1. He points out your errors. It’s impossible to be perfect with some asshole constantly griping at you about comma abuse, homonym misuse, and proper apostrophe placement. You never do anything wrong. The dude needs to just back off.

2. He explains things to you about grammar, proper usage, plotting, characterization, etc. What does he think you are, five? Of course you know these things. You know everything. He just doesn’t get that you’re exercising your stylistic freedoms. And why is he giving you lessons in history, physics, Cantonese slang, Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the limits to which the human body can strain in that particular position of the Kama Sutra? You’re creative. You don’t have to be factually accurate.

3. He suggests improvements to your story and style. If you’d wanted to write it the way he suggested, you’d have done it that way in the first place. Even if you’d never thought of it before. Jesus. What an ass. He’s probably a failed writer with nothing better to do than try to undermine your talent. If he’s so smart, he can go write a book. You don’t need to improve anything. Ever.

4. He makes you do all the work of implementing his recommended changes. Cripes. You wrote the book once already. Why should you have to retain ownership of your characters and storyline to write it again? All that BS he spouts about trusting you and your talent, and about not taking over your story…pfft. He’s just blowing smoke up your ass because he’s too lazy to do it himself. He should just whip everything together and take care of it; it’s not your problem anymore. Editors are really just glorified proofreaders anyway. Everyone knows that.

5. He actually thinks your writing should mature with each iteration of edits and each new story. Why should you have to change what’s already perfect? So what if you just had to rewrite ten pages of action because he decided the existing scene created a plot hole the size of a mutant manatee? You’ll just dash it off and send it in as-is, flaws intact. Nevermind the fact that he’s spent the entire manuscript griping like your mother-in-law about semicolons can’t be used that way or make sure the modifying clauses agree with the main subject, verb, and object. Whine, whine, whine. If your writing style changed from edit to edit and book to book, he wouldn’t have anything to do. You’re just being considerate and keeping him from getting bored. After all, he wouldn’t have a job without you.

6. He’d rather go without sleep than miss another chance to go through your manuscript. I mean, obviously he’s just trying to create problems and he’s got a grudge against you. Does it really matter if every instance of the word Green in the Manuscript is CapitaLiZed? Get a life, man. Maybe if he slept more than three hours a day he wouldn’t be so nitpicky.

7. When you halfass your edits, he makes you do them again. Clearly he doesn’t understand that you skipped 75% of his editorial commentary because it was all asinine and destructive, demonstrating that he doesn’t get what you’re doing. Also, see previous comment re: getting a life. Doesn’t he think you have anything better to do?

8. He makes you kill your darlings. You spent months crafting that perfectly placed piece of purple prose, with its precisely poetic palliteration. You love that particular figure of speech and damn it, even if it’s not appropriate, you’ll make it appropriate. Your favorite 20-page scene detailing the movie the lovers watched in chapter 40 just touches your heart and reminds you of when you first watched it at a slumber party 72 years ago. You adore the way you always write “ocular orb-thinguses” instead of “eyes;” it’s your signature. You love your art. You are your art. And he’s trying to destroy you by making you cut out the things you love most. Nevermind that the narrative makes more sense without them. He’s ruining the beauty of the thing.

9. He challenges you. He pushes you beyond your comfort zones and asks you to write things you’ve never written before, try things you’ve never thought of, learn new ways to do an old art. What is he trying to do, give you nightmares? New experiences are traumatizing. If you take risks, you might fail. Wait. That’s it, isn’t it? He wants you to fail.

10. He gives you deadlines. You have other priorities. Your hair appointment is this afternoon, your dog needs a mani-pedi, you’re working on a brilliant new story that will blow the NYT list out of the water. Look, those deadlines can wait. It’s not that hard to put a book together. You can just turn it in the day before the release date and it’ll be fine. It’s not like there are any other books in the pipeline, anyway. Yours is the only one that matters. If your editor really cared, he’d prioritize you above everyone else.

11. He makes you self-promote. And he’s out there promoting you, too. I mean, really. There are marketing and PR people for that. You shouldn’t have to self-promote; you are the author, the diva, the prima donna who watches from an ivory tower as the fans come flocking. You shouldn’t have to do anything to draw them. And heaven forbid anyone expect you to speak with them or engage them in any way. They aren’t authors like you.

