Author of LGBTQIA+ speculative fiction and poetry in English and Esperanto. Emeritus teacher of scientific writing. Lover of natural history. SFWA Secretary. (he/him)
It’s easy to take air for granted, until you can’t breathe. Then you become acutely aware of it’s importance.
In 2022, I was diagnosed with a chronic lung condition. There were signs earlier, but neither I nor my medical professionals put them together until there was a crisis and I ended up in the emergency room. After a 12-day stay in the hospital, I got out and had to make a number of accommodations to my changed life circumstances. Now, I generally isolate, wear an N95 respirator for indoor events, and pay closer attention to air quality.
I was born the same year the Clean Air Act was passed. The air quality in US cities, which had become nearly intolerable and was lampooned and memorialized in comics and cartoons, gradually improved during my childhood. I spent quite a bit of time in Los Angeles during the mid 1980 and you’d hardly notice the haze until the wind changed and you’d realize there were mountains nearby. In other parts of the world, air quality continues to be a problem: I visited Saõ Paulo in 2006 and the air quality was chokingly bad.
I moved to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts in 1996. The Valley has a tendency to funnel air up from New York City and to trap air creating inversions. The result is that the air quality tends to be worse than you would predict from the bucolic, rural appearance. But it was rarely bad enough to be a concern until we started getting plumes of smoke from wildfires in Canada.
During the last intrusion of wildfire smoke, the air quality was bad enough that I wore my respirator while I was outside. I also pulled out my COVID-era Corsi-Rosenthal boxes and set one up in my office and in my bedroom.
To track the outdoor air quality, I did a bit of investigating and discovered the PurpleAir sensor network. You can buy devices to share air quality readings that can appear on a giant map. I kept a tab open on my computer and watched as the readings on the sensor climbed. There weren’t sensors really close by in Amherst. (Well, there’s one, but it’s an indoor sensor, so it doesn’t tell you very much.) There are two or three by the bridge in Sunderland and one in Hadley and one in South Amherst. Among those, I could interpolate to get a pretty good sense for what the air quality was here. But I found it useful enough, that I decided to buy my own sensor.
I bought the PurpleAir Classic – Air Quality Monitor. It was the only one that wasn’t sold out. (And, as of now, it is sold out.) I didn’t need any of the advanced features that the others had. And this one was marginally cheaper.
It arrived yesterday afternoon. It was not difficult to set up. I’ve installed it out in my tent and zip-tied it to the frame. I have power out there — I’m using an old, old Raspberry Pi power supply I happened to have sitting around. It was fun to have it show up on map and then be able to watch the readings change. There’s even a widget I can install to have it’s readings show up as an embed in my website. (I tried putting one on this page, but it breaks the formatting.)
Now I’m kind of waiting for the next plume of wildfire smoke to come this way so I can watch the number go up. Bring it on!
Like most authors these days, I’m getting constantly inundated with author scam messages. As someone familiar with the underlying technology, these are pretty easy for me to recognize, but I realized it might be worth documenting the kinds of features I use to identify them. Some of these are pretty obvious, while others are more subtle.
A great source of information is SFWA’s Writer Beware. Victoria Strauss has been writing about these scams as they’ve developed over the past couple of years. This impersonation scam has already been documented by Victoria — including the particular person being impersonated —which I’ll use here for my demonstration.
This message purports to be from an agent at a literary agency that would like to solicit the manuscript I’m currently querying with. In this case, the agent and agency are both real but this particular message is fake.
A couple of things to note first. One is that I’m using a desktop computer application to check my messages. If you use phone email clients, they often make it difficult to see the email address a message came from — or to consult the full headers. Second, is that my email client is configured to not load remote “content”. I recommend never, ever loading the remote content in email. It’s almost always web-bugged, meaning it uses a filename or server path that communicates to the sender that you’ve looked at the message. You really don’t want to ever do that. It does mean that messages sometimes look broken. But the “design” of email is easy to copy and so you shouldn’t ever let yourself be fooled by a message because it “looks” genuine.
