Decapitated Anarchist Haiku, or A Last Note on the Nebulas

[dr_pretentious]

What could be more gratifying to a roomful of science fiction and fantasy writers than a New York Times article with a headline like "Anarchist’s Head Is Finally Buried, but Outcry Arises Over Timing"? I spent about an hour in the hospitality suite with half a dozen other unpublished writers, riffing goofy story premises in our respective subgenres off of it. It's hard to top the article itself, though. Why are Italy's leftists annoyed about the timing of the head's burial? Not because the head spent 70 years on display in a museum of criminology, but rather because the museum officials sent the head to its final rest without giving advance notice. That's Italian politics for you. No one will be surprised to learn that I have some new ideas for bizarre funerary rituals to put in the Little Book.

And then one of my new acquaintances noted that the headline needed only minor tweaking to be a haiku. DS and I immediately pulled out our notebooks and went to work. I don't have DS's haiku, but here's mine:

Head of anarchist
Buried at last, but too late?
No--at dead of night!

Yes, I'm already stockpiling material for International Bad Poetry Day.


In other news, one of those dreadful scammy services that spams the whole publishing industry with unwise writers' formletter queries has picked up my email address. Someone, somewhere, thinks I'm an agent or editor. Not that whoever it is seems to care much which I am, considering that the query's salutation reads, "Dear Editor or Agent." If you have ever considered paying one of these services to broadcast your query letter, don't. Just don't. Agents and editors hate mass email queries with the fiery hate of a thousand suns. The services boast about how many industry people they have contact info for, but how many of those contacts are unpublished writers like me? And although I wouldn't respond to the query by posing as an industry pro just to mess with the unwise author's head, the thought did cross my mind. (One hazard of writing an impulsive protagonist is that more peculiar impulses occur to me. I don't think it's an improvement.) If I thought of it and refrained, someone else will probably think of it and act. After all, some of these services advertise that they have over ten thousand addresses on their lists. All it takes is for one of those recipients be a scammer or a sadist to mess up a naive writer's day.

Comments

[sppeterson.livejournal.com]

I've used those services for sending out screenplays. Particular in screenwriting, it's very difficult for anyone on the outside to even get read, let alone sold. The result has been mixed. A couple years ago it seemed to work better -- lately it hasn't been working so well. However, it is through one of those services that I got my first option (and first option payments) and that option keeps getting renewed in various ways. We'll see if it turns into a produced film -- though, for screenwriting, I think a solid option would be considered a "success" for the service.

This is probably different though from novel publishing, where I imagine there are places that are more open to actually reading a query. In screenwriting it's almost purely producers around the edges who are trying to break in that are willing to read your stuff, then carry it to a bigger fish they happen to know. Anyway, these smaller producers are people you'd likely never even realize exist, so you wouldn't query them directly. And the big companies by and large just delete or return queries unread. In fact none of my direct queries, either snail mail or email, to one of the bigger places has produced any response.

[leapfaith.livejournal.com]

I wonder what would happen if S. King, J. Grisham, or T. Clancy (whose first names you already know too well) were to hire one of those outfits, just once, just to see how many replies they get...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Oh, now that is a clever hoaxbusting plan.