If your editor meets even half these criteria, it’s obvious that he or she hates you and wants your book to fail. Or at the very least, they’re trying to make you as insane as they are. You should take up drinking. Make sure you drink while you write and while you edit; it’s a bonding experience, and you’ll be keeping your editor company. It won’t affect the quality of your work at all.

Besides, even if it does, your editor will fix it. That’s what he’s there for, after all.

I just know someone out there will take this seriously. And then I’m going to cry. You wouldn’t want to make a poor, defenseless, exhausted editor cry, would you?

When I finished laughing (and that took a while), I promised revenge. Revenge in the form of…BACON. For never was there a nuttier bacon nut, and one day I shall bribe her for ARCs with entire pans full of greasy goodness. (Because really, what else is a pig good for?*)

Oh, and this:

(Click for the larger version.)

I only had two between 6th grade and senior year; I had the good fortune of being in the AP English & Creative Writing class, which meant the same teacher guided our progress year after year and gave us personal attention when developing our speaking and writing skills. For my freshman through senior years, that was Mrs. N. She was utterly out of her mind – and utterly brilliant. She was the one who shaped my love of reading and writing, and encouraged me even when others admonished me to get my nose out of the books and go do something normal kids would do. Her lessons have remained with me for my entire life, along with her frizzy yellow hair and enormous coke-bottle glasses.

Actually, she looked a hell of a lot like the principal on South Park. Only crazier. A lot crazier. We’re not even getting into the incident with the eggs and the beeswax.

No matter how dotty she was, though, Mrs. N was a great teacher…and she saved me from Mrs. L, my teacher throughout the three years of middle school.

Mrs. L was a nice woman, for the most part – in that rather false way that said she was only being nice to her students because it was her job, though she really did work hard at teaching us the foundations of proper English while still letting us have free reign to develop individually. She even tried to stimulate our creativity, which led to our 6th-grade project.

We had to write a book.

Oh, not a full-length book. Forty pages, double-spaced…which was still quite daunting to a 6th-grader. We had a semester to write it. Most of us dove in with eager enthusiasm, chattering about our ideas all through class and completely ignoring Mrs. L when she tried to call us to order. I still remember my book; if I recall, it was called CAT PRINCESS.

I was in 6th grade. Shut the bloody hell up.

My heroine was Taylana. Her mother was a postal worker, just like mine. She was as confused about girls as I was about boys. I was projecting just a little – no, a lot. I was young, and at that age where every story I read cast me as the hero inside the shell of the author’s character. So when I wrote my own story, I wrote a story I’d want to be in and a persona I’d want to adopt, with the gender reversed. Taylana had bright green eyes, because I thought mine were too brown and ordinary. She had long, dark hair that didn’t need special treatments to be straight, and because she was a girl she didn’t have to argue with her mother about keeping it long. She had a black cat just like mine.

And she had brown skin, just like mine – though darker. She was purely African-American, while I’m only part.

There were a few other influences; Occula from Richard Adams’ MAIA, along with another story I’d recently read (but can’t remember now) about a middle-aged woman who was transported to another world and at some point discovered her real heritage…about the time her inner self transformed her into an angry mother bear. Literally. Thus Taylana was the lost princess of the cat people, who’d been sent to the human world to keep her safe; the black cat was actually her guardian, and could talk to her. She shapeshifted into a panther.

Let me remind you: I was eleven. Maybe twelve.

I wish I still had the story, for nostalgia’s sake. Other than a 3rd-grade effort about Dolores the talking hamster, it was my first real work of fiction. Well, it would be if I’d finished it. I failed the assignment, because about two thirds of the way through I put it down with no desire to ever touch it again. It was stupid, it was wrong, it was bad, I shouldn’t have even bothered. Or at least…that’s what Mrs. L led me to believe. During our progress check-ins, she’d read the stories and offer a little advice.

In my case, her advice was to make Taylana white.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, why is she black?”

“Because she just is.”

“She needs a reason to be black.”

“Why?” I asked again, confused.

