I’d like to try to conduct a mini-poll here today.
I hope everyone will feel free to comment honestly.  No right answers, no wrong ones.  Just opinions.
Disclaimer:  This question is in no way ABOUT any particular person or situation.  It’s just something I’ve wondered about, and I think feedback on the subject would be valuable to others too.

Here’s the scenario:
You’re a struggling writer, trying to get a nibble from the New York pubs.
You’ve sent your latest beloved manuscript to all of the publishers and agents at the top of your wish list, and so far they’ve all turned you down.

Until now.

One hot, humid day, when the air conditioner has broken down, the kids are psycho on sugar highs, and you’re trying to get the trash can out before the truck pulls away…

You get THE CALL.

It’s a phone call from a well-known editor at a big, shiny New York publisher, and he’s fallen in love with your manuscript.  He advises you, however, to recruit an agent before negotiations are conducted.

Soooooooo……………

Would you go with one of your top-of-the-list agents if they now agree to represent you, even if they’d turned this manuscript down before?

Or would you rather start a clean slate and find someone else?

A couple of years back, I was having a phone conversation with one of the nieces I’d helped  corrupt  raise.  It was shortly after Thanksgiving, and she’d recently landed a job as a nurse’s aide in a prominent hospital.
She was full of stories about the doctors, nurses, and patients (as anyone would be who’d just started an exciting new position), and I listened very politely.

Until she told me her story about a man coming into their emergency room with a wishbone stuck up his butt.

No, I am not making it up.

And unfortunately for the poor fellow, it was good and stuck.  They actually had to perform a bit of minor surgery to remove it.
No word on whether the interns on call actually made a wish at the time.

Now please, don’t get me wrong.  Whatever people want to insert into the cavities of their body is okay with me, as long as they deal with the consequences (I won’t mention some of the other things she said they’d encountered).
I’m sure that whatever precipitated this may have been silly/romantic or stimulating in some way.  No doubt, some people would find the concept exciting.  It wouldn’t work for me personally—but then, I’m not into fun and games with proctology.

So let’s toss our turkey legs up here on the table, shall we?

I want to know what behavior, speech, positions, or anything related to romance and/or sex you’ve read in books that simply does not work for you, for whatever reason.  And please feel free to be as delicate or blunt as you wish.

Reader feedback is always a valuable asset for a writer.  Think of it as sharing something with a friend.
Sort of like………………

I have a confession to make.

I don’t have much of a clue.

This won’t come as a surprise to some of you. :razz:  But I thought I might as well be honest about it.
There is a marked absence of something in my blog posts, both here and on my own blog, that I see quite a bit of elsewhere. 
I do very little in the way of writing advice.  Suggestions.  Recommendations.  How-to posts.  Ways to get published.  And there’s a very good reason for that.

I don’t have a clue.

Does that sound like a strange confession from someone who professes to be a writer?  Yeah, well, it sounds odd to me too.
When I was younger, I gave violin lessons to the children of my friends.  No problem.  In step-by-step detail it wasn’t hard to teach how to do this, how to play that, how this effect was produced, and what results they could expect.  But being technically proficient doesn’t make you a great violinist.  It’s a certain unknown quality, a feeling for the music, an affinity for the instrument that makes one exceptional.

A bit of the same with art.  I learned a few techniques, taught myself to handle some of the materials, and could probably make suggestions on applying them to a drawing or painting.  But that won’t make that painting good, possibly not even interesting.  It’s the artist’s own unique vision that makes the work extraordinary.

I’m a little in awe of authors who have it down to a fine science.  They can run down the GMAC at the drop of a hat.  Tick off the differences between romance/romantica/erotica/women’s fiction/mainstream/scifi/urban fantasy in the blink of an eye.  Know exactly where the black moment/sex should fall in the story well in advance.  What to cut, how to hook, how to dissect, and how to keep from going overboard.
(And no, the fishing metaphors hadn’t occurred to me until I wrote them, lol).

