Category: The Ramble (page 148 of 462)

I am astonished these days by the bold-faced ballsiness of the Republican hypocrisy.

My jaw is perpetually on the floor. It’s not even attached anymore. It’s just a jawbone resting at my feet, as my tongue flops and flips around my rent-open face in moist gesticulations that fail to properly explain the sheer what-the-fuckery I’m forever feeling.

It’s probably always been there, this hypocrisy. Maybe it was better hidden, once upon a time. And certainly no political entity is without its duplicities and insincerities — but what we’re seeing now, what is paraded before us daily by both the administration and by Congress, is like satire written by an angry eight-year-old. It’s so clumsy, so on-the-nose, that no one would ever let the story air because it feels like a chimpanzee’s attempt at parody. Irony is dead. It’s six-feet-deep. Political humor is harder now than ever, because how do you make fun of a clown?

Every time I turn on on the news or even glimpse at Twitter, I see more and newer hypocrisies whipping fast past my eyes, scrolling like the list of side effects you’d get on a commercial for dick pills. It’s dizzying: an ever-growing display of towering horseshit so vertiginous that to attempt to climb it would be positively fucking Sisyphean. You’d never make it to the top. You’d forever be sliding back down as another shovel-load whaps you in the face.

They say they care about families, but then they rip them apart and deny them aid. They call women “hosts,” removing their personage, their choice, their access to care. They love unborn kids but somehow hate the women that give birth to them. Eat shit, Moms. They only want what’s in those uteruses, not the uteruses themselves. And once you’re born, ha ha, double fuck you, kid. Fuck your education. Fuck your health. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, they say only after they’ve bought up all the bootstraps for themselves and closed the bootstrap factories and what the fuck is a bootstrap, anyway?

They speak about individual responsibility, but can’t even show up for their own fucking town halls. They won’t be accountable to anything or anyone, but you, you have to be accountable for everything — even for them. When they say individual responsibility, they mean fuck you, do it yourself. Fuck the safety net. Fuck the general health and well-being of the nation. They got theirs, man. They mean that they won’t help you. The government’s very job is one of communal responsibility, but they have absolved themselves of that role and given it only to you. And how far down does that rabbit hole go? Will we be our kids’ only teachers? Are we our own doctors? Is the road outside my house mine and mine alone to build and to fix? They want to hold only their enemies accountable. They’ll investigate Hillary for decades after she’s dead, but they won’t cast one suspiciously-slitted eye toward Trump, toward Russia, toward every pay-for-play drip of corruption that erodes the bedrock of our government’s ability to self-regulate.

They talk about freedom, but the freedom they want isn’t for you. The freedom you want is the freedom to be able to drink clean water, to breathe clean air, to buy products that won’t kill you, to buy insurance that won’t bankrupt you, to invest in a future that helps you instead of hurts you. The freedom they want is for themselves. The freedom they champion isn’t yours, it belongs to big business. They want businesses to have the freedom to poison your air and your water, to lie to you, to tie you up with loopholes like nooses, to savage your investments and your future earnings. They want the freedom to take advantage of you, and they’ll sell that as your freedom, too. Don’t you want the choice to be lied to, to be cheated, to be ruined? What freedom! What choice! Ah, yes, just as our Founding Fathers wanted: the liberty of empowering others to fuck you from every angle. Isn’t that in the Bill of Rights? Can we get it in there somewhere?

They talk about being fiscally conservative, but then they spend money like they can just print more. (And our president thinks we can just print more.) It’ll cost more for our Comrade-in-Chief to go golfing than for the entire National Endowment for the Arts budget. The president has the fiscal discipline of a drunken gambling addict.

They talk about being stewards of the land, then take a flamethrower to the EPA, try to sell off the national parks, refuse to acknowledge climate change, and eradicate environmental protections — including streams. Because fuck streams, right? Streams have had it too good for too long.

They want you to pay your taxes, even though our president is proud of having never paid his.

They bark about voter fraud, then gerrymander the shit out of everything, rigging the game with a hundred thumbs holding down their side of the scale.

