Writer Beware's Top 20 Worst Literary Agents, featuring Barbara Bauer

As a sometime writer I consider myself a silent fringe member of the "struggling unpublished writer" community at large. In that capacity I sometimes lurk on web resources for writers. One of them is the weblog of a mysterious New York-based literary agent codenamed Miss Snark.

Now, this lady lives up to her nom de guerre, answering writers' questions from the hip. The stupider the question, the more snarkastic the answer.

Another key resource on the web is Writer Beware, a section of the Science Fiction Writers of America website dedicated to rooting out literary agents who scam writers.

Writer Beware recently published its list of the Top 20 Worst Literary Agents. You can imagine the reaction of anyone whose name appears on that dishonor roll. One of them is agent Barbara Bauer, who went on a campaign against Writer Beware and allied sites, including Miss Snark's.

Not a good idea. Miss Snark and her legions of Snarklings are hitting back as only web-savvy writers can, employing Googlebombs and Technorati tags like this: BarbaraBauer. Check out Miss Snark's left hook and right straight. She skipped the jabs, and now I guess we're waiting for the big uppercut.

Hey, Barbara Bauer? I think you're in trouble.

Receipts

Thise little slips of scrap paper are truly annoying. You have to collect them, sort them, keep them somewhere safe, and then summarize them so they can turn back into money you spent. It doesn't help that some of them are printed on thermal paper and the text fades after a couple of days.

I'll be so glad when we get to the stage where all your spending can be tracked on a card or chip and wed can dispense with the little slips of annoying paper.

Juanes: Mi Sangre (3.5/4 stars)

I haven't run into such a fun album in quite a while. My Spanish comprehension isn't much more than 50%, but what I could understand of the lyrics, the ringing strings and the sweet Latin rhythms make Mi Sangre (My Blood) a real pleasure to listen to.

My favorite cuts are the infectious Amame (Love Me), a rocking obsessive love pean, the slower burn but still kinetic love song Nada Valgo Sin Tu Amor (I Am Nothing Without Your Love) and the unusual breakup song La Camisa Negra (The Black Shirt).

I don't have very many complete albums on my poor little 4GB apple green iPod mini. Mi Sangre is one of them, and I don't think I'll be deleting a single track for quite a while.

A Life i(Pod)mproved

I'm late to the iPod revolution. I got my lovely wife an (appropriately) apple green iPod mini for Christmas 2004. She had is for over a year until the iPod nano appeared. I got her one of those, and the mini was handed down to me.

Previous to that I had discovered podcasts. The only way for me to listen during my long commute was to burn the mp3s into a CD, which I would then play on my fortunately mp3-capable car stereos. This was pretty cumbersome, but I kept with it just because the podcast voices were like friends chatting you up on the way home after a long day of hard work.

Anyway, the CD player on my current car stopped reading mp3 CDs a couple of weeks before the mini became mine. I got myself an iTrip (my wife got a RoadTrip) and now I no longer have to burn CDs. I also no longer have to continuously shuffle my CD collection in my car, five discs at a time. The 4GB of my little green friend can only hold a fraction of my music collection (the classical stuff has to be ripped whole CDs at a time, and I can't bring myself to listen to anything below 192kbps...) along with a few podcasts, but now I understand why people take the iPod wherever they go.

Fall Off Horse, Get Back On Horse

It's funny what invisible lines can do to you.

My writing momentum was deep-sixed by that trip to the other side of the world, as I expected it to be. When I got back I was so disoriented that reestablishing routine was a struggle. Being an inveterate creature of habit, that meant I needed to go back to the start and rebuild my routine. It was no mean feat, since the back-to-back weeks away meant that Important Stuff, i.e. work and home, needed a lot of tending to before trifles like weblogs could be addressed.

Add in another week off of work to spend some quality time in the sun (and rain) and the onset of Busy Busy Busy here in the office and, well, I have a lot of excuses to make to myself over the silence.

So, I'm back. One can always rely on Major Events like two purportedly-blockbuster films to bring me back online to add my two cents to the world's currency regarding the Current Controversial Movie. Yes, my obligatory lines on the Ron Howard celluloid treatment of Mr. Daniel Brown's moneymaking tome will be on The Silver Screener shortly.

The other weblog will have the long-delayed retelling of the Jersey Game Session up soon. My fickle sometime-writer, ever-a-gamer alter ego decided that it didn't like the fragments of a session report I had previously saved on Blogger and deleted the mess. So I will do a rewrite based on badly-faded ten-week-old memories. Well, it won't be the first time.

It feels good to have the virtual pen back in hand.