“Because without a good reason for her to be black, no one wants to read about her. Nobody wants to read a story about a black person. Those stories don’t matter.”

And that was it.

Just like that she’d rendered my character and my story invalid without any consideration of its merit, its worth; all that mattered to her was that the character was black, which made it wrong.

Even worse, she’d rendered me invalid. She’d told me my perspective, my voice didn’t matter…and never would. She’d told me that even though I grew up around people of so many races – most of them not white, especially the majority of my family, my neighbors – there was nothing important about the stories they had to tell, real or fictional. There was nothing important about their thoughts, their perspectives, their cultural insight. There was nothing she could ever possibly relate to, simply because of the color of their skin. The color of my skin.

I felt small. I felt transparent, invisible, dehumanized. I was already a wallflower before, but after that I became wallpaper. I retreated into my books, hid my notebooks full of scribblings, and avoided my friends…my primarily white friends, who found plenty to relate to in our common childhood experiences and had no idea what Mrs. L was talking about, or why it should matter. They liked my story, with the unbiased view of the young – but it was too late to change my impressionable young mind, as an authority figure had already told me it was worthless.

It took another authority figure to straighten me out: Mrs. N. She gave us creative writing assignments starting in freshman year, and noticed mine were a bit stiff, unnatural. I wrote about white boys and white girls, not as normal people, but as ideals of what Mrs. L had told me people wanted to read. I wasn’t comfortable with them, and she could tell in every word – when I even did the assignments, as I felt like there was no point in even picking up a pen. She tried to work with me, despite my mutinous silence and withdrawn nature. After some patience, she managed to pry an explanation out of me.

And when I finally told her about my misgivings, she laughed.

Not at me, no. At Mrs. L. She also called her a few interesting names I won’t repeat here. And then she told me,

“Adrien, who cares what color they are? Who cares what color you are? Every day African-Americans and Chinese people and Arabs and Malays and Latinos and hell Nigerians – everyone’s out there having the same experiences as you and I. There’s a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl somewhere right now staring at a handsome boy with her heart in her throat and hoping he’ll notice her, and just because they’ve both got brown skin and black eyes doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel the same damned things as the blonde white girl when she’s looking at her handsome green-eyed boy.” Then she rapped my knuckles with her pen.

“Ow!”

Then she rapped hers. “Ow!” And she laughed. “See? I’m a nutty old white lady, and you’re a stubborn mule of a young – wait, what are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’ve got pretty skin. It’s like nutmeg. And mine’s like flour. Young dark boy, old pale woman. But the pen still hurt us the same way. And if you wanted to write about it, you’d write it the same way, because we have the same experiences, and they mean the same thing. Exactly the same thing. Your pen smack isn’t my broken leg. Do you get it?”

I nodded slowly, though I wasn’t sure I did, and wasn’t sure I wholly believed her. I’d been burned once already.

“Good.” She started to smack my knuckles again, then grinned when I yanked my hand back before she could. “You learn quick. Let’s see if you’re as quick with a pen. Throw this shit away, don’t tell your mom I said shit, and start over. Write stories about people who matter to you, and if they matter enough…they’ll matter to everyone.”

It took years before I had the maturity to really grasp what she was trying to tell me, but I’d already grasped one important thing: the hand she offered to lift me out of the pit of misconception so I could stand on even footing with everyone else. And what she taught me stuck with me beyond even high school and college, even though I didn’t know until five or six years ago that I wanted to be a writer. I’d thought about computer programming for a while, ended up in data analysis before moving on to full-time writing and editing…but thanks to Mrs. N I never stopped writing on the side, whether it was college assignments, fanfic, or random little drabbles of no importance.

And there was always someone brown in the stories – not just because Mrs. N said it was okay, but because it was what I wanted, and most importantly Mrs. N had taught me to stand up for what I felt was right regardless of any authority figure’s opinion. Whether the protagonist, antagonist, or supporting cast, there were always brown people as part of the landscape of the story – because brown people have been part of the landscape of my life. We’re part of the landscape of your life. You interact with us every day; maybe we’re part of your story. Or maybe you’re part of ours, and we’re the star; that doesn’t make the story any less valid, especially if you stop to think about the fact that we have enough in common in our lives for them to overlap. You talk to us every day; you know us. We’re your friends, your coworkers, people you pass on the street. We have the same concerns you do, the same joys, the same fears.