They climb to their seat of power on a ladder whose rungs are fashioned from fake news, and then once they’re up there, they look down at you and say, you’re the fake news. Everything you want, fake. Everything you are, fake. You don’t even exist if you disagree. Did you protest? You were paid. Did you show up at a town hall? You’re not a constituent. You’re a unicorn. A snowflake in need of a safe space.

And yet, they call us snowflakes, but melt under the tiniest light of scrutiny, under the smallest agitation. The moment anyone disagrees, they retreat to their own safe spaces, close and lock the doors, turn off all the lights, lower all the blinds so they can peer out until we’re gone.

The evil circus peanut who sits in the highest chair in the land decries liberal Hollywood elites while being himself a liberal Hollywood elite. We must do more with less, the man says as he goes to one of his like, seven fucking White Houses to hold a rally for an election in four years that doesn’t even have an opponent.

They talk about making America great, as if Americans weren’t already great.

They vilify illegal immigrants, as if we weren’t all illegal immigrants — as if this isn’t a country built first on native land that wasn’t ours, then second on the backs of black slaves who we stole and enslaved and tried to treat more like livestock than as human beings. They try to demonstrate how great this America is, but then those who come here to share in its greatness are cast aside, are sent away, are rounded up and torn from their families and told they don’t belong here. They claim to serve an America for all Americans, but it’s not — it’s for a very narrow slice, for the richest and whitest and straightest, for the healthiest, for the abled, for the men, for the companies, for themselves. Even the white working class gets fucked even as they’re told they’re not, because they still have to drink the water and breathe the air. They vote for the right to poison the water, you drink the water, you get cancer, but fuck your health, and fuck your kids if they’re born with a defect, that’s America, now, buddy. The freedom they want is to get what’s theirs from your pocket and pay no price for it even as you wither and weep at their feet. The freedom they want is to rob you blind then point to The Other and say, they did it, over there, it wasn’t us. We look just like you. You could be rich someday. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s them over there. The welfare queens. The foreigners. The terrorists and the rapists. Not us. Never us.

They make hats and shirts that say AMERICA but whose tags say CHINA.

All the while, that word America in their mouths like a Bible verse on the tongue of the Devil. God Bless America, they say as they pick up their axes and chop at the roots of this tree. We’re good Christians, they say, as they do yet another un-Christian thing, because I’m sure it was Jesus who said fuck you, I got mine. Piss on compassion. To hell with empathy. These hypocrites cut away at the foundation of all the things we need to be a smart, healthy, successful country. They attack science. They hack at education. They want to chop your healthcare to splinters. They destroy debate. They slit the throat of every fact they don’t want you to know. They call the media the opposition, the enemy. They claim that truth is fake. The truth that we are at greater danger from white nationalist terror than from radical Muslim terror? Fake. The truth that we have nothing to fear from refugees, and that they are already extremely vetted? Fake. The truth that transgender individuals are not the harassers but in fact, the harassed? Fakeity-fake-fake, they say. The sky is red, ham is a fruit, pray for the family of Shazaam Berenstein, a survivor of the Bowling Green Massacre who then went on to die in the Swedish Event.

Their hypocrisy only grows — swelling like a tumor, diverting blood-flow away from healthy organs and to itself, because that’s how a cancer grows. A cancer is your body in rebellion. A cancer is rogue cells bypassing the checks and balances of your biology. This is that. Their hypocrisy is a symptom, though. And like with all symptoms, we must not ignore it.

We must treat the disease. Inoculate against the bullshit.

They will not hold themselves accountable.

So we must.

We must demand they do better.

We must demand our media be the watchdog.

We must resist their duplicity and their lies.

Courage in this strange time, folks. Stay frosty. Remain vigilant. Hang together.

Comments closed because, really, c’mon.

I am asked sometimes how I do it.

Write books, they mean. Or finish books. Or finish a trilogy, or jump from Miriam Black to Star Wars, or switch from novels to comics and back again.

