“A Belfast Mother”

Lizzy’s short story tribute to her mother, Maureen Blythe

“The ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where they stand at times of challenge and controversy.”  Martin Luther Kings Jr.

Lizzy Shannon

The Drop Dead Client

When I received a letter from a potential client with the words "drop dead" on the envelope, I felt it was perhaps time for a reality check. Was I really cut out to be a literary agent? It seemed the ideal vocation: helping writers achieve their dreams of being published. I have been a (mostly!) successful actress, playwright, and fiction writer for many years. I thought I had made every mistake in the book when dealing with various agents, yet in the first few months with the Pacific NW Literary Agency, I discovered I hadn’t even scratched the surface.

The gentleman who told me to drop dead began it all. Ignoring the specific instructions of only sending one chapter with synopsis, we received his entire manuscript in single-line spacing on both sides of the paper. It was a grimy, illegible photocopy, all bound together with duct tape. His query letter informed us that agents were a ‘shifty lot’. No SASE, or course, (self-addressed stamped envelope). Nevertheless, we mailed him a polite rejection letter.

We had decided to be more accessible than other agents, permitting e-mail submissions for authors’ convenience. We rapidly found out why other agents actively discouraged this practice. Our first e-mail submission was sent to us several times, "just in case it got lost".

When having to reject, we at first provided constructive feedback via e-mail, but quickly stopped. Almost every author took it personally and replied angrily, whereas if we sent a form letter, it was meekly if not happily accepted. One author responded to his rejection by furiously demanding to know if our reader was out of grade school yet! Another particularly nasty person penned a vicious tirade, telling me my mother should have had an abortion so I wouldn’t be a waste of space on earth.

Often, when an author sent an attachment, (usually without permission), a virus was detected when we attempted to open the files. We’ve even received naked photos of authors, invitations to visit their XXX webpages, and offers of dubious-sounding gifts. One author attempted to engage me in ‘hot-chat’ when he caught me on line. He’s still lurking out there, trying to make contact from time to time. Creepy.

Our ‘drop dead’ friend by this time mailed us back our rejection letter, having scrawled a second query on the back of it, asking for us to look at another book. Again there was no SASE. Horrified at the thought of viewing any more of his writing, we rapidly fired back a negative response, but he sent the manuscript anyway. When we looked at it, it was so truly appalling that we sent him a letter begging him never to send anything else ever again.

By this time, local authors had discovered my west coast office in their midst. Although obviously a home business, a man hammered so violently on the door I could see the hinges rattling. Eventually, I put a sign in the window that read, ‘by appointment only’, closed my drapes and hid.

Amongst the daily barrage of mail, we regularly received letters with no postage or return addresses, so we had to pay postage due. We have had to practically take a pick ax to one manuscript to get it open, and another collapsed in our hands, sending asbestos type dust coughing into our lungs. It was obvious who smoked when stale tobacco wafted up from the manuscript box. I actually found that a little charming, imagining an old-fashioned writer hunched over a looming, black typewriter, coffee cup on one side, filled ashtray on the other.

We’ve received plenty of queries from inmates in prison. Most are polite, but one in particular ominously informed me he was in for murder and would do it again if he got out. The phrase, "I know where you live," sometimes echoes in my head in the dead of night.

One of the most amusing was a query letter from an author who did nothing but bad-mouth a fellow (published) author who made several million dollars on her books. He considered his (rejected) work far superior and was not at all shy about telling us why: it was her female attributes that got her noticed, not her writing.

I have cynically learned to read between the lines. For example, if a new writer tells me he is willing to participate in sales campaigns and publicity, I know it means he will harass me weekly. If another tells me he wasn’t satisfied with his previous agent, I know that interprets as the unfortunate agent didn’t sell the work within the writer’s unrealistic expected month, nor was the agent available as a free on-demand psychotherapist.

Unrealistic expectations seem to be the crux of the matter. Few agents, no matter how established or successful, can close a deal from query to contract in a single month. I receive impatient and rude letters from clients who cannot understand how slowly the cogs of the publishing machine turn.

Our agency’s biggest mistake was in providing what I thought was a considerate service, sending our clients a monthly update. Instead of reassuring them that we were doing our jobs, it had the opposite effect. Suspicious nitpickers surfaced, demanding a blow-by-blow accounting of our every action. If we had charged office expenses by the month as other agents may, that would be fine. But we just could not spend hours describing how, when, and where we conducted business, without taking precious time from submitting and negotiating with publishers for sales!

Then a month or so later, we received yet another manuscript from our "drop dead" friend. In disbelief, we didn’t even open it; printing "REFUSED" in very large black letters on the front and sending it back. A response quickly arrived with no return address, but the writing was his familiar scrawl. Frustrated and driven to petulance, we filled in his return address, again wrote "REFUSED" on it, and sent it back.

Which brings us full circle. He in turn refused that, and this unopened envelope is now framed and hanging above my now happily empty desk.

There are thousands of excellent books on how to find an agent out there, but it seems from our experience that many do not utilize them. The literary world is a business like any other and should be conducted with dignity and respect, yet in today’s world of immediate e-mail gratification, courtesy and good manners have been swept aside in the literary equivalent of road rage.

Needless to say, I am no longer an agent!