Letters to the Ham-Fisted

*snarl* Even when he's not going to be in for a month, he's making my life a misery.

I needed to ask Angela, one of the girls in copy editing, for a copy of a paper because Lady Competence has a bee in her bonnet about something even though it's already been accepted and gone to copy editing. (So she's thorough. It's not like this is an everyday thing.) But Angela, while I'm there, asks me what's going on with a bunch of letters to the editor. Yes. Well. It would help if Ham-Fisted Editor had actually told me what the hell I was supposed to do with them, or for that matter what he's done with them. See, normally if a letter touches on a recently published paper, we ask the author of said recently published paper if they want to make a comment. But I don't know what's been published when (having my own fish to fry), and I don't read the letters, so I don't automatically know which author to send a letter to the editor to, relying on Ham-Fisted Editor to tell me. And in the cases where a letter to the editor has been requested as a very hefty revision of a rejected paper, there's not much needed there. And sometimes he wants them sent on to Lady Competence but copies me into the letters saying that these things have been sent to Lady Competence with no indication as to whether they've actually been sent or if he wants me to do the sending upon receipt of this CC email.

So I send him an email basically telling him that I cannot do what he need me to do if he does not tell me what needs doing. And then I go on with my working day, going over the three separate documents of undifferentiated, badly-sorted, generally meaningless crap (half of which doesn't even apply to me but there you go). And find that one page of one of these horrific documents is instructions on what to do with the various letters to the editor that he asked Angela about yesterday. But ... he wrote the decisions on them yesterday! What does he expect to have changed in that time? And why, for the love of all that's holy, does he keep asking Angela what's going on with the letters to the editor? She doesn't deal with them; she only tracks them, half-heartedly at best, and I don't blame her because it's not her job to deal with these things. However, Ham-Fisted Editor has decided to spread the workload so that we're both copied into letters to the editor but only I'm the one who knows what has or hasn't been done to get them to the acceptance stage because I'm the only one who does any of it.

So he won't ask me to do anything to the letters except in documents that I generally don't get around to until the day after he's blown through the office like a zephyr on the brown acid and asked Angela for information that he's just given me but I won't read for 24 hours or so. That's ... that's just brilliant, that is. I swear I will throttle that man...

Agent Provocateur

And now, on to a whole different set of rants.

I know a lot of the people I know either are already published authors or (for the most part) hope to break into the field one day. Now, the internet is a great way for writers who aspire to make a living at it someday to exchange tips and info, which makes it harder for scam artists masquerading as agents to get a foot in the door. And then there's Barbara Bauer. You'll note that she appears on the Twenty Worst Agents list, and fairly high up it as well. From what I've been reading on various blogs, author-centric sites and miscellaneous places, the moment anyone starts speaking publically about her agency -- how it charges some frankly ridiculous fees and how it doesn't appear to have sold anything since the mid-eighties, which suggests a scam -- she will threaten to either sue or issue a cease and desist order. One website, Absolute Write, is now defunct. Rumour has it that this is because this harpy masquerading as a literary agent got on the phone to the ISP and screamed LAWSUIT!

Miss Snark lays out the problems with this woman's business practice. Barbara Bauer from the editor's viewpoint is just as damning, it would appear. So essentially the plan seems to be a Googlebombing; people who view this kind of scammer as the worst kind of heavy-handed, money-grubbing moron are asked to link to that first link - the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Inc reproduction of Absolute Write's Twenty Worst Agents list - in a bid to get it to the first listing on the first page of any Google search for Barbara Bauer. Seems fair enough, mainly because she can't shut us all up.

Just in case the SFWA site has to bin it as well... ( The Twenty Worst Agents List )

So yeah. Scammers blow.

And Technorati's too complicated. Neat idea, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Editorial

I keel heem. I keel heem slow.

Look, it's not hard, okay? You have a document. You save it to a subdirectory. You keep working on it later on, and you edit that document in the subdirectory. If you have two copies of that document in two different subdirectories, save the edits on one in both copies of the paper!

Needless to say, Ham-Fisted Editor did not do that. The reason that his asinine request sheets etc did not make any damn sense in the least was because he pointed me at the subdirectory in which was stored the half-edited mess of a worksheet instead of the one on which he'd finished the edits. AGAIN. Afuckinggain! Does he never learn?

Fuck this. There will be huge bag of sweeties on the way home. Stupid fucking man.