And obviously the mechanical answer to that is, you sit and you fucking do it. You say, I’m going to fucking do this thing, and then that’s the thing you try very hard to do. As I said on Twitter today, the ditch ain’t dug till you dig the damn ditch. Beyond that, I can offer a bevy of other answers, many personal to the author and not entirely applicable to every other author, and those answers deal with how you prepare the work, how you outline, how you treat characters and embrace process and whether or not you listen to music while you write or whether or not you get gin-drunk and punch a bear before you write. Or, or, or. Everybody’s different. Everybody’s got their way up, down, or through the mountain. Writers aren’t precious snowflakes until they are.

But there’s a deeper truth going on that I find vital. And it’s this:

You’re always thisgoddamnclose to failing.

Now, the nice way to put it would be: writing means taking risks. Risks are — *bites lip, narrows eyes, smolders generally* — sexy. Nngh. Yeah. Take a risk with me, baby. Drive fast. Live loose. Eat raw cookie dough naked in the saddle of a galloping velociraptor. Boom. Risks. Yes.

But I don’t necessarily want this to be sexy.

I want you to understand, some of the best — and, likely, some of the worst — fiction was written by tap-dancing right on that line separating success and failure. Or, moreover, tap-dancing across the ombre gradient that shows the swiftly sliding scale that carries a work from mediocre to good to amazing to oh fuck it’s shit now, it’s all shit, it tried to jump across the widening chasm and it fell down into the fissure and was promptly eaten by cave lizards.

Let’s talk a little about cooking.

What? I know, shut up, just — just follow the bouncing ball.

You grill a steak, what happens? You apply intense heat very quickly — you want it just right, just perfect. You want it juicy and pink on the inside, tender as anything, but on the exterior you want some color, maybe a little char. Not crispy, but done right on the outside, while almost not at all on the inside. Tender, but not mushy. Thing is, that moment of perfection is about as long as an avocado’s window of ripeness — it’s like, a minute, maybe less. You cook that steak one minute too long, and you’ve lost it. You don’t cook it enough, and you never get to where you want it. (And by the way, if you’re one of those people who wants a steak well-done, just go and eat a shoe. A burned shoe. Do not waste your money on a good steak by charring it to the consistency of an asbestos roof shingle. You monster.) A perfect steak is a golden moment. Go beyond that moment, and its deliciousness swiftly dwindles toward utter disappointment.

Or, you’re making a soup, a stew, a chili, whatever. You add spices and salt and different flavor components — you give it a taste, okay, needs more, you taste again, needs more, still not right, so you try something. You add an unusual spice, or a little vinegar, or a mystic bezoar taken from the bile duct of a young chupacabra. It’s a risk. You can’t add it without potentially ruining it, but without it — ennngh, it just isn’t right. So, you march up to that line, you stare down into the bubbling broth, and you add the ingredient. You hope you didn’t just fuck it all up. Maybe you did. Or maybe you just elevated it to something sublime.

I’m not saying anything particularly new here. The cliche, true enough as many cliches are, is no risk, no reward. Just the same, what often marks some of the greatest fiction — or, put differently, some of your favorite fiction — is a willingness on the part of the creator to take those risks, to march into the gloom of uncertainty into a place where every step might lead to a sucking mire or a starveling beastie. Some of the best work is done when it’s done by an author who knows what they’re about to do is not precisely advisable, or entirely safe, and yet they say, fuck it, fuck this, fuck that shit, I’m doing it anyway, motherfuckers. They broke a rule. They took a thing long past its expected arc. They blew up a trope or juked right when everyone else would’ve gone left. They tried something new, and it either pays off or it fails spectacularly. And honestly I’d rather read something that fails spectacularly than something that just kind of… putters along in the manner of an elderly dachshund.

Tempt failure.