It must make the writing a lot easier.  But it doesn’t make it yours.

Learning craft is one thing.
Mastering your craft is something else.

“Did you get my e-mail?”

With my keyboard in my lap, I twisted uncomfortably in my seat, even as I typed the reply.  “Yeah, of course.  Um…which one?”

“The IMPORTANT one.”

My correspondent—we’ll call her Debbie—was a sweet-hearted person and had been a good on-line buddy.  Except for one tragic flaw.

Her penchant for sending Pollyanna e-mails tainted with death threats.

Now, I love inspirational stuff as much as the next person.  And to be fair, I don’t think the Dark Side of the messages even registered with her.  A happy little e-mail fairy, she was intent on spreading the good word to everyone she knew.
Unfortunately, the good word was actually “intimidation”.

I hurriedly delved into my “recently deleted” e-mails, praying something of hers was still there.  Something important.  “Oh!  You mean the one about how the walking stick-figure of Jesus is on an e-mail journey across the world, and if you disrupt the continuity it might bring on the Apocalypse?”

“No, no, not that one.”

I read the next one as fast as my effing dial-up would download it.  “Then you mean the one about how thrilled you are to know such a proud, intelligent, independent woman who’s so capable of making her own decisions, but I absolutely must send this e-mail on to prove it?”

“Nope.  The other one.”

Dammit.  “Oh, okay.  The one about how God loves us so very, very much, and if I don’t spread the word by sending the e-mail to at least fifteen other people within five minutes of receipt, I just might suffer a dark and horrible death, like John Jones of Clayton, Missouri?”

“Wasn’t that the saddest story?”

 “Yeah.  Tragic.  Exactly when did you send this e-mail?”

“Four days ago.”

Eureka!  I had it.  Clicking on “read”, I waited impatiently for the screen to come up.

“Um…Debbie?  What if I don’t think the pattern in the newborn calf’s coat looks like the number ‘666’?”

“Well, pass it on anyway!  It’s important that people know what’s going on in this crazy world.”

I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and I could only come up with one solution for people who indulge in this kind of thing.

Kill them.  Kill them all.

But first be sure you have the right ones.  We can’t afford to attack the innocents, but can’t let the guilty ones continue this campaign of terror.

The answer?
Send an e-mail out to the suspicious ones, an e-mail threatening dire consequences if they don’t pass it on—and, of course, send it back to you.

Yeah.
Got ‘em. 

“…The primary function of a title is to lure unsuspecting readers into having a go at your story.” ~~ Sinclair Lewis

“A good title is the title of a book that’s successful.” ~~ Somerset Maugham

While looking for something else in a stack of my books, I came across an interesting chapter in one of them about TITLES.
The book was called “Learning to Write Fiction from the Masters” by Barnaby Conrad, and I’d picked it up many years ago just for the variety of great prose between its covers.
What fascinated me about this chapter were the examples of titles chosen by famous authors for infamous books BEFORE publication:

Trimalchio in West Egg  (THE GREAT GATSBY)

Blanche’s Chair in the Moon  (A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE)

They Don’t Build Statues to Businessmen  (VALLEY OF THE DOLLS)

Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice  (MEIN KAMPF)

The Mute  (THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER)

Private Fleming, His Various Battles  (THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE)

Something That Happened  (OF MICE AND MEN)

The Man That Was a Thing  (UNCLE TOM’S CABIN)

Bar-B-Que  (THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE)

How important is the title of a book to you?
What are some of your favorites, old or new?

A mini-rant, since I haven’t used the soapbox in a while.  I try to avoid the ____ thing, but sometimes it just rears up and grabs me by the gluteus maximus.

I’ve come across this a few times while blog-hopping (when I should be writing), and it’s always plucked just the wrong nerve with me.
And no, it’s not that I’m MS. Perfect, and always say just the right thing or phrase it just the right way.
And yes, I’m sure people mean well when they offer advice.  It’s just that we may want to be a little more careful with the manner we choose to offer it.