Just like you, we read. We write. Yes, there are higher rates of illiteracy among the ethnic population, but we’re fighting to change that. We’re fighting not only to make our voices heard, but to learn the right ways to communicate our message on common ground.

We’re fighting to tell stories that give us a little something more to identify with. We’ve grown up reading stories where the white person is the star, and anyone dark is a marginalized token that’s often stereotyped. Yet we’ve found something to identify with in those stories; we’ve found something to love, something that fires our imaginations and makes us want to write our own stories with people like us. People like you, with only a few differences of language, culture, and coloration. We’re trying to be recognized as part of the mainstream – because “mainstream” shouldn’t mean “white only.”

And it doesn’t, anymore. Despite some old voices who still insist no one will buy books with an ethnic protagonist, more and more writers are striking out to speak with colorful voices on every page of their stories. Are readers having trouble identifying? No. No, instead they’re falling in love with the stories and the characters, because good fiction is good fiction – period. They’re proving the status quo wrong.

One day I hope to prove Mrs. L wrong. One day I hope to see Kensington, Akhilesh, Sujit, Hai, Rio, Crow, Akai, Vice, all my rainbowed cast in print – and not just the ethnic rainbow. Grayson, Vee, Marcus, Sebasien, Kira – another rainbow, on the LGBT spectrum; another set of voices who are just as mainstream as the heteronormative ideal.

We aren’t any better than you. You aren’t any better than we.

We’re all the same, but no one asks if there’s a good reason for your characters to be white.

So why do we need a good reason not to be?

*Put the logo on your blog in your post.
*Pass the award onto 12 bloggers.
*Link the nominees within your post.
*Let the nominees know they have received this award by commenting on their blogs.
*Share the love and link to the person from whom you received this award.

It took me a while to actually stop and say, “Wait…out of all the blogs I read, do I actually bloody well talk to a dozen of those people?” Surprisingly, the answer was yes. So here are the twelve people I’m passing the award on to:

1. Anji and her crew over at Cinema Chicks: http://cinemachicks.wordpress.com/
2. Kerry: http://uppington.wordpress.com/
3. Carrie: http://www.carrieclevenger.com/
4. Janet: http://muffintopmommy.wordpress.com/
5. Jinxie: http://jinxiesbabblingblogs.blogspot.com
6. Sabrina: http://coffeequill.blogspot.com/
7. Jennifer: http://www.jenniferambrose.blogspot.com/
8. Lessa: http://gonfalon.org/eclat/
9. Jeffe: http://lovepowerandfairytaleendings.blogspot.com/
10. H.C. Zuerner, also known as the scary hungry kitty: http://kittysbleedingwords.blogspot.com/
11. Wookie’s Girl: http://www.blogger.com/profile/07726231846622344573
12. Slush Pile Hero: http://slushpilehero.wordpress.com

Next, the…uh…”Creative Writer” award, emphasis on the quotes. Which I guess is accurate, since the stories we tell are a big mess of lies. They’re just enjoyable, intricate lies. The rules are a little more complex for this one:

1.)I am to thank the person who tagged me,

2.)Copy and paste the award on my blog,

3.)link to the person who nominated me,

4.)Tell up to 6 lies about myself and one truth.

5.)Tag at leasr 7 people for this award. I tagged 8 because the whole “7″ thing was getting redundant and I despise redundancy.

6.)Post links to their blogs

7.) Comment on each of their blogs to inform them of the nomination.

So, thank you Annarkie. My (sometimes snarky) six lies and one truth, and you get to guess which one is the truth:

1. My name is actually Adrien Luc-Sanders, not Adrien-Luc Sanders. I’m really a woman who married a man with the last name Sanders, but wanted to keep my maiden last name of Luc.

2. I am entirely neurotic about walking on floors in bare feet. As in, I refuse to put my feet in the bed if they’ve touched the floor, because they might contaminate the sheets.

