that the editor of the first magazine I ever wrote for had to shut down when his mother asked him to move out and he no longer had the disposable income.)

Ever notice how you don’t see all of those little skiffy magazines on the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble any more? Well, considering that Fine Print Distribution went bankrupt trying to spread the word of zines around the world, the big bad publishing business put its foot down. I guess there wasn’t enough business to subsidize magazines where the editor/publisher was writing 80 percent of the content, including the film reviews and the comics.

Maybe QueryFail crossed into mockery from time to time, but hell, I’d mock those people, too.

Here’s a question that I think I know the answer to: Is the Query* advice also valuable for those of us who are short fiction folks? (I’m betting the answer is “heck, yes” but thought I’d check).

The other thing I wish was out there was a nice, clean, collection point as all the twitters linked from the above sites are just chock full of replies and other comments, etc. Not easy to find the actual advice. But hey, if you want the info you can do the work to find it!

- yeff