Mes Amis
I am the carpet man and I can lay... Fucking carpet people - two days on the trot they've said "we'll be there at x hours to do an estimate" and two days of no shows and no real explanations except a brusque apology when I phone and an insistence that if I handed over my keys they could get in when it was convenient to them... Um, no...
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be... I was back home at my parent's place the other week. I went a rooting through the cupboards of all my old stuff and found my very first rejection letter from Virgin Publishing back when they were doing the Doctor Who: New Adventures series of novels. And what a great letter it was, saying some nice things about the effort I'd put in but saying that ultimately they couldn't do anything since they just lost the licence to do the novels. But better yet was the fact that I reworked the novel without the Who elements and sent it to them when they did the Virgin Worlds series of SF novels - I got back a big checklist of all that I did wrong... bear in mind I was about sixteen at the time... and my worst crime was being unoriginal, that is some elements may have been space opera stuff that everyone had seen before. But my characters were good and my prose was good enough for a published novel... it was the nicest letter I ever got as a rejection... I also found the shredded front of another manuscript I'd sent off on which the person to whom the letter had gone had scribbled, "Sorry, but as you can see my kids got a hold of it. They didn't like it, either". I'm still amazed that didn't stop me writing forever...
Speaking of literary people... Sarah Weinman's excellent blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind is always worth checking out... but I'm in absolute awe of the letter she got from a guy claiming to be a literary agent (just for the record, my agent actually knows what she's doing!).
How not to apply for work...So I found a job I fancy... Really, really fancy... Working as a writer on a gaming magazine... And I sent in my application which included a small article I'd worked my ass off on to get right for them... except I attached an unfinished draft copy to the email... so I tried to send off the proper one (with a wee note) later that night when I realised my mistake... except fucking AOL decided it wasn't going to send anything and disconnected me twelve times midway through sending the bastard thing... The more technology can do the less it wants to do for you...
Anyway, mes amis, that's all for now.
Au Revoir
Russel
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