3. Once I came two tequilas away from getting married in Brazil. To a woman.

4. When I was a little boy, I fantasized about having Superman for a boyfriend.

5. I once accepted a dare to eat a live lizard.

6. I’ve left weird things hidden in various places in every apartment I’ve lived in, just to freak out the next renters.

7. I’m really Billy Joel.

And now for my list of seven bloggers to pass the award to:

1. Allison, who bled sunshine all over me. http://mynfel.blogspot.com
2. Kerry, who has a bloody sunflower for her Twitter icon. http://uppington.wordpress.com/
3. Carrie, who rhymes with Kerry but writes bloody stories. No sunshine or sunflowers. http://www.carrieclevenger.com/
4. Janet, also known as MuffinTopMommy, whose Twitter icon sometimes looks like a flower. http://muffintopmommy.wordpress.com/
5. Jinxie, because I’m running out of ways to link these and figured a J-name would work. http://jinxiesbabblingblogs.blogspot.com
6. Sabrina, because her blog name makes me want coffee (and she’s one of my closest friends, not just a fellow writer). http://coffeequill.blogspot.com/
7. Jennifer, just because I like her and completely gave up on the thematic thing. http://www.jenniferambrose.blogspot.com/

…at least I could use part of my list of a dozen for the list of seven, just with a few embellishments.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a crap ton of comments to leave. ~groans~ I have some other good news to share, too, but I’ll save that for tomorrow after I’m done with some paperwork.

Female Writer Looking Agent (NYC)
Date: 2010-02-05, 12:50PM EST
Reply to: gigs-nbh2m-1587342071@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

Talented, sexy up and coming Writing is Looking for a NO Bullshit Agent.

She has many short stories already written.

A novel in the works…that could easily be turned into a trilogy.

Notes for a mini soap opera for Spanish TV

As well as a draw filled with notes for other books

If your looking for a fresh, new & edgy writer then look no further

# Location: NYC
# it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
# Compensation: TBD

I’m going to sidestep the obvious problems with this “Writing’s” so-called talent and put my red pen down before I end up leaving permanent marks all over my screen. I’m also going to ignore the fallacy in looking for an agent on Craigslist; I’ve covered that already. Instead, ponder this:

What does her gender or physical attractiveness have to do with her ability as a writer?

Gender can play a strong role in an author’s platform as a woman writing about women’s issues, gender issues, feminism, and any number of other subjects where the perspective of a strong female writer is a selling point (there are entire shelves in bookstores reserved for these kinds of books).

But somehow I get the feeling this isn’t what our illustrious Craigslister intends.

This young lady, fresh and edgy up-and-comer that she is, wants to sell herself on sex appeal.

Not on the strength of her writing, not on the value of her story, but on being young, sexy, and fresh.

This is the same misguided sentiment that causes writers to include headshots with their queries, rather like the Bon Jovi look-alike who left so many agents tickled a few weeks ago. It’s the same lack of understanding of the industry and lack of interest in self-educating that leads writers to post on Craigslist when they should be building a strong query letter and sending it to individual agents.

And it’s the same ignorance that’s going to get this poor girl disappointed when she finds out her C-cups probably won’t sell her novels, short stories, or soap opera.

Now, I won’t pretend that some agents and publishers wouldn’t use an author’s sex appeal to sell books. But frankly that’s a bonus, sprinkles on the cupcake that an agent or publisher might use if it’s there, but won’t care about when making decisions about a book’s value. The only things that will matter are the words on the page. Not that Roman nose or mile-long eyelashes; not the tight ass or the legs that go on forever. You can’t sashay your way into a publishing contract. And you can’t tell someone you’re hot and talented, and have good ideas.

You have to show them your talent. (Your talent, not your cleavage.) You have to show them a finished product that makes them care about your story, and show an understanding of the industry that makes them happy to work with you as a client. Believe it or not, most people want you for your brains…not your body.

Your appearance is not a selling point. Your story is.

So write the best story you can. Write something worth selling, that will have more lasting merit than fleeting, shallow physical traits.*

…and then dear lord, child, learn to proofread. Seriously. Did you even glance at the post before you hit “submit”?

 

 

*You know, I’d do the nice thing and contact her, give her a little gentle nudge towards AgentQuery and AbsoluteWrite and many other wonderful sites that explain the proper way to obtain an agent, but I’ve found more than once that it tends to bite me in the ass.