March right up to it. Always write as if you’re about to fall on your face. Add fire. Bring the char. Toss in a weird ingredient. I wrote several meh books before I finally hit with Blackbirds — and when I hit with Blackbirds, it was because I had lost the capacity to care about fucking up. I felt I had already tried everything safe, everything expected. I’d already walked all the paths and followed every map and I still wasn’t writing anything of substance, so I chugged some whiskey, bit a belt, and went hard into that story because I felt like I had nothing to lose. I no longer cared if I failed. That allowed me to no longer be hesitant, to dismiss the fear of failure because I certainly wasn’t succeeding — hard-charging into that unseen fog was liberating, and it produced not only a successful book, but one whose series continues today. Using present tense inside Star Wars was controversial, in part because tie-in-fiction tends to not go that way. Some hated that choice, some loved it, and that’s where I’d rather be. I’d rather be in a place where some people love the book and some people despise it instead of everyone saying, “It was fine, sure, it was a book, and I read it, and now I forget it.”

Just as the stakes for your characters should be raised and complicated, twisted and transformed, so should you view your own stakes as storyteller.

Write unafraid. Do not be tempted by the comfort of mediocrity. Yeah, you’re going to fuck it up sometimes. (Though mind that unlike with a steak or with a stew, the book can be revised and rewritten.) Yes, your efforts to do something that is uniquely you and totally untested will sometimes lead to a narrative car crash. That is as it should be. I’d rather you drive me, the reader, at top speed into a wall then slowly sputter down a quiet street at 25MPH.

Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.

That sounds bad, but I don’t think that it is.

Take the risks.

Get ready to mess it all up.

Leap toward foolishness the way a stunt pilot plunges the plane toward the ground.

Always be leaning toward failure. Get ready to fall. Tell stories that are bold and strange. Make moves that feel dangerous and uncertain. Confidently assert your own chaos as you discard fucks over your shoulder like a cruel child plucking the legs from a captive centipede.

I want you to go for it.

Whatever it is you’re afraid of, go for it.

Whatever fears you have, step over them.

Whatever twists you can take, take them.

Sometimes this thing we do, it’s an act of closing your eyes and falling backward and hoping that the story reaches out with the hands of the audience and it catches you. And sometimes, that won’t happen. Sometimes you’ll crack your head like an egg on the pavement. But fuck it, fall anyway. Trust yourself. Enjoy the plunge.

Woo!

It’s done.

It’s here.

*deep breath*

*long exhale*

Finally, the epic tale of one liverwurst burrito can be told.

*checks notes*

Wait, that’s not right at all.

OH OH OH I KNOW I KNOW

It’s time for Star Wars: Aftermath: Empire’s End: Wait I Added An Additional Colon And Now I Don’t Know What Comes After It So Let’s Just Say, Uh, Um, Journey To The Last Jedi?

Star Wars: Empire’s End: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

The first Aftermath came out a year and a half ago in September of 2015, with me starting that novel only the January prior, and in that time I’ve written three of these things, and I honestly couldn’t be more pleased. It’s like I got to pick a literal star in this awesome galaxy and say, boop, that one’s mine. I get to own a little bit of narrative real estate in what is arguably the biggest pop culture storyworld of all time, one that I grew up with, one in which I have been brining and pickling myself since I was four years old. When someone comes up and hands you a metaphorical bowcaster and says, “We need you to finish off the Imperial Empire, so figure out how to work that thing and get to business,” yeah, yeah, hell yes I’m going to do it.

Occasionally, ahem, the journey has been a little fraught — some reaction to the first book in particular was rougher than I anticipated, and some of that is chalk-uppable to hey, not every book is for every reader, and I don’t necessarily write in the standard “tie-in fiction” style what with the present tense and such. Some of it was due to, er, other social forces, and then those social forces somehow manifested like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man except this one was a giant Evil Circus Peanut and then I guess oops we elected him president.

Back then I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted to write more Star Wars, but it’s been such a heady rush, and the team at Del Rey is aces, so I’d totally jump back in if invited. Meanwhile, if you want to check this one, it’s got all kinds of stuff. Hutts! Space battles! Maybe a Gungan! Jakku (that junkyard?)! Han and Leia! An auspicious birth! A huggable, cuddly murder-death-droid! References! Interludes! Sinjir being Sinjir! Wookiees! Stars! Wars! And more.

