Sometimes Love Doesn’t Feel Like It Should

I was going to write about syntax tonight, but given the OUTPOURING of responses to my  call for a vampire book, I thought I would provide some guidelines as to what exactly I’m looking for. I think some of you are really on to something. I especially like the one about the string quartet where [...]

Out for Blood

Readers, I just heard that another vampire book (1,000 pages long) sold for seven figures. If the agent weren’t the sweetest guy in the whole world, I would drive a stake through my heart. I’ve always counseled writers not to jump on the band wagon, not to look to the bestseller list for inspiration, not to [...]

If You Don’t Know Me By Now

A reader explains her predicament: she submitted her manuscript to a publishing house a year ago and has still not heard back. Now, she believes the editor will be at a certain bookstore because one of her major writers is giving a reading. She wants  to know if she should go to the reading, approach the editor, and [...]

Unrepentant

I’m not going to temple today. It’s not that I haven’t done anything wrong this past year, or even that I’m not sorry for those things, I just  don’t see why I should die by asphyxiation from the collective smell of expensive pancake make-up favored by the women of the congregation or suffer through another internet [...]

And That Was All

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/fashion/27Cover.html

Please Kill Me

I started reading the newspaper in earnest in October, 1978 when Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen. I was eighteen years old and a freshman at NYU. I would buy The New York Post, The Daily News and The New York Times and go to the fourth floor of Bobst Library where you could smoke, spread [...]

My Bologna Has a Second Name

Unadulterated pity party: I didn’t get to go to Italy. Last minute trip to the doctor for codeine-laced cough syrup yielded a strong warning not to get on a plane. Fortunate is the person I would have been sitting next to. I am a passenger’s worse nightmare. So, no me sitting in a cafe with [...]

My Bologna Has A First Name

I’m going away for a few days to an unnamed Italian city. I’ve got to pack like now and I’m still all ungapotched about what to read. I”m pretty sure I’m taking the new Lorrie Moore (I know, predicatable, but still). And probably the James Atlas biography of Saul Bellow. I also want to read [...]

Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me (reprise)

On September 1, I posted a question from a writer who had interest from an agent,  had a few other agents request his manuscript (but still hadn’t heard back), and some outstanding queries with agents who hadn’t answered at all. I recommended he let everyone know that he had interest. This was the moment when he [...]

The One That Got Away

When the venerable editor and publisher Robert Giroux died last year, his NYT obituary listed some of the illustrious writers he worked with  including Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. Equally interesting to me were stories about the ones who got away.  One of these writers brought in his manuscript on teletype paper pasted together [...]