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On Mary Sue

I recently read a Very Popular Book in a Very Popular Series, which I was going to talk about here until I read the second book in the series and realized--OH NO--that the main character of the book is a total Mary Sue. sigh. For those of you who didn't spend time in the fanfic world, a Mary Sue is a character who everyone else loves. She's a stand-in for the author (fanfic is written mostly by women, which is why "Mary Sue," although there are some Gary Stus out there as well).She's beautiful (but not too beautiful), she's funny, she's self-deprecating, she's smart, and all the other characters will fall head over heels in love with her and think she's awesome. (An example, if I wrote Friday Night Lights fanfiction, Mary Sue would move to town and become Riggins' girlfriend, and Jason Street would have a crush on her, and Lyla Garrity would like her and even Tyra would must us some grudging respect, and their lives would all be better for k...
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Jay Is Not On Vacation

Despite my absence from this blog, I am not dead and/or on a beach somewhere. I wish I were (on a beach, not dead), but I am not. I would sing a song about how busy I am with work (true), and how busy I am with teaching (also true), and how busy I am with working on the new projects (true dat), and how busy I am with life in general (double true), but the real reason why I haven't been posting here is because I've been querying. For some reason, querying has made me especially leery of posting here. I've seen posts from agent blogs that talk about how they don't want to know that the author they're considering representing has been rejected by everyone else in the world. Likewise, I don't think it's good form for me to post about the responses I've received when the agents haven't given me permission to do so, although some writers do it. I know I wouldn't want to see my query letter posted on someone's blog and commented on, although som...
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Careful What You Wish For

I'm a lawyer at a company that employs a LOT of creative people, so it was no surprise to me that one of our employees writes novels. He writes "adult" novels (by which I means, books for adults, not dirty books), and he's got an agent and had a couple published, and gotten some good reviews, and rumor has it that they made a movie of one of his books a while back, although I can neither confirm or deny that rumor. And, according to friends of friends, he's unhappy. He doesn't like the way his writing career is going. He was hoping for more. I don't know what more, because that's not something that you can really ask someone, like--"hey, so describe the ways in which you're unhappy with your writing career"--but I imagine it's the typical writer stuff: fame, fortune, the respect of people of letters. But it's funny, because, um...he HAS the things I dream about. An agent. More than one book published. Books you can buy in, ...
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