If you wanna read a short interview with me over at Sci-Fi Now about the experience, you may do so by making with the clicky-clicky.

Otherwise, please to enjoy the book.

I’ll see you on the other side of the war.

Comments may contain spoilers, so please be advised.

So, though the weather was arguably a lot nicer this week than it should’ve been — I mean, it’s the middle of fucking February, usually the most heinous of the winter months, and here it’s 70 degrees out and I’m eating ice cream and wearing short sleeves — I still managed to toodle around inside the house and take some MYSTERIOUS MACRO PHOTOS.

I’ll pop that bounty in below, but real quick:

Hey, tomorrow, it’s Empire’s End.

Then next Tuesday, it’s Miriam Black’s latest, Thunderbird.

Star Wars: Empire’s End: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Thunderbird: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Also a reminder that I’m doing an event this Saturday in support of both at one of the greatest bookstores in the land, Let’s Play Books, in Emmaus, PA. 4pm on the 25th, details here. (The event is listed as 4pm – 4:45pm, but I have full confidence it’s not going to be 45 minutes only — I’ll be there long as you need me to be.)

AND NOW, MACRO WEIRDNESS. Part of the fun here will be to look at these and to try to figure out what you’re even looking at. It’s a mystery! Get in the van, Scoob! Zoinks!

Okay, so, a couple weeks ago I asked you guys to come up with three-word titles, and you did, in spectacular fashion. It fueled last week’s challenge.

And, because you were prolific and I am nothing if not a tremendously lazy human being, I’m going to dip back into the well for another ten titles. Pick one or use a random number generator to choose, then write a piece of short fiction to go along with the title.

One change this time around is my picks for title are not random —

I’m hand-picking ten that sound interesting.

Also, we’ll up the word count a little.

Get writing, word-nerds.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: Friday, Feb 24th, noon EST

Post online, give us a link in the comments.

Your ten titles to choose from (title creators in parentheses) are:

1. She Broke Gods (thomasmhewlett)
2. Gunslinger Ridge Experiment (EGUW)
3. Wolves of Sorrow (powerjacob)
4. Tomorrow’s Mirror Today (stephen cowles)
5. Stars That Bleed (kirajessup)
6. To Forbidden Passengers (lydie h)
7. The Porcelain Cat (d.moulou)
8. It Wants In (mollons)
9. Sincerely, Your Mortician (AN)
10. Burr Edge Jitterbug (m. oniker)

It used to happen once every couple of months. Then once every month, now I’m up to about once a week. What I’m talking about is, authors emailing me to see if it’s time to leave their agents.

When this happens, the writer often frames it like, “Well, how do you and your agent do things?”

And I say things like:

ME: She sells my books? I dunno, I write them, and then Stacia helps them navigate the BOILING CHAOS STORM that is the publishing industry?

THEM: But what about emails?

ME: Emails, like, Hillary’s emails?

THEM: No, does your agent answer your emails?

ME: Well, of course.

THEM: In what timeframe?

ME: A reasonable one? Actually, an unreasonably fast one, usually — within the day, sometimes within the hour. Pretty fast turnaround to questions and stuff.

THEM: She not only responds to your emails, but she responds to them quickly?

ME: She does, and in fact endures a great deal of nonsense from me, including occasional Career Freakouts and other psychological gesticulations. But given your response, I’m guessing yours doesn’t… respond at all?

And from there, we uncover a host of uncomfortable sins. And this can be for a lot of reasons. Maybe the agent is wrong for you, or you’re wrong for her. Maybe she’s too new. Maybe she has too many clients. Maybe you’re too small a client and she’s got bigger beasts to hunt. Maybe she’s a terrible agent — or maybe you need to recalibrate your needs.