(click the image for full-size)

Tablet-drawn, mixture of styles. I’m experimenting a bit so the styles aren’t blending together quite right yet, but I figure with some practice I’ll be able to get it straight.

This version of Shinji is 18, a senior in high school. I feel like there’s something a little wrong with me for drawing a high school student who looks like that.

Those of you familiar with Shinji probably find him a bit odd looking, since his hair’s shorter and inverted: silver on black instead of black on silver. He’s also more solidly built (well, anything’s more solid than my old spider-leg art style) and darker, somewhere around the appropriate color for a tanned Japanese boy instead of the death-pale color he used to be. Just as the concept had to evolve to be viable as a YA novel, so did the characters.

Those of you not familiar with Shinji, well…you have no idea what I’m talking about?

I…need to go do something that doesn’t involve my eyes and the computer. I’d wanted to try a drawing of Roman and another of Ken, but I’m all blurry and eyesore. So…later.

So lately I’ve been rereading some old favorites, as well as exploring a few new titles from the authors of said favorites. Some are modern, some are historical, some are the classic bodice-rippers, but in a large number of them I’m noticing a disturbing trend:

Controlling, domineering, irrational men with very few redeeming traits. They’re insensitive, bullheaded, temperamental, impossible to talk to with any level of honesty, misogynistic, arrogant to the point of self-delusion, sadistic, prone to using physical force to get their way, borderline (and often outright) cruel, difficult to reason with once they’ve made a conclusion, and generally in some position of authority over the heroine’s life and well-being – whether placed there by others, rank, an unfortunate and perilous situation, or themselves. These traits, while superficially infuriating to the heroine, in the end only serve to endear him to her as signs of what a man he is, a true man’s man, an uncompromising force of nature who will protect her and eventually give her many fat babies. And naturally his flaws are forgivable because he’s handsome as the devil and the most amazing lover on earth, and he knows it.

I get the lesson: love isn’t perfect, but it can pave the way for accepting a few character flaws in your mate. And I’m aware that all these traits can exist to some measure in real men, in a variety of concentrations and combinations. And I’m aware that many women (and men) have different tastes in what makes a man attractive. But seeing all these traits combined to such extremes that they make an unappealing caricature of a dominating man-child, I have to ask…

Is this really what women want in a fantasy man?

Seek Literary Agent (World)

“What?” thought I. “Surely this can’t be right.”

So I clicked. I clicked, and stared in blank amazement – for yes, it was exactly what it seemed.

Seek Literary Agent (World)

Ivy League Latino writer with completed works seeks Literary representation. First Novel is written in the style of Magical Realism; screenplay, television pilot and stage plays are part of the package. There is one short film written in Spanish, as well as a stage play in same. Let’s break into the huge Hispanic literary market. All works have copyrights, and are in professional format.

* Location: World
* it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
* Compensation: 50% of First Sale, standard fee after

Oh. Oh, lawdy.

Don’t do this.

The scary thing is, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this.

Flat, plain fact: you will not find your agent on Craigslist. Finding an agent isn’t like finding a hookup with someone with compatible fetishes (really? You like to do what with guacamole?), or even like finding a normal 9-5 job. Agents don’t trawl Craigslist looking for new clients; they don’t have time. Anyone on Craigslist claiming to be an agent is either a scammer, a troll, or someone who thought being a literary agent would be “fun,” styled themselves as one, and then went looking for clients despite having no experience, no industry contacts, no plan, and no way of getting their unfortunate clients a deal*.

Agents don’t come to you. You go to them.

They’re too busy handling business for existing clients, dealing with interns, attending conferences, and slogging through the slush of query letters, partials, and manuscripts from potential clients – and when they’re done with that they’re generally off having personal lives, not poking around Craigslist looking for your brand of genius. Don’t expect them to do the work for you. Look up agents who rep your market; resources like AgentQuery, QueryTracker, and the Publisher’s Marketplace are invaluable. Send properly-pitched query letters, according to their instructions; if you don’t know how to write a good query letter, Google is your friend. Find out what kind of writers’ conferences host events suiting your market, attend them, and arrange for face-to-face pitch sessions there.