It usually starts with the phrase, “If you can’t ___ ___ ___, then you probably shouldn’t be in this business.”

I may be contrary by nature, but my instinctive reaction to such statements is, “Well excuse the ___ out of me, but who the ___ died and named you Wizard?!”

I’ve heard it applied to everything from being patient, to the amount of time it takes you to rebound from rejections, to how many words a day you should be writing, to going to conventions, to taking harsh critiques, to meeting deadlines with time to spare, etc.  And I gotta tell ya—it chaps my ___.

Different people react to different situations in different ways.  So while a struggling author might fail to luck into the biz right away, or take rejection too much to heart, or not meet an ideal word count with their writing attempts, it also might be true that they have family issues at that time, or they’re in physical pain, or unable to use their hands/fingers, or can’t see well, or have an elderly parent to care for, or children and no one to help, or they’re working two or three jobs, or don’t have the luxury of a support system, etc., etc.  And however large your molehill may be, don’t piss on the smaller ones.  It ruins the ___ view.

It’s one thing to tell someone that ‘people who can manage this or that seem to fare better in the business’, or ‘if you have trouble with this aspect of the game, you might want to work on it as much as possible’.  But to tell someone, “if you can’t ___ ___ ___, then you should probably take your toys and go home…”

Please.  Stop.  Just ___ stop.  Your way is NOT the only way, and more than one author has made it with more than one liability.

Warning someone about a rough road is one thing.  Laying down a spike strip is something else.

You ask if I actually believe in vampires?

I’m here to assure you that they really do exist.

My name is Raine.

And I’m coming out of the closet.  I am a vampiress.

It’s been a difficult time—both accepting it for myself, and deciding to go public with it.  The disease progressed so slowly, it wasn’t easy to recognize the symptoms, to move beyond denial.
Yes, that’s right.  It’s a progressive disease.  And there are far more of us than you’d care to believe.

It has nothing to do with being bitten—not by fictional fangs, at any rate.  Nothing to do with drinking blood (which has a sharp, coppery taste that never really worked for me).

But I’m a vampiress.  Make no mistake about it.

I noticed the symptoms here and there for years, but attributed them to other causes.  Sensitivity.  Empathy.  Eagerness to broaden my horizons.  I even touched on it in a previous blog on my own site.  It really hit home for me a couple of years ago when I was watching a news report about a man who phoned 911 to let them know he was on his way to the Tacoma mall to commit mass murder.  When the dispatcher asked his location, the reply was:
“Follow the screams.”
Forgetting who I was, what I was doing or why, the first thing that came out of my mouth was, “Damn, that’s a great line!”

Horrified, that was when I realized the truth.  We, as writers, not only hunger and thirst—we absorb.  We feed on it.  Real-life horror, suspense, comedy, drama…and yes, romance.  We hear it on the news and process it, sink our fangs in and suck it up, like genetically-altered blood.  Other people’s distinctive personalitites, characteristics, confessions, gestures, stories of family and sexual escapades—like doing a line of coke.
It’s a benign sort of vampirism, of course.  We don’t kill our subjects.  Once we’re finished, we lick their wounds closed with a smile and understanding nod while we digest what we’ve taken from them, and keep one eye or ear cocked and ready, immediately on the lookout for our next meal.

Something to think about next time you’re sharing/conversing with an author.

You ask if I actually believe in vampires?

My name is Raine.
Let’s get together for a drink sometime.

I must confess…

Occasionally, when I visit author’s blogs (yes, including my own), I imagine myself as a reader, rather than a sympathetic party suffering from the same affliction.
And if I were just a reader visiting these blogs, and reading about all the angst, occasional anger, frustration, waiting, blocks, barricades, struggling, etc…
I’d simply have to wonder, “Why do these people DO this?  Is it really worth it?”