One of the first things I do when I get one of these messages is to determine whether the person referenced actually exists. A quick web search will confirm that Amelia Atlas is an actual agent and that she does, in fact, work with the Creative Artists Agency. But a little more digging will show some discrepancies. First, the email address the message was apparently sent from (amelia.agent.caa@gmail.com) is different than the email address shown in the footer (amelia@caa.com) and both of these are different from her actual email address (which you can find at her agency website).
Note that you can’t fully trust the email address shown in the “From:” line of a email message. Those are possible to forge, so you really need to look at the raw message source and confirm that the email was actually sent through gmail. The mail headers are long and mostly impenetrable, but there’s the relevant piece that shows where my mail server received the message from Google.
Unfortunately, Google does not show us the actual IP address the scammer connected from — just the address of the server they used (74.125.227.130). Otherwise, we might be able to deduce where they are located in the world. But this shows pretty clearly the email address they used and that it did come from Google.
Since agency email addresses are clearly @caa.com and this came from @gmail.com, we can be pretty sure this message is fake. The fact the footer shows an incorrect address — and is in fact not even linked to a mailto: link, but instead to the agent’s page at caa.com is also a giveaway. It’s gotten so that just the fact that it’s sent from gmail.com is, in itself, suspicious.
Note that this a lesson for authors as well: you really should get a domain name of your own and send all of your email from that if you want to appear legitimate. And you should also maintain a web-presence at your domain name with information people can cross-check to confirm that messages from you are not forged.
One other pitfall to be aware of is that scammers sometimes will register domain names that use non-ASCII letters to impersonate valid websites. For example, I could register “𝖼𝖺𝖺.com” (which uses mathematical characters that look like “caa”, but are different unicode characters: U+1D5BCU+1D5BAU+1D5BA instead of U+0063U+0061U+0061U). This is why you should never trust a link sent in email. Go find the server yourself and navigate starting from there. You can type the domain name yourself, or start with a search engine — they mostly won’t be confused.
Double checking information “out of band” is a useful strategy also in other contexts. One time I got a voicemail from someone who introduced themselves as an FBI agent from Boston and left a phone number. I didn’t call that phone number but, instead, looked up the Boston FBI office, called the number, and asked for the agent by name. It really was a valid message. But you should always be skeptical of information provided by a potentially unreliable source.
Finally, the content of the message is also suspicious. Anyone who knows anything about querying knows that agents basically never solicit manuscripts. If anything, they want a well-structured query and would probably want to look at an excerpt before considering the full manuscript. This particular agent’s webpage specifies what she’s looking for:
For fiction submissions, please include your query letter, bio, and the first 10 pages of your manuscript in the body of your email. For nonfiction submissions, please include your query letter and bio and proposal if available.
Most agents use the nagware website Query Tracker to manage queries. A few do in fact use email, and I expect they are among those most commonly impersonated.
One thing I found creepy about this particular scam was that it seems to be that the scammer has been reading my blog, so they appear to know I’m currently querying. I got an earlier scam solicitation that pretended to be a different agent at a different agency that was similar, but I wasn’t yet querying at that time.
One other particular giveaway in this instance for me was that I have in fact queried a different agent at Creative Artists. So I wouldn’t query a second agent at the same agency — and would certainly not expect a different agent to contact me.
Time being limited, you only have so much attention you can devote to things. The more things you try to track, the less depth you can devote to any one. I think it’s worth being reflective every so often about how many different things you’re trying to pay attention to. To begin with, there’s real live people: people in your household, cow-orkers, & friends. Then there are communication tools: telephone, email, and social media environments. Finally, there are a vast number of notifications that are competing for our attention: computer notifications, updates, and automated messages. It’s overwhelming.
There’s a vast scholarly literature about the “attention economy.” Advertisers and the commercial social media companies have been intensely interested in how they can capture and keep eyeballs on their products and platforms. There are hundreds or thousands of articles you can read where people have parsed and dissected the topic a million different ways because there’s so much commercial interest (i.e. money) involved.