Take the time to do your research and learn how this business works. Don’t think you’re just going to fling yourself out there, and agents will come running.

Especially when “out there” is Craigslist, where you’re basically painting a target on your back and saying “Screw with me; I’m gullible and lazy, and expect someone else to make my career happen for me.” You’re more likely to find a three-way with a goat** and a purple speckled alien from the planet Grarrwron than to find a legitimate agent.

*There is one exception to this. Once I saw a legitimate agency posting to Craigslist, looking to expand from nonfiction into fiction titles and seeking authors with completed manuscripts. It set off my warnings so strongly that I checked with Victoria Strauss over at Writer Beware, and she confirmed that despite the odd practice, they were indeed legit. Bizarre, and very much not the norm.

**Goats are becoming a trend around here lately. Anyone else find that disturbing?

You get the idea.

At this point you can no longer assume that the internet grants true anonymity, or that your internet life can somehow remain separate from your real life. We live in a digitally connected world where screen names are now tied to photographs, business is conducted over e-mail, IP addresses can be traced, and one part of building an audience is becoming known in online venues and maintaining an identifiable presence.

So when doing that…how much do you hold back?

I hold back a hell of a lot. I keep a lot of my personal life and frustrations out of this blog, because I don’t want the world at large to know my private business. My insecurities, moments of doubt, and worries over rejection are just that: mine. No one wants to listen to whining about that crap. I curb most of my fouler language; I want to publish YA novels, and it’s generally not a good thing if YA writers are slinging the F-bomb about. I barely mention work, partially due to a non-disclosure agreement and partially because I learned my lesson about being indiscreet with work a long, long time ago. Political rants – well, sometimes I post those, but tend to keep them to myself more often than not simply because they aren’t very interesting. I’m neither radical left nor radical right, and with my tendency to overthink everything and try to see all perspectives, it’d make for pages of political reasoning posts that no one wants to read. The only things that’ll get me to flare up are gay rights or rabid, hurtful intolerance of any kind.

Thoughts on the publishing industry? I’d say I curb those, but there’s really not much to curb. It is what it is, and frankly energy is better spent trying to work with the machine and joining the effort to correct its flaws rather than railing against it.

At the same time, I don’t hold everything back. I’m gay and love my boyfriend very much, and I don’t care who knows it or who has a problem with it. I’m a sarcastic asshole, and I think everyone knows I make little attempt to hide that – no matter how I might try to hide how squishy I am underneath. Western centrism in fiction, the dearth of accepted minority main characters, and token stereotypes of exotic/ethnic characters bug the hell out of me, but don’t stop me from enjoying a good book no matter the race of the characters. I have an unholy love for weirdly-flavored martinis, and if anyone takes issue with a legal adult having a drink on weekends (YA writer or not), they can unwad their damned panties. I’m an atheist, and have spoken freely about the fact that while I have no problem with any organized religion as long as they don’t advocate harm to others, my lack of faith is my choice – and I expect my choice to be respected as much as I respect others’ choice to believe whatever they believe in. My family and I haven’t gotten along in the past and I’m having typical comedic problems integrating with my boyfriend’s family, and it’s not a big deal who knows it. Everyone has family problems of some sort, and I feel it helps me identify with people I meet online to know we share that common bond of familial frustration on one level or another. It’s a very human experience, a very relatable experience, and one I don’t mind sharing with others as long as that sharing doesn’t delve into any private things.

These are the things I keep to myself, and these are the things I place out in the open as part of my public persona. While part of having an online presence (and part of being an adult) is knowing when to speak and when to shut the hell up, and while discretion is the better part of valor…at some point you have to add some color and life lest you become just another faceless screen name with no voice and no lasting impression on anyone.

For the sake of online professionalism sometimes you have to hold back even when you don’t have anything really crazy to hide. Sometimes you have to play it safe, until you’ve felt out your place and know how to find the balance between speaking your mind and saying things that you’re afraid will come back to bite you in the ass later.

But at what point does holding back strip you of all personality, until you’re playing it so safe that there’s no reason for anyone to give a damn at all?