Agent #6 Speaks

Secret Agent #6 (aka, the Legendary Masked Literary Agent) weighs in:

A beautiful blog site. Nice job. Here's hoping what I have to say will be embraced by your visitors.

• Agency submissions, both paper and email, are falling in quality at close to lightspeed. Most currently aspiring writers are so poisoned by TV concepts that they can't imagine an original story anymore.
   
  
• Most currently aspiring writers are completely unprepared to write, because they've never learned how to read closely enough to tell Hemingway from Tolstoy or either from RL Stine.
   
  
• Decently written works by published authors are still set in worlds where there are no cellphones, big box stores, or Bush government. Sometimes this empty present is deliberate and the novel is set in the 1960s, but more often it is just blindness.
   
  
• A published novelist will relate a scene where the hero, in 1790, runs from the "road" across open ground after the moon has been obscured by storm clouds (LIKE, IT IS *PITCH DARK*) and he doesn't break a leg or even stumble. He then leaps into the surf where a ship is foundering on the rocky coast and dodges all the flotsam to rescue the sailors without once, during or after, realizing that he's freezing his ass off.
   
  
• Generally, authors now seem to believe the world has no weather and people can see in the dark or observe places they can't see or things in the room they left a page ago.
   
  
• Most submissions I am receiving now are from people who want free critiques and personal tutoring in how to write. And I'm not including the folks who don't know grammar, only the ones who can write a correct but dumb-ass sentence.

So there. You have been warned.