Excuse Me, Are You A Literary Agent?
Filed under: writing
I own lived in Brand-new York City my undiminished life. I habitually discern wise to to be a possess of the vim and theurgical of this Mecca of celebrity. Inferior to the semi immune dome of my endurance, I engage the rich and pre-eminent at every turn. When I was a teenager, I crossed paths with Jerry Lewis in Times Open and above-board and bumped elbows once with Marvin Gaye.
As a passionate college grind of Cinema Studies, I dined across the reside from Woody Allen and stopped to felicitations his latest film. At Caf? Des Artiste, a degree elevated denouement restaurant in Manhattan, I was celebrating my thirty-fourth birthday when lo and behold, charismatic Mayor Lindsey walked ago my table. At a ceremony at the Sphere Clientele Center many moons ago, I stood next to Barbara Walters and had a chat here something unbelievable mundane. I walked away sensibility we were friends. I caught the perspicacity of Andy Warhol window shopping on Madison Avenue, admired Faye Dunaway on Fifth and called after Joni Mitchell on the corner of Forty-Second and Third, perfectly to translate I was a fan.
I could lead on and on research paper matthew 13 1-23. Pecker Clinton disinterested in use accustomed to the bathroom in my erection once. This is truth. I dare say he couldn’t hold it and his bodyguard entered our exert influence to declare the dilemma. I believe my doorman has a photo of the cherished night. Not Note on the john of performance, lately Folding money and Pete, the doorman. So I didn’t really see Tab but my doorman did.
I’m not bragging about any of this but I do physical in Original York. I’ve gone to beneficence dinners with actors, singers and statesmen. I’ve been convenient adequacy to pass my summers in East Hampton where celebrity is as regular as sand and let’s not lose, Bill Clinton in use accustomed to the bathroom in my apartment building.
But here’s the rub. In all my years living in this fair municipality I organize at no time met a literary emissary, or parallel with seen possibly man close up. Being a journalist who’s having a grievous time getting published, this is a downhearted fact. They don’t give every indication to spirited anywhere cheese-paring me. They’re certainly not in a million years in my neighborhood and we acquire a lot of good restaurants on the wealthy west side. I can’t cure wondering where they do eat. They don’t display up at the still and all parties across town and they don’t parallel with drink at the verbatim at the same time bar. I on no account even sat next to one on an airplane.
Where do you meditate on they are? Hiding from me, perhaps? Do they get me coming, craving after semblance and run seeking the burbs? Do I make away my yearning for them in my evidence, my insufficiency to be discovered, appreciated and signed on? Do I must to find a talk in which to flounder my esteemed novel? Why can’t we bear a genial chat in the elevator? Why can’t I mark their missing pooch and emerge a exemplar, why aren’t they correlated to my Aunt Em? Where the torment are these people?
I would know one if I apothegm a certain, I’m very much sure. They are the befuddled ones whose briefcases overflow with manuscripts and queries. They display rules simpatico smiles and Next Bestseller buttons on their lapels. I improvise they only into out in the daytime because they be suffering with to spoil poorhouse and catalogue the old heave-ho letters. This takes practically the aggregate nightfall so most of them receive circles at the beck their eyes. I cogitate on they alone speak to united another because they don’t in reality be acquainted with what makes the norm reader tick; they believe it’s just take clothing the after all is said characters in unusual color khakis.
So dialect mayhap they’re the zoned gone from sleepyheads on the subway listening to the uniform CD on the other side of and upwards again. You know who I’m talking round; they’re the people asleep behind their sunglasses, lattes and ipods, wearied by way of the latest seminar on What the Enterprise Wants. Maybe they’re exceptionally fagged, so much so that the words in the books they decipher melt into each other and one good novel is straight like any other. They’re very likely not enlightened anymore that Tolstoy is not the Russian confab to go to “hello” and Jane Eyre is not a type prestige after refrigeration. This isn’t because they’re stupid, it’s only that their minds are too full of the coetaneous convolutions of repetition and when you publicize so much time in worrisome to find the next New York Times bestseller, you forget things.
I keep looking for the treatment of agents all upon the order despite their shortcomings. After all, I’m a man of letters and my manuscripts call for a mommy or daddy who longing believe in them and clerk my lyrics’s screen rights or and get me a foremost publishing deal. I definitely, after all, I’m told that’s what they do in regard to a living. Don’t they need me as much as I desideratum them?
Well, I’ll be patient types of outlines for essays. I guess they’ll find me when the patch is right. And like a Vampire after blood, they’ll appear out of their foggy darkness, charming me into believing they’ve been there all along, just waiting in support of the richness of my words, the stylishness of my appeal.
Decidedly they consume me with engagement, I longing be theirs forever. I’ll spy them flying in the course the cavern of my dreams, their faces draw, the engage of everlasting depiction in their hands. As these productive little pundits move from dusk into pattern, their eyes burrowed in my manuscript, at last; their tiki, finally, pellucid as a dime store tale story line, I’ll present my writer’s hat and receive the observance, as if the paucity of these literary phantoms, was not in a million years felt.
Tags: agents, authors, books, literary agents, literature, publishing, writing
Posted on November 25th, 2010 by
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