You were angry in 1991 about stuff in LA not being rebuilt after the 1992 LA riots?

Said Wolverine is very, very mad at you from beyond the grave for referring to it as “Michigan University.”

If that’s not perfect for the “don’t talk to me or my son ever again” meme I don’t know what is

China did not violate U.S. territorial waters. You don’t know how the law of the sea works.

There’s a very tiny problem with this, which is it utterly fails to propose an alternative affirmative theory, i.e., the “why would you do that”? test.

I work in publishing. For a debut author, yep, that’s pretty how much how it works.

Yep. Israel is pretty uninterested in attacking ISIS and vice versa. ISIS has operated well within range of Israeli guns near the Golan Heights. The fact is that Israel and ISIS have the same enemies — the Assad regime and Hezbollah.

Israel is fighting ISIS? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. You just very concisely demonstrated that you know nothing.

So you DO know that China made and sold a whole lot of AKs and you were just being pedantic?

Does the term “Type 56” mean anything to you, AntiLag? It doesn’t, does it?

But this is different from the story Jezebel ran a couple weeks ago about the woman who got more responses from agents about her novel when submitting as a man than as a woman, right?

Could you please explain what the difference between “an agent who also writes” and a “writer who also agents” is?

Isn’t your anecdote kind of meaningless without the numbers? Like, what if they really had run like 90 profiles of books by women and 10 of those by men? Wouldn’t that in fact make it reasonable?

Well, no, I think *you* don’t understand; she had the exact same “acceptance rate” as both genders, which was 0%.

Simply put: know people (that is, if you can’t or don’t want to get into a prestigious MFA program, which can certainly help). Which isn’t that hard. Join writers’ groups, go to readings, reach out to writers you like (contrary to the pop culture image, most - though not all - writers, even relatively famous ones are…

Why do you assume that I don’t know what it’s like “on the other side of the gulf”?

Thanks, but I don’t do YA. Wish I could, but have no idea how.

I like how I explained precisely how and why I’m NOT biased (except against bad writing) and you come back blathering about my inability to move past my biases. Thanks.

I’m a literary agent, and reading this self-pitying nonsense made me kind of angry. (By the way, Catherine/Tom, sending unsolicited queries is the most accessible way to reach us in the same sense that posting a personals ad on Craigslist is the most accessible path to a long-term relationship — technically true, but…

To be fair, there was some other stuff going on in the USSR at the time that meant that further work had to be put off for a bit.