Those Rejection letters that Never Come Anymore

Notice how you just don’t get a response with email? The standard rejection letter for anything now is a no response. Once upon a time we used to get letters, responses from people saying, “no thank you, thank you for your query.” In the cyber world the universal rejection letter is the black void. No response. Not even an effort to deem our request worthy. The impersonality of the computer world is affecting every day life. Humans talk. Not anymore. How often do you talk on the phone now? How often do you chat? Not much I’ll bet.

Whole lives are now carried on through the medium of the cyber word. And that makes for a pretty dull life. We love and hate email. It is a barrier against those we don’t want to talk too and a moat against us when we want to talk to someone. You have to love corporations and the way they hide behind their websites. No longer do we have a human to complain too when the wheels fall off our car, no go to the website and register your complaint. It is the biggest firewall in the world.

The human voice carries emotion, our humanity, the cyber word carries only information that can be deleted in a nanosecond. Even these blogs our highly expendable. A newspaper carried weight, it cried out with its very existence that it be recognized. The blog or the cyber news page is just a button away from vanishing. It is the expendable quality, the absolute evanescence of the interaction that is most frightening. We are human and at some point we will really want to have a conversation again with another human. So what is the guilty secret of email…we are our own worst enemies. We are now afraid of being engaged in a conversation. We are afraid our precious time will be used up by some person we cannot get off the phone. We would rather have those few sentences convey our business and be on on our way. We have now become slaves to cyber time lest we miss even a single nanosecond.

Of course the backside of this is that when we do feel like talking to someone, there are few who will take our call. Those roads once closed are hard to reopen and we get an email a day later saying, “I saw that you called, sorry I was busy.” The strange thing is we have relationships with people where we never hear their voice. That’s weird. So our only chance is to break the cycle. The next time you get an email from a friend or colleague, freak them out and pick up the phone. They probably won’t answer, but you never know. If you get them on the phone, blow their mind and say, “I’m just calling to chat.” Stunned silence will probably greet you, but then again, they might say something. Humans are like that. Once they get talking, it’s hard to shut them up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Mozart was broke...another struggling artist

Mozart was deeply in debt at the time of his death and spent the last years of his life trying to make ends meet and pleading with aristocrats for money, so what else is new? Another struggling artist. Seems we can't get away from that starving artist thing when it comes to even our great artists. But he was an artist. He wasn't a celebrity dipping into the well of immortality at the end of his career with a book or a painting or a rock band to finish off megalomania fame to satisfy the craving that we will be remembered beyond our time. Mozart had no such worries, but he did worry about being broke.

Apparently scholars have connected the dots and found Mozart took a big loan and the payments were coming due and his music was in a slump. Sounds familiar to our 2010 ears. Slump. Loans. Payments due. Even musical geniuses get caught up in the boom and bust of capitalism. But artists seem perpetually in the economic dumps. We hear this frequently with big name stars and of course all the starving artists who never hit the radar scream and die in obscurity. It is just the nature of art that it does not produce a lot of money. From A Confederacy of Dunces to Van Gogh it just seems sometimes the public is not ready for what artists have to offer.

Of course Mozart was one of the few who was appreciated during his lifetime and celebrated. Of course he was brilliant and his music stands. But we strip away the gloss from Amadeus which does a good job of showing the squalor in which the last years of his life was lived and we see the artist lot in all it's glory. Maybe stability is just not in the cards. We know of all the musicians who produced great music right up to the moment they became successful. It seems struggle is wrapped up with being an artist, maybe it is the fuel that pushes on all great art. Certainly Mozart proved that magnificently.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

The Delicate Dance of Agents and Authors

It is a marriage. You have a courtship then a honeymoon then a working marriage and then at some point a divorce. You never like to think of getting divorced when you are married but it happens. But lets back up to the courtship. You are a writer and they are an agent. You have something they want and they have something you want. It should be symbiotic and so you start out by courting them. You send out your manuscript until an agent accepts and you go on a date.

Usually the first phone call is all hugs and kisses. They love your work and you love them because they promise a way to the promised land. The phone calls are all feel good and you get off feeling like you could leap tall buildings. Then you enter the honeymoon. They are submitting your work to editors. This is unbelievable. You have just jumped ahead ninety percent of other authors. You have a conduit to that mysterious world of publishing. Now is when you have your first quarrel usually. The rejections start coming in and you question the agent. Why did you submit it to them/ How about this person? This is a minor quarrel and you roll on.

Now here is the first fork in the road. The agent does or does not hit pay dirt. If he does not find a home for your book then you are looking at a quickie divorce. You might drag on a while but lets face it the bloom is off the rose and agents are in business to make money and if they can't make money off you then those calls will not be returned and those emails will go un-answered. You simply fall out of love. It happens. But if the agent sells your book then you go to the next level.

Now your are in a thriving working marriage. You have made the agent money and you have made money. Everyone is happy. This could last a very long time especially if your book does well. Maybe a lifetime. But, unfortunately, a lot of times the contract is paid off and the royalties dwindle and the followup book might not pan and then you enter that declining era in the marriage where no one is happy. You feel like you are not getting enough attention and the agent doesn't want to wast time on projects that won't pan out. So you divorce.

As an author you have to be very attuned to this cycle in author/agent relations. You want it to all work out the best but you don't want to be delusional either. If it feels like a bad marriage it probably is and you best be on your way to divorce court. There is nothing worse than thinking someone is doing something on your behalf when they aren't. So go get a divorce, then jump right back in the saddle and start dating again.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/