If not, he’d likely be in a nursing home, somewhere in Pennsylvania, I expect, wondering, as his mind drifted in and out of various time zones, whether my manuscript with the check for $200 had arrived yet.

I’d use his name here if I thought for sure he were dead, but he might just have seemed to be a prissy, spinsterish old fart.  He might well have been younger than me, and I don’t want to give the sonofabitch grounds to sue me.

This was back in ‘96.  I’d finished my first novel and recovered from the post-partum-like depression after a two-week celebration over  getting the damned thing done and paying to have a local instyprint place do up three copies of the manuscript.  This was before we had Internet service at home.  I’d typed the thing on a Kaypro 2X, my first computer, which was really just a word processor.  It had a little green cathode screen, and you had to save everything to floppy disks.  I still have the machine, thinking maybe I can donate it to the Smithsonian in a couple more years and use the tax deduction to defray a Bermuda cruise.  

Now it was time to find an agent.  A real agent.  Someone other than myself.  Let me explain. Trying to get past the receptionist/first read specialists at the mags to which I was submitting short story candidates, I’d created Bingo Bango Agency, which consisted of two rubber stamps.  One was for the letterhead.  I used black ink for that one.  The other was a miniature of the first, which reproduced my name, phone number and the word “agent.”  After being pressed on a pad doused in red ink, this one affixed the official-looking information in the right hand corner of my query letters.  Looked impressive as hell to me, but, alas, all Bingo Bango ever accomplished in my behalf was to occasionally garner a handwritten “yuk yuk” in the margin of the boilerplate rejection slips that invariably accompanied my returning manuscripts.

I spent a couple of days’ pay to purchase a copy of Publishers Marketplace, and began sending out bundles of query letters, with first chapters, an outline and a SASE to agents hither and yon.  Almost invariably the SASEs came hurriedly back, with boilerplate rejections minus any “yuk yuks” in the margin.  You all caught that “almost.”   I received a personal letter back from my agent.  Yay.  He offered a comment on my first chapter.  The comment, which sucked, unfortunately also told me that he thought the chapter itself sucked.   But his comment was my foot in the door.  Maybe if I jigged it up a tad and sent it back, he’d not think it sucked anymore.

This I did, and this pissed him off.  The good thing is that he didn’t completely blow me off.  You see, what he was really trying to do was to sell me his “critique service that guides newcomers to fiction.”  For $200 per 50,000 words he would critique Dump Denoument, and refund his fee “when the book sells.”  

He not only rejected my tweaked first chapter, he laid on some primary insults, telling me it had “involved sentences” and questioning the entire plot structure in a way that told me he hadn’t even looked at the outline.  He went on to say that agents “are not writing teachers.”  Remember, this was a snail mail exchange.  Had we been doing this via the Internet, the FCC would have had to intervene at some point to head off a cyber fistfight.

My agent wound up with this combination:  “You need to read more published books rather than base your ideas on tv or movie watching.  It is clear you haven’t learned the art or craft of writing.  That is why I suggest my critique service…”

I responded politely, taking advantage of the lag time to calm down, not wanting to burn any bridges.  But my response did mention several worthy published novels that utilized the very same plot device he’d derided.  

I eventually changed the title to Dump Fatal, thinking more cinematically,  which may be a clue that my agent was somewhat on target in his assessment of my intentions.   Dump Fatal, as yet unpublished, sits in several manuscript copies in my basement at the moment.  I’m afraid to read the damned thing now, for fear my agent was correct on everything.

Wheel you into the sunroom, Sidney?