I never really like to recommend that a writer leave her agent — not because that’s a bad idea, but because I’m not comfortable being the one to say, YEAH, TIME TO JUMP OUTTA THE PLANE, as that’s awfully easy for me to say, because I’m buckled up in a nice, cozy seat. Telling you to do the hard thing is easy when I don’t have to do it with you. Plus, then you jump out of the plane, get sucked into a turbine, are turned into a red mist, oops.

That said, there is a calculus involved in determining whether or not to persist in the relationship, and that calculus is different for every author. But — but! — I do think that there are things, mmm, nnny’know, you should look out for, just in case. If enough of these boxes are checked, maybe it’s time to consider moving on. Let us discuss some of these:

1. Your agent doesn’t communicate with you in a timely manner — or at all. That’s not good. Your agent is the champion of your book and ostensibly, your career. They are its babysitter — and I don’t mean that dismissively, I mean, you want your child to be in capable hands, and further, you want that babysitter to answer the phone if you would like to find out how your baby is doing. If you go weeks without hearing anything from an agent, or months, or forever, you have a problem. It probably means they forgot your baby at the mall.

2. Your agent has little idea about your career. I am a firm believer that an agent should rep more than a book — the agent reps the author and, by proxy, the author’s drinking habits I mean career. I’ve had long conversations with my agent about strategy and about different editors and publishers and genres and also about where you can get a really good margarita. Okay, the margarita thing is secondary, but just the same, my career is viewed as having a trajectory — an arc, not a single point in time — thanks to talks with my agent.

3. You pay the agent. I shouldn’t even have to say this, but if you’re paying the agent up front — as in, not a commission off sales — you probably got yourself a scammer on your hands. Remember: the money flows to the author, not away from the author. A reputable agent is one you pay a commission to — meaning, they’re only making money when you’re making money.

4. Your agent doesn’t seem to like your books. This is a thing. I’ve seen it. I don’t understand it. But any time the agent gets a new draft of your book, they tell you in words minced or unminced that they don’t like it, they can’t sell it, won’t rep it. Now, a good agent will tell you the truth about a book if it doesn’t work — it’s not their job to pass a hunk of crap up the publishing ladder just because Baby Huey will throw a tantrum otherwise. But it’s also possible there’s a very real disconnect between you and the agent in terms of what they like. Worth a look at the rest of the agent’s catalogue in terms of authors and books she reps. If you’re made to feel like an ugly duckling in a flock of preening peacocks, might be time to scout elsewhere.

5. Your agent doesn’t seem to like your chosen genres. This is also a thing. You write erotic epic choose-your-own-adventure books, your agent reps self-help books for narcoleptic parrot-owners, and ne’er the two shall meet. You want an agent familiar with the genre of what you write, not just in terms of the books themselves but also in terms of the industry circles and imprints that support that genre.

6. Your agent is not the right size. It sounds great having a rock star agent who reps mega-clients, and certainly it can be. But having known a few authors who were with some high-profile agents at the time they were debut authors, they often felt lost or under-sized in comparison — they were not, quite simply, a priority.

7. You’re doing the work. Some authors end up being the ones to pitch editors and seal deals, with the agent there mostly skimming off the success of the author. This isn’t common, but I’ve seen it happen — the author is the one doing the leg work, the submitting, the everything, and then the agent just passes along the contract and boom, 15% collected.

8. The agent seems to be on the side of the publisher, not the author. An agent who defends unethical publishing behaviors is not an agent you want to have. You certainly don’t want an agent who is hostile to publishing, and who has a realistic view of what you can get away with and what slings and arrows you’re probably going to have to suffer — further, you also don’t want to be a prima donna to the agent, acting like, WELL, YOU DIDN’T GET ME A MILLION DOLLAR ADVANCE SO OBVIOUSLY YOU LOVE THE PUBLISHER MORE THAN ME. But at the same time, an agent who seems to be more interested in protecting his relationship with the publisher than the relationship he shares with you, the author… eek, yeah, no, not good.