Commercial social media companies have conspired to promote the idea that they are unitary “sources” of “content” and that people should be content to scroll through an endless succession of effectively anonymous posts selected by The Algorithm, provided they’re reasonably aligned with their interests. I’ve always found this notion horrifying.
As an aside, let me note that essentially all of the literary agents I’ve queried have had X-twitter, Facebook, and /or Instagram feeds. I think *one* mentioned Bluesky. Personally, I would be embarrassed to be seen with a Twitter account these days. If you hang around in a Nazi bar, who’s to say you aren’t a Nazi… The nagware QueryTracker web app they mostly use seems to only support asking about Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And many of the agents ask if you have a “social media” presence — meaning one of those three commercial platforms. Sigh… Many also ask for my “website” and/or “blog,” so that’s something.
In the 1990s, an anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, proposed a limit to the size of meaningful human communities. His statistic, Dunbar’s Number, suggested that humans can maintain approximately 150 stable relationships at a time. Various other’s have critiqued his methodology and proposed other, usually larger, potential numbers: up to around 300.
In education, there is a similar effect. When there are fewer than 300 students in a school, all of the staff can learn all of the kids’ names. This has profound effects for kids acting out in school: when even the crossing guard and the lunch lady know everyone’s names, students are not anonymous — they’re not just a number. It creates an atmosphere of respect. Once schools get much larger than that, people quit trying to learn the kids’ names because it’s impossible.
I’m trying to winnow down my information environment to entities I actually care about and want to follow. I’ve started using an RSS reader to let me follow particular writers. And I’ve begun trying to critically look at social media accounts I follow to decide whether they are contributing meaningfully to my experience. I basically always did that when I followed people at Mastodon: I always check profiles and scroll through the feed to see if they’re adding value. At Bluesky, I clicked a bunch of starter packs and so now I’m following a lot of accounts where I did not thoughtfully make that assessment. But, honestly, I haven’t liked the vibe at Bluesky enough to bother with critically evaluating my feed there.
Note in particular that I’m talking about writers, by which I mean “human beings that write things.” I’m not interested in things nobody could be bothered to write, by which I mean AI. Evidently, somewhere between a quarter and a half of the posts on commercial social media are written by AI now. And it’s even worse on LinkedIn. If a human can’t be bothered to write something, I can’t be bothered to read it.
Today, I got a notification from Google with what looked like a news headline. (I mostly don’t allow “apps” to send me notifications, but I let Google notify me mostly so that when I’m driving, it can alert me to accidents or traffic jams and help me route around them. But, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t any way to tell it to be more selective about notifications.) The headline was, “Americans increasingly disillusioned by ‘AI.'” This did sound like an article I might be interested in reading, so I clicked on it. It was not. It was not an article — just some AI summary. I closed the tab.
I have signed the contract for my fluffy space-opera novelette Bearly Believable to appear at Hexfiled, probably in October. The story features two non-human biological androids that work at a picnic park on Planet Volpex.
Volpex is a terraformed world with a simplified ecology designed to maximize providing feedstock for the replicators that people use to manufacture everything. All of the people live on one developed continent and the rest of the world is left fallow to be harvested for feedstock — or used for recreational purposes.
I workshopped the characters using Wandering Shop Stories at Mastodon: A ranger who runs the park, an owl who patrols the park for litter, a bear that runs a fire-safety program, and a charming little girl named Brunhilde who is endlessly curious. I wrote a lot of short vignettes as I developed the characters. Some of the vignettes appear in the story, although most of the story is new and it includes new characters, like Lloyd — a penguin who works at Kowareta Nai, a business that sells surplus biological androids.
The story is set in the same universe as the Better Angels and includes some walk-on and cameo appearances of characters from there, including Totemo Isogashii and Lambda. In fact, I have several new Better Angels stories. When I wrote Bearly Believable, I was thinking it might appear in an anthology with the others, but that seems less and less likely to happen.
