Monthly Archives: May 2021

What’re YOU Lookin’ At?

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Random memory: This was in New York in the fall of 1998, and Shane and I were relaxing out by a construction sight that would become Trump Tower (or was near an already constructed Trump Tower—that part’s pretty hazy). We happened upon a large piece of broken drywall, and Shane decided that this was art. He always carried around his pastels, so he set to work bringing it to life.

Wearing shirts and ties, and me in my trench coat, Shane observed that I looked like a goombah, and, with nothing else to do, I put on a really bad Mafia accent and started harassing passersby, saying, “What’re YOU lookin’ at? What’d’you think this is, an aht gallery?” I started telling anyone who would listen about the artist and the drawing, using as many gangster cliches as we could think of, such as, “Look at that linewerk, it’s pretty good considerin’ both his thumbs are broken. Hey, he owed me money,” and “See the woman he’s paintin’? That’s Angelita, his one true love. Killin’ her was the hardest thing he ever had to do. Maybe next time you’ll keep it in yer pants, Angelita! You too, Joey, God rest yer soul.”

Eventually we had to go to work, that’s what we were doing in the Upper West Side to begin with, so we left his art leaning up against the fence of a construction site, with no illusions as to its fate. We chatted about it for a while, and we thought it would be fun to actually do the schtick in an art gallery, where Shane would actually paint something and I would taunt the gallery-goers. Keep in mind, this was when The Sopranos was just starting, and Analyze This (or its sequel) was a huge hit at the box office, so mobsters were huge at the time. That was one of many dreams that Shane and I had together those first few months I lived in New York, and like many, it just lived on in our imaginations.

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Special Agent, Man

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Almost two months ago, I took an online class called, “How to Hook an Agent.” At the beginning of April, if you were paying attention, you may have recalled me stressing out about query letters or about how every other person in my class wanted to sell literature, and I had a superhero romance. Also, as I had not noted, I was the only one in the class with any experience trying to woo an agent.

The last class was a twenty-minute one-on-one with the agent teaching the class, where she would discuss any corrections made to the query as well as the requisite ten-page sample. The agent was incredibly positive about my book. She said there was a market for this kind of thing, and to avoid the label of romance because that’s a whole separate publishing industry that had its own rules and customs. She sent me a list of agents who were looking for work that was more fantastical.

After I explained the book to her a bit so that she might not have gotten from the sample and query, she asked me to send her more of the novel so she could get a feel for it. She told me up front that she probably wouldn’t be interested in it, so it’s not an agent query, but she might have some ideas for how I could better sell it, and she might even be able to give me a few names I can try to query.

I sent fifty-six pages to her about six weeks ago, and I haven’t heard back, and I don’t know what to do. She’s not a queried agent, and she’s not doing this for (potential) money, but as a favor to a student. I don’t even know how many students she’d done this with. Since she’s not a queried agent, then I shouldn’t be afraid of getting rejected. But if what I wrote was good, don’t you think she would have reacted to it by now? I know she loved the first ten pages, so what if the subsequent forty-six were a letdown, and she recommends I stop writing? She probably won’t do that. But I don’t know what to expect. I’ve gone from elation at her asking for more to trepidation at what she might say if I poke the bear.

I will probably write her, that much is clear, but what will I write? I don’t have the slightest clue. I keep getting blocked every time I think about it. And when do I reach out? I know that she will not write me unless I write her first, so what is a good time to allow to pass before I do write her?

This is why I went into self-publishing: it’s all on my schedule. Now I need to wait for someone else, and it’s making me a little crazy. I wish I could just write books and let other people worry about this stuff.