So now, I pose the question to you.

Is it worth it?  Why, or why not?

For a few years now I’ve been a fan of the infamous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, sponsored by the English Department of San José State University in California.
Yes, that would be Bulwer-Lytton, original author of “It was a dark and stormy night…”
The competition challenges writers to compose the opening sentence (preferably a very LONG sentence) to the worst of all possible novels.

A few favorite gems from the contest here—just because they make me smile.
(And of course, I couldn’t resist joining in—with apologies to Emily Dickinson). I discovered that it’s very easy to write a bad sentence, but not so easy to write a very GOOD bad sentence).
Enjoy…or add on! Open forum.

She’d been strangled with a rosary-not a run-of-the-mill rosary like you might get at a Catholic bookstore where Hail Marys are two for a quarter and indulgences are included on the back flap of the May issue of “Nuns and Roses” magazine, but a fancy heirloom rosary with pearls, rubies, and a solid gold cross, a rosary with attitude, the kind of rosary that said, “Get your Jehovah’s Witness butt off my front porch.”~~Mark Schweizer

“Send an ambulance; I’m glistening profusely . . . bosom heaving . . . luscious, ripe orbs threatening to burst the seams of my black lace bodice . . . . pulse galloping apace like a knight’s sleek steed . . . exquisite pain radiating down my graceful, alabaster arm, shooting upward to the finely chiseled jaw . . . I shall swoon—oh, my address?” the romance writer gasped into the phone before collapsing.~~Linda A. Fields

I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized — he was killing me softly with his sarong.~~Karl Scott

She wasn’t really my type, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from the local cat box liner, but the first second that the third-rate representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, my sixth sense said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth note from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, so, nervous as a tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing arms, and, humming “The Twelfth of Never,” I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth.~~Wm. Ocheltree

Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy’s girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, “Hold the spumoni–I’m going to follow the chick an’ catch a Tory.”~~John L. Ashman

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.~~Jim Guigli

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, annoints despair with offerings, seeking to cajole—but I gotta tell ya, every time I’ve let it out of its cage it heads straight for my rear and nips my buttock with its jagged little beak, because once it tried to whisper in my ear and I swatted at it, thinking it was one of those big, retarded moths that thumps against the screen door, and crushed its fragile little wing (which it never forgot), so now, every chance it gets, it shits on my head and bites me right in the ass.~~R. Weaver

HACK:  A writer who works on order; also a writer who aims solely for commercial success. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).

HACK WRITER is a colloquial, usually pejorative, term used to refer to a writer who is paid to write low-quality…books “to order”… In a fiction-writing context, the term is used to describe writers who are paid to churn out sensational, lower-quality “pulp” fiction such as “true crime” novels or “bodice ripping” erotic paperbacks. (Wikipedia).

I’ve never been called a hack writer—although, as one who’s written what might be called “bodice-rippers”, I suppose I might qualify.  I can almost imagine myself living on Grub Street in London in the 1800s with all the other hack writers, an impoverished bohemian, huddling in a one-room flophouse across the street from a brothel.

But the disdain that seems to accompany the idea of writing for money amazes me sometimes.  It’s not that I’ve done this (yet), and I really try to put my best creative effort in whatever I do.  Ideally, I’d like to have both.
But if an artist/writer DID produce mainly for profit—what of it?  Are the arts supposed to be ABOVE wanting commercial success?  I’ve yet to hear of a used car salesman who was spurned for clearing out the lot, or a plumber who unclogged pipes solely because it was his gift from God.  Why are “creative” people cast in a different light?

Would I write if I didn’t get paid for it?
Yes.  Have done so, probably will do.  It’s a part of me, and of most serious writers, I think.  I’d write, even if it was just for myself.  And I’m not sure it’s necessary to sacrifice “art” for “craft”.

But would I mind being in the company of “hack” authors like Dickens, Chekhov, Fitzgerald and Faulker?
Would you?