Description: Literary agent, ultrarunner, sporadic blogger
We’ll see! My personal site has been preserved in amber since about 2017, but with certain people buying out certain social media sites, I’m contemplating using this a little more. If I do, I’ll get rid of the ads and/or switch to a publishing platform that’s a little more 2020s and a little less late 2000s. . .
One of the reasons I took a job at a literary agency, as opposed to a publisher, was that I didn’t want to sacrifice my humanity on the altar of professionalism. Publishing companies employ a lot of individuals with independent spirits, fierce intellects, and keen eyes, but they’re still conglomerates. Most have shareholders, quarterly SEC filings, and the other trappings of latter-day capitalism that to me always felt divorced from the arts.
Imagine now what it must be like to be a feeling, thinking person at Simon & Schuster, which as of this writing has still not pulled the Milo Yiannopoulos book. (It may even wind up published, provided it somehow survives vetting by the legal department.) It isn’t easy to speak out against an employer, even when that employer has decided to give a fascist a quarter of a million dollars while hoping to profit off that hate, capitalizing from the book sales, possibly even footing the bill for an author tour—w