EVER

“”My theory is that all such people waste your time. In the time it takes to explain what you want, to check what they do, to point out where they did it wrong–you can do at least three times as much by yourself.” — Isaac Asimov”"

Good point. This is exactly why I stopped having a webmaster. His work, his temperament, and his prices were all fine, but updating the site was always such a time-consuming process, for exactly the reasons Asimov cites, that when I decided I wanted to build an all-new site and retire the old one, I also decided it would be more efficient to learn some web software and just do it myself. That was five years ago and I still find that just doing it myself suits me best. I use Dreamweaver, which was actually a nuisance to learn, but I think the preponderance of writers doing their own websites now with WordPress (which I gather is a lot more user-friendly and something I should look into for my next overhaul) means that quite a few writers have decided that it’s less trouble just to do it themselves.

Anyhow, I find it really interesting that Asimov says he eschews agents in a piece entitled HOW TO ENJOY WRITING. That highlights something which has been true for me, which is that working with an agent always wound up significantly diminishing my enjoyment of writing. And, as already discussed, I also lost BOATLOADS of time and energy when working with agents, due to the stress and distraction they caused me.

In fact… in a perfect example of the TIME that such people cost me (as well as mental energy)… On one occasion, I found out that an editor of mine was leaving and I was being reassigned. This happens fairly often in publishing (and has happened a number of times to me), and you never know how it will go for the writer. (Once it went really well and led to many more books sales; once it meant I had to leave a house because my new editor went A YEAR without ever answering my emails or returning my calls; and so on.) I was philosophical about the news. I hadn’t heard great things about my new editor, but I also hadn’t had a great impression of the previous one. So I would wait and see how it went.

My agent, OTOH, freaked out. Both my agent and the agent’s assistant spent the morning on the phone telling me that my new editor was a nightmare to deal with and this would be a disaster for me. So that afternoon, the agent and I talked about whether to request ADDITIONAL reassignment–but I didn’t know anyone else at the house, and the agent didn’t like anyone at the house, do we just dithered. So then we talked AGAIN toward the end of the day; still MORE dithering.

I had by now spent a WHOLE DAY thinking and fretting about this… when, in fact, I’d pretty shrugged off the news, first thing that morning, with a “it happens” attitude. It was the -agent- who’d gotten me up in arms and wasting the whole day fretting about this. So now… as we’re talking, then agent asks to put me on hold for a moment to take another call. But instead of putting me on hold… the agent disconnects me. (Out of courtesy, I’ll assume it was an accident.) I wait by the phone a few minutes, assuming the agent will call be back. But no call comes. So I call the agent’s office; not there. So I call the agent’s cell; I get voice mail. So I email the agent.

Well, 5 o’clock comes and goes. And it’s Friday. So now I spend the ENTIRE WEEKEND fretting about this editorial problem–which -I- hadn’t considered a problem until the agent whipped me into a frenzy about it, had 3-4 phone conversatinos with me about it… then disconnected me and NEVER CALLED BACK. So, yep, I waste AN ENTIRE WEEKEND fretting about this.

I assume, of course, that the agent will phone me Monday morning, full of apologies and A Really Good Explanation for not phoning me back on Fri. After all, I have left an office-phone message, a cell phone message, AND an email.

But no call ever comes. No response to the email, no acknowledgement that I was simply left HANGING in the middle of an interrupted conversation, wholly generated by the agent and the agent’s assistant, along the lines of, “This is a disaster for you, Laura! A disas–oh, can I put you on hold?”

So finally, on Tues or Weds, -I- called and tried to re-open the discussion. The agent never acknowledged having hung up on me, never acknowledged ignoring my calls and messages… and now tried to backpedal and say that the reassignment to the new editor was no big deal and didn’t really matter, but if it wound up bothering me as much as I expected ( I? I??? =I= expected?), we could talk about it again then, but there probably wasn’t much we could do.

So by now, I’ve wasted 4-5 days fretting anxiously about something -I- had seen as a standard event, which the -agent- then freaked me out by (rather hysterically) defining as a huge problem, and then further freaked me out by leaving me hanging mid-sentence for days, and THEN capped off by pretending was all -my- idea and one that should be shoved aside. Which led to me losing several MORE days in the stress of bewildered frustration, feeling ill-used, and wondering if I should fire the agent. (I eventually did fire the agent, but it was later and for other reasons.)