Yesterday I received an email from a publisher apologizing for the delay in acknowledging receipt of my manuscript (which was sent unsolicited) and assuring me that it would be read in due course. The publisher, of course, is Canadian.
In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review Helene Stapinski wrote: “In the hierarchy of literary respect, fiction is king, followed by historical narrative and, dead last, the lowly memoir.”
She was wrong on two counts: Poetry resides at the top and travel writing, unfairly, languishes at the bottom.
Yesterday I read a piece by a writer talking about how difficult writing is these days. It was a mildly interesting essay, but not nearly as eloquent as silence would have been.
When people ask me how I'm enjoying retirement I correct them: "You don't get rejections when you're retired."
I recently received an email from an agent that included this sentence: "We also discipline ourselves to taking on new clients for whom we are confident we can obtain a royalty advance of at least $100,000."
Odd use of the verb 'discipline.'
In his Low Life column Jeremy Clarke describes his visit to a Marseilles hospital and beautifully disregards the old writing rule about never using multiple words when one will do. “I located the department of nuclear medicine, finally, at the end of a corridor along which the curvature of the Earth was visible.”