ksmith | *whoosh*

It's a windy day. My leaping reindeer lawn decoration is half toppled, and given the roaring I heard during the night, I fully expected to find my wreaths had been stripped off the side of the house and tumbled to parts unknown. But they were still attached, as was the one on the garage. The wonders of really solid hooks.

I've been pondering the writing business, which is bound to make one crazy but there you go. Someone I know from another list just separated from their agent. I remember when this person signed on with said agent, who was their first choice and a grand choice overall. Great agency, with lots of bestsellers. The agent zirself had a very solid rep.

No clue what happened, and I don't know this writer well enough to ask. It didn't sound like it was their decision. I could guess that it was due to a list purge. Maybe a business disagreement. So now this writer needs to start the search all over again. They've done it before, and will likely end up well, but they're still dealing and it can be a shock. But it's also a reminder that agenting is a business just like writing, and one agent's "solid" can be another's "not worth the time." ETA: I should add that this writer has contracts to fulfill. Definitely a working writer. If I could hazard a guess, I would say that this agent doesn't have much patience with career upsets at the non-bestseller level, but that would just be a guess. I'm just glad I never took certain folks' advice and applied to this agent. Not that they would have taken me, but still. One time when it paid to listen to the little voice.

Also talk on the list of where the publishing business is headed. Some folks seem to feel that The Long Tail may help save the midlist, assuming that there are sufficient smaller publishers out there willing to publish those works, along with a decent distribution system. One fear is that this may ring down the curtain on the higher advances--by "higher", I mean low-mid five figures, enough that one or two books a year could cover major bills or even be enough to live on. Advances of a few thousand, and smaller sales, will make it more difficult for midlisters to make a living writing fiction. Bestsellers, mainstream and genre, will, I think, always have a home with the Bigs in NY. The rest of us...I think it's going to be an adventure, which may turn out well. But the journey will be rough and what we wind up with may be very different than what we face now. Granted, what we face now sucks, but it's the devil we know.

You're not going to hear a lot of rah rah writing talk from me. Been there, done that. Maybe it's that I don't take coaching well--it gets me to a certain point, but then I'm still on my own. If I don't have the fuel or momentum to power through on what becomes an increasingly solitary journey, no amount of external push is going to get me where I need to go. At various stages, I simply reach the point when where I am at the moment isn't enough, and I need to move on. "Stop going to the conferences and just write the damned book." "Try writing something else." "Make up my mind how I'm going to approach this business and make it fit in my life instead of the other way around." Discussing things with others can help, but in the end, I need to make the decision. Put in the time. Deal with the realities of the business, which can lay waste to the sturdiest egos.

Graham Greene's sliver of ice in the heart. You need to save some for the business side of things. At least, I have to. My terms, as much as is possible.

And that's my ramble for the day.