I submitted the story a few other place and several liked it, but said it didn’t quite fit. When I saw what Hexfiled was looking for, I realized it had found its perfect home:
Our editorial focus leans toward stories where the speculative element shapes the story’s infrastructure rather than decorating the top. We love biological SF, ecological futures, post-human consciousness, weird and slipstream fiction, military SF, and stories where the science is imagined thoughtfully even if it isn’t real. We are less interested in chosen-one narratives and portal fantasy.
We prefer stories that give the characters a selfhood. Not necessarily a fully realized identity if it clashes with the story’s concept, but a sense of interiority as much as the premise allows.
We appreciate stories that make us feel something alongside the imagined weird. We have a soft spot for fiction that is simultaneously absurd and grieving.
I look forward to sharing Bearly Believable with you when it appears!
About two weeks ago, I started to query for a literary agent. I aimed to send out at least one query a day. So far, I’ve exceeded that by almost three to one. I’ve currently sent out 33 queries — and received four rejections.
At first it was hard because the queries required some new thing I needed to write. Some wanted an expanded biography. Others wanted a logline. But I’ve pretty much got these all written, though I continue to polish and adjust. So now, I just need to copy-and-paste.
I also needed to find appropriate break points for requests for different length excerpts: 5 pages, 10 pages, 20 pages, first three chapters, entire manuscript, etc. Now I’ve got those all figured out.
Now it’s really just adjusting the opening to explain how I think my manuscript fits what the agent says they’re looking for. I still have to research each agent to find out what they’re seeking and to see if they have any special requests. One wants to be addressed by first name. Another by Mx.
One unusual special request was to identify a special item I would take on a spaceship. I scratched my head a bit and eventually said I would take a NeoBoxer — a cybernetically-enhanced boxer dog that could pilot a starship if necessary. And I invited them to read Better Angels to learn more. Maybe it will get a chuckle.
I’ve made a few mistakes. I accidentally submitted one letter with the wrong name (the name of the founder the agency is named after rather than the individual agent). I also accidentally sent queries to two agents at the same agency, which is reportedly a no-no. I have a spreadsheet, so I should have caught that. I’m being extra careful going forward. My memory just isn’t what it once was.
I’m also trying to keep track of the agents I consider and reject. One said they were only accepting by referral. One said no “new adult”. One said, “no fantasy” even though the search I’d conducted was for agents that accept fantasy. It’s hard to keep track of everything.
So far my rejections have just been form rejections or one liners. “Not right for me.” “Isn’t the right fit for my list.” “I have decided to pass.” (Nothing as interesting as what this guy has received.)
When I got my first rejection, I shared the news at SFWA. Several people sent encouragement and one person asked what I was going to do to celebrate. One author said that when he gets a rejection he always has Rejection Nachos which are an important part of the process. If I were to get Rejection Nachos every time I get a rejection, it might create a personal health catastrophe.
Instead, I will hold out hope that an agent finds my query intriguing enough to request the full manuscript. And maybe, then, they will offer to represent me. It could happen. Then I really would celebrate.
Every morning, I take my 93-year-old mother for a walk. We almost always walk along Montague House that has a sidewalk beside a metered parking lot. The sidewalk used to be wide enough for us to walk side-by-side, but now that she uses a rollator, it’s a little too narrow. We sometimes walk single file, when there are parked cars. But, on a Saturday in the summer, the parking lot was empty.
In any case, this morning I stepped into the empty parking lot and walked along the curb. As we passed on either side of the parking meters, my mom said, “Bread and butter.”
I, of course, immediately replied, “Bread and butter!”
I remembered how we did this when I was a child and I asked her whether she could remember how she’d learned it. But she couldn’t — I assume it was from her childhood as well. So I looked online for the answer.
At first I found nothing, in part because Internet search sucks now and also because bread-and-butter is a ubiquitous phrase with many practical and idiomatic meanings. But it turns out there is a Wikipedia page for Bread and butter (superstition). What would we do without Wikipedia?
