So I am marketing my latest novel, Pictures on the Wall of My Life, and my query letter gets the usual thanks, but no thanks on the first round. Then there are those agents/publishers who are interested in taking a look at more, 5 pages, a chapter, 25 pages, 50 pages, the entire manuscript. And I dutifully send out one at a time and wait for a response so as not to have multiple submissions. But then, I think, well at least they are willing to check it out. And I have gotten over that first hurdle with an agent here or there. But then I get this kind of rejection:
"I think you’re a talented and original writer. That makes it all the harder to say that I’m not confident that I can find a publisher for you in the current difficult market for literary fiction. Editors seem exceedingly cautious right now about acquiring anything but the most obvious fiction."
Hmmmpffff...so perhaps I should follow Quentin Rowan's plagiarizing approach, when he wrote what Little Brown promoted as the new classic spy novel, just steal from about 13 other classic spy novels as Jeremy Duns discovered and revealed in his blog, The Debrief.
This was not the first time Little Brown boasted of an amazing new brilliant work...anyone remember Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” that contained several passages strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty—the 2001 novel “Sloppy Firsts” and the 2003 novel “Second Helpings.” ?????
I suppose I should be "that original" rather than write from a place of my own original thought as my fictional memoir Pictures on the Wall of My Life is. Maybe I should have just "borrowed" everything like Quentin Rowan (aka QR Markham) has.
It seems that since my talented and original idea is just not that obvious I need to appropriate work from others...to even get noticed. There should be a special place in hell for writers who plagiarize.
Why does this make me so damn mad?
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