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Agent leaves lawyering, discovers that agenting doors are not easily opened, perseveres, discovers gold. For agent Theresa Park, it wasn’t love at first site with one of her major clients, but it’s the stuff of legends. Never let it be said that we are not suckers for a heartwarming story. Heck, we cry during the […]

Agent Amy Rennert defines her taste as character-based literary fiction. This is a catch-phrase we actually get, thanks to her helpful examples (and, also, meeting Rennert at a conference). All she had to do was say “Anne Tyler”, and we got it. Why can’t everything in life be this easy? Also, for those of you […]

Today’s conundrum: what makes an agency a “boutique” versus an ordinary agency? And, if you’re not a boutique, does that spell disaster? Or, if everyone’s a boutique agency, except those agencies that aren’t, is there an even hotter buzzword to describe a small, selective, hands-on agency? Just curious. Of course, this has nothing to do […]

Yesterday, we spent time catching up on favorite blogs. Of course, catching up involves a lot of cruising from site to site, following interesting links. Then following more links. And then wandering lost in the wilderness for a few days. Yes, this means that we didn’t so much catch-up as misplace our purpose somewhere around […]

If we weren’t so lazy (and the chances of that changing are pretty much nil to none), we’d compile a dictionary of literary descriptions. Or a thesaurus. Or both. Wait, the husband is all excited about folksonomies — maybe that would be the right approach. We may actually have to pay attention the next time […]

We can’t resist agent interviews. Seriously, you post a link, we’re gonna follow it. We like MediaBistro’s Pitching series because it feels a little less cookie cutter than most interviews. That’s not to say we don’t sometimes wonder how a writer is supposed to differentiate between some agencies — at the risk of our career, […]

Never let it be said that we bore easily — we’ve spent years being fascinated by the labels applied to writing. It’s now hard for us to believe that “narrative non-fiction” was once considered a wacky term. Adam Chromy (also known as Artists and Artisans…which, yes, makes us wonder what he considers the distinction) is […]

We’ve probably mentioned (once or twice) that we’re not much for the non-fiction side of writing. Our first reaction when faced with a crisis of facts is “make it up.” Who’s to say for sure that humans can’t adapt to temperatures on Saturn? It’s not like we’ve tried, and until we have proof of failure, […]

What with one thing and the other (mostly the other), we have about fifteen tabs open in Firefox, each representing something we meant to post on over the past week or so. If we were to stop and dwell on how pathetic this makes us, well, we’d never get around to posting anything. Our goal, […]

We’re intrigued by the mixed focus at Sarah Lazin Books — narrative non-fiction and womens’ fiction? Sure, it makes sense in a way, but in another way? Well, that’s diversity for you. Besides, we’re focusing all of our energy on the fact that there are only ten stories in the world. Surely there must be […]