Most of the page is drawn from a 1923 article in the American Journal of Folklore, Signs and Superstitions Collected from American College Girls that claims it wards off bad luck (or prevents a quarrel). Interestingly, it is also the specific charm for when two people go to dry their hands on the same towel. Who knew?
I’ve always been partial to non-fiction accounts of spies and espionage. I picked up Gorden Corera’s The Spy in the Archive and found it readable and informative, though with certain deficits.
Vasili Mitrokhin was a retired KGB colonel who spent most of his career as an archivist first in the Lubyanka and then, when KGB expanded to a new building, Yasenevo. He was the one tasked with moving the files — some 300,000 of them from one building to another. This gave him unique access to many of the KGB’s most closely guarded secrets.
The book dwells on Mitrokhin’s motives for defecting. Mitrokhin had become disaffected with the Soviet system, but was always guarded about his own history. The book provides what evidence is available and tries not to speculate overmuch. But the result is a bit unsatisfying since so little is really known.
What he specifically targeted was the “cheka” system of secret police using informers to maintain ideological compliance. Although the Russian intelligence service has changed its name from Tsarist then Bolshevik then Soviet then Russian times, it’s culturally the same. Now wielded by Vladimir Putin, although the individuals have changed, the practices have not.
Mitrokhin used his unique access to take notes about tens of thousands of files and to sneak them out hidden in his shoes. He spent years assembling the notes into a highly compressed form until he retired in 1984. He made approaches first to the Americans, who rejected him, and then turned to the British. Eventually the British brought him and his family in. The revelations contained in his notes shook the foundations of the intelligence community around the world.
Mitrokhin had seemingly been unhappy with his life and career. He was not much happier after his defection. He was frustrated with his efforts to publish and publicize his work. He passed away in 2004, still fighting to get his vision out.
The book, which intersperses the sketchy personal history of Mitrokhin with the events of his defection and some history of the origins of Soviet intelligence service and its practices during the Cold War, often felt a bit jumbled to me. But Mitrokhin is an interesting, if mysterious, historical figure and I enjoyed learning more.
When I was about seven years old (circa 1970), my family got a boxer dog. I recollect that we paid $100 (about $860 today) for a flashy fawn from a breeder, who let her go because she was the runt of the litter. But she was very pretty and adorable. Her official name was “Miss Meerschaum.” My father was a pipe-smoker and meerschaum is a kind of light-colored wood used in pipes that gradually turns a boxer-colored brown as it’s used. But we just called her “Miss Boxer” for short.
We got a dog primarily for my father. One of his students had committed suicide and he’d become very depressed. He spoke with a therapist who recommended several things, one of which was to get a dog. I think my father fell in love with boxers after reading about Malabar Farm. My father was an ecologist/environmentalist and Louis Bromfield, who was considered the father of the environmental movement, famously had boxers.
Miss Boxer was the first of three boxers my father had. Boxers, like most large, inbred dogs, don’t live very long. After Miss Boxer, we got Sunny and then, after I had left home, he got Beau (whom I called Beauzeau because he was such a clown.)
Once I was out running in the countryside with Sunny. We lived in the country and she ran off lead most of the time, ranging around. She was usually pretty far out in front. She was amazing in that as we came to a decision point — a corner or fork in the trail — she would look back and with a gesture, I could tell her which way we were going to go and she’d head off that way.
Boxers are described as being protective. Running along the road, I approached a truck that had four or five young men standing around the tail gate drinking beer and laughing. I didn’t think much about it, but something must have seemed off to Sunny. She came alongside me and interposed herself between me and them. Then all the fur came up along her back and she ran with a really stiff-legged gate. The young men fell silent and watched us go past. Then she just went off ranging around as usual. My respect for boxers as guard dogs went way up after that.
When I had a family, we decided to get a dog. I, of course, held out for a boxer dog. My wife was skeptical and did extensive research on dog breeds, looking at all kinds of weird things, like otter-faced dogs. I would also conduct oppositional research to point out all of their negative characteristics, e.g. “It says they bark incessantly. Did you hear that? INCESSANTLY.” Finally, I wore her down and we got a boxer puppy.