9. Your agent just ain’t selling your books. Something just isn’t coming together, but your books ain’t moving. Assuming you have confidence in those books, it may be time to look further afield for a new agent. It’s not a personal thing — but if a real estate agent were not helping to sell your house (or at least helping you to understand why the house isn’t selling), then some new blood may be necessary. And by “new blood” I do not mean human sacrifices, please be advised. Human sacrifices are a no-no. That’s how publishing used to work but new regulations have strictly forbidden it blah blah blah, so now it’s no longer “politically correct” to sacrifice humans and — well, it is what it is, so you may just need to find a new agent.

10. Something just isn’t right. This is an unquantifiable thing, I know, but sometimes in any relationship — things aren’t jiving. The gears keep slipping. The agent doesn’t like you. Or you don’t like him. You don’t ever feel on the same page. Something feels off, weird, like you’re forever out-of-sync. You and your agent don’t need to be friends, but this is ideally a relationship that will go on, so if something isn’t right, it’s worth figuring out what it is and if your gut is trying to tell you something.

Listen, I get it.

Getting an agent is tough. It feels wildly special, like you’ve been given the keys to the first gate of the kingdom, and you feel like losing the agent is giving away the keys. But understand now that a bad relationship with an agent is almost certainly worse than no relationship at all. And if you were good enough to get an agent on the first go around, I’d argue you have a good shot the next time, too. (Plus: self-publishing remains a viable, if crowded, arena. Though even there I’d argue you should eventually get an agent. I’ve sold some self-published stuff to publishers domestic and foreign, and that happened only because of my agent.) You need to recognize that you’re the one with the power — meaning, you’re the one with the kick-ass book that needs a home. The agent is a liaison, a loose partner, a valuable player with real insight — but the agent is not your boss. The agent is not the only agent that exists. The gate to the kingdom isn’t even real in the first damn place. You do what you gotta do for you and your book.

Before you go voting your agent off the island, though, do a few things —

First, make sure it’s not just you. Like, ask the tough questions — are you being unreasonable? Are you overreaching and creating unfair expectations?

Second, talk to some other authors — successful and unsuccessful. Ask around how they do things with their agent. Talk it through. Establish a baseline for “normal.”

Third, talk to your agent. Be upfront and honest about your concerns — politely, duh — and try to suss out what’s up. Maybe the agent feels it too. Maybe the agent can course-correct. You don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can save the baby for later, because babies make great baby jerky when brined and smoked and dried and — wait, I’m doing the thing where I talk about eating babies again, aren’t I? Ha ha ha, my therapist told me I needed to stop doing that. *smacks self in forehead* STUPID WENDIG. STUPID STUPID WENDIG.

Then, if it’s time to truly say goodbye to your agent, you do it the right way, the correct and kind way, which is to say you gently pull the lever next to your desk and open the trapdoor beneath the agent’s feet, thus plunging them into the ACID BATH or BARRACUDA TANK that you built and —

*receives note*

*reads note*

Okay, don’t do that.

No acid baths.

No barracuda tanks.

Trap doors also a no-no, apparently.

ALL THAT AND NO BABY-EATING

FIONA APPLE WAS RIGHT, THIS WORLD IS BULLSHIT

*long sigh*

Fine, I guess what you do is, you write a nice letter and blah blah blah you let them go live on a nice farm upstate. Be sure not to procure a new agent before you end your relationship with the former, and also if you have existing books on submission or contracts in play, you need to talk to the agent to see how that gets handled. (If you have an agency agreement, it should outline that. You want to make sure that the agency gets its due for work done, but also isn’t able to invest in you or your work long after you have left them. Like with any publishing relationship, read the damn contracts and protect your booty.)

It’s hard out there in PublishingLand, so do what you gotta. As always try to approach others with empathy and compassion. Be smart, be kind, watch your six, eat your Wheaties, buy my books.

(EDIT: it’s also worth noting the obvious thing that’s not always that obvious, but if the agent is also in some way bigoted, creepy, or harrassment-y, yeah, that’s also a tremendous red flag.)

* * *

INVASIVE:

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Out now where books are sold.

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N