Boxers are a little weird. They look weird and they act weird. Their short muzzle is thought to be a neotonic (puppy-like) characteristic and their behavior is also puppy-like their whole lives. Their forward-facing eyes give them a very human-like gaze. Their wrinkly face is incredibly expressive. And their jowls (which my brother and I called “muppies” as children) are soft and velvety.
When we got our first boxer, my wife would just shake her head and say, “Boxers look weird!” And then about 6 weeks later, she shook her fist at me and cursed, “Now other dogs look weird!” It’s true. Once you get used to boxers, it’s the long-nosed dogs that look weird.
My family had two boxers. I set up a website to share our boxer experiences. Our first boxer died young, at 6, from canine lymphoma. (Like all inbred dogs, boxers are subject to a variety of health problems, like cancers and heart conditions). The other lived until she was old and grey. I kind of wanted to get another, but my wife resisted because we’re getting too old to manage a big dog and we have my elderly mother living with us, who is too fragile to have a crazy boxer dog jumping on them. And for several years, I was without boxer companionship, which I missed terribly. But then my son got one.
When my son got an apartment, he decided to get an emotional support animal and I was delighted that he chose to get a boxer dog. I got to go with him to pick out the puppy from the litter. Then to go with him to bring her home. I’ve gotten to see her pretty much every day as she’s grown up. She is adorable and I love her to pieces.
Boxers are also reflected in my fiction. In my collection, Better Angels: Tour de Force, one of the protagonists is a NeoBoxer — a genetically engineered, cybernetically-enhanced boxer dog. NeoBoxers just look like dogs, but they have human (or better) intelligence, are able to pilot star ships, and can make themselves understood by (most) people just by barking.
There are actually two NeoBoxers in the stories, Lambda and Tau. (One of the stories is a riff on Lady and the Tramp.)
When the artist first drafted the cover, she thought the character must be humanoid with a boxer head. I explained that, no, he just looked like a fawn boxer dog. “Oh, that’s way easier!” she said.
I’ve actually got several more stories that feature NeoBoxers, but since the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy seems to no longer be a focus of the publisher, it’s not clear that these stories will ever see the light of day. It’s kinda sad.
Other dogs are okay too, I guess. But boxers are the best.
Today I believe I performed my last professional duty as a faculty member by attending a Faculty Senate Rules Committee meeting with the Administration. The Rules Committee, which sets the agenda for the Faculty Senate, meets monthly with the Chancellor, Provost, and the Campus Leadership Council. I made a few small contributions at the meeting and, with that, I don’t believe I have any more official duties until I formally retire at the end of the August.
I first got involved with the Faculty Senate shortly after I was hired in 1996. I began by serving on one of the committees: the Faculty Senate University Computing and Electronic Communications Committee. In 2004, I became Chair of the Committee. I also served on several other councils and committees over the years. I’m not sure when I became a Faculty Senator, but in 2013 I joined the Rules Committee for the first time.
In the early years I was more focused on union service and there was a strong bias against the union among the leadership of the Faculty Senate at that time. Although the union had been voted in 20 years before, it had been a divisive vote and a number of the anti-union people bore a grudge for the rest of their careers. Several of them were among the leadership of the Faculty Senate.
A big part of why I pursued Faculty Senate leadership when I did was because the administration began trying to centralize and outsource all of the IT functions. After a lengthy selection process, with good faculty participation, the campus had selected a Learning Management System. Just after all of the faculty had migrated their content to the new system, a Dean wanted to chuck it and force everyone to use a different (worse) system that was supported at the system level. We fought that off. Similarly, a misguided Chancellor wanted to force all of the faculty into Exchange, even though the students were all in Gmail. This was a spectacular flameout because the Chancellor hadn’t bothered to check how much it would cost and the campus couldn’t even afford the costs. We slowed down the adoption long enough that the Chancellor left and, afterward, leveler heads prevailed.
After I rotated off the Rules Committee as an at-large member (term-limited), I next served on the union bargaining team for several years. As that ended, I allowed myself to be recruited as Presiding Officer of the Faculty Senate, which I began in 2020. And I served for the last six years of my career.
I began during the depths of the COVID response when the Senate meetings were being held remotely via Zoom. When the campus returned to face-to-face meetings, I continued to preside remotely, since I had by then been diagnosed with a chronic lung condition and wanted to avoid the poorly-ventilated, densely-packed room. It was a little strange to have the auditorium directed by “big brother” on a screen, but people were generally supportive and made allowances for the things I could not easily do.
In point of fact, I pushed for us to continue to hold Faculty Senate meetings remotely. I was unable to persuade the Secretary to actually share the data, but I’m pretty sure we had better attendance, better participation, and more discussion when we were using Zoom. But he (and others) felt it was very important to bring people together in a room.
As Presiding Officer, I was also called upon to preside over an extraordinary meeting of the Faculty Senate and two General Faculty meetings. When the Chancellor called police to haul away student and faculty protestors, there was outrage. The Faculty Senate called an extraordinary meeting to give the Chancellor the opportunity to explain and for the faculty to ask questions. When many faculty were dissatisfied with the Chancellor’s response, they called fora General Meeting of the Faculty to vote no confidence. It was a giant hybrid meeting in one of the largest spaces on campus with overflow via Zoom. In the end, the faculty did vote no confidence in the Chancellor. The second General Faculty meeting was to have the faculty adopt a resolution calling for solidarity in higher education in response to the attacks being brought by the federal government.
Serving on the Rules Committee gave me a perspective and insight into the University — and its governance — that many faculty never see. I remember meeting with a Board of Trustees member that really summarized how they see the University. I don’t recall the specific issue he was talking about anymore, but I summarized for people by explaining that they would look at parameters — like the number of light poles per square mile — and the compare us with our peers, then say things like, “Well, Stanford has 15 light poles per square mile, but we have 19 — therefore we need to cut down four light poles per square mile.”
As my wife was on the Select Board, I frequently was invited to attend soirees at the Chancellor’s House as part of a town-gown initiative. I suspect I attended events at the Chancellor’s House more than any other faculty member in history. I remember I had been telling my wife about a particularly prickly chancellor and she said, “Oh, you must be exaggerating!” We arrived at the event and the Chancellor was greeting people at the entrance. I said, “Hi, Chancellor. We missed you at Faculty Senate on Thursday!” He drew himself and said, “I’ll have you know I was on Beacon Hill advocating for the funding for this campus. PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH TIME I HAVE TO SPEND TRYING TO SECURE FUNDING FOR THIS CAMPUS!” I plastered a smile on my face and nodded. Afterward, my wife said, “Okay. I get it. You were not exaggerating at all.”
Perhaps the most discouraging experience I had was when this chancellor presented their “Framework for Excellence” to the Faculty Senate. It was like a presentation to that Board of Trustees member. He had constructed a value-function graph for every parameter on the US News and World Report rating system to estimate the slope of the line where we stood as compared with our peers and proposed to spend money every place where the slope was steep, hoping to jump us up in the ratings. I was scathing. My proposal would have been to identify problems on the campus and try to address them. But, when that chancellor was forced out and the next chancellor came in, the campus unexpectedly jumped up several places in the US New and World Report ranking. The new chancellor crowed about how his policies had resulted in this historic rise, but I knew better.
I was not great as Presiding Officer. But I like to think I did okay. I was able to stay calm, mostly keep track of what was going on, and use Robert’s Rules to keep the meetings on track. I was pleased to find a role that I could perform usefully. And the experiences were all useful for my writing, But I don’t mind letting it go.
This month, I have started to query for a literary agent to publish my next book. It is an odious process which is qualitatively worse than submitting manuscripts for publication. Most “markets” that you submit a manuscript to at least pretend that they will respond to let you know if they’re going to reject your manuscript. But agents — universally as far as I can tell — say that you can expect your query to vanish into a black hole, and that if you haven’t heard from them in two or three months, you should assume that you never will.
Last fall, at WriteAngles, I attended a panel of agents that talked about their role in the publishing process. Agents are fundamentally a kind of parasite that act as gatekeepers for the publishing industry. Basically none of the traditional publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts, so you need an agent to even have your work considered. Agents see themselves as indispensable, of course. The agents on the panel suggested that you should query for at least six months before considering alternate routes to publication (i.e. small press or self publishing). Since I’ve already done those routes, I thought I would investigate finding an agent this time around. To find an agent, you need to engage in this activity called “querying”.
Querying requires a vast amount of research. I’ve attended several workshops to learn about the process. To begin, you need to draft a query letter, identify “comp titles,” and provide a preview of your manuscript. Of course, there’s no consensus about what any of these things represent, so you also have to study the submission guidelines for each agency. Some agencies also require other things (like a logline). Others put varying and unspecified arbitrary constraints (length of query letter, length of preview, etc).
One Straw Dog Writers Guild workshop I attended, provided a very nice overview of the query letter. A few takeaways: Address agent by name and be sure to not misgender. Indicate your reason for querying this agent: have you met before? Do you have something in common? Introduce your title. Identify the genre and wordcount. Craft a three paragraph pitch: The protagonist, the obstacle, and the stakes. Identify recent comp titles. Provide a short bio that focuses on your writing accomplishments. Finally, wrap up with a closing. Of course, as I said, some agencies want something different, so you still have to check the submission guidelines.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge for me was to identify “comp titles.” These are books with similar themes that have sold in the past few years. Before the workshop I had tried looking various places (e.g. Amazon and Goodreads) with little luck identifying good choices. But the workshop introduced me to NoveList a search engine that lets you search for recent books and find related titles. Luckily, my local library provides free access for library card holders. Using that, I was able to identify some recent books with similar themes.
Once I had the pieces mostly in hand, I started the most difficult part: trying to identify agents that my book might appeal to. There is a nagware website, querytracker, that many agents use for query submissions. The “free” version is intentionally crippled in a bunch of ways so that they can try to get you to pay for a higher tier. The website purports to have information about agents, but I’ve found that it has basically nothing and, what it has, is out of date. But it does have a bunch of agent listings so it’s not a bad place to start. Starting there, I investigate the literary agency’s website and study the page about the agent there to learn what kinds of things they are looking for. After exhausting querytracker, I will start studying Locus, which lists which agents sold speculative fiction books each month. That may well be more a profitable course of action, but querytracker — though not very useful — is easy and seems like a good place to start to practice, as I polish my letter and my pitch.
Lady Cecelia’s Journey is a sapphic, romantasy, road story. It is written as a series of six novelettes (that can serve as chapters in a collected edition) that, including a seventh “omake” story, totals 74,000 words. It is set in the same universe as my debut novel Revin’s Heart, but at an earlier point in time. That said, this is is a fully independent story.
Lady Cecelia is an aristocratic young woman attending the Westland Finishing School in a conservative part of the island of Belleriand. She has begun to realize she has feelings for women, but grew up in a sheltered environment with no opportunity to explore her sexual orientation. Her wealthy parents, who unbeknownst to her are the leaders of an organized crime syndicate, intend to place her in an arranged marriage to benefit the family politically.
Cecelia falls in love with Kasseh, a commoner who is attending the finishing school due to the patronage of the Baron. After they are are expelled for “conduct unbecoming a lady,” they flee together toward the capital, where — with the Baron’s support — they hope to be able to live together openly. Her mother takes a dim view of her rebellion against her authority and aggressively pursues her.
I’m aiming to send out at least one query per day. Recently someone at SFWA said they had submitted 150 queries before finding an agent. So that at least gives me some ball park figure to think about as I pursue this path. It’s a journey of my own that I’m undertaking one query at a time.
Oh. And if you’re an agent, I was kidding about the whole “parasite” thing. Really. Ha-ha-ha.
