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Finding an agent is like looking for Mr. Right in a singles bar – you are constantly buying new shoes with high heels that kill your feet but make your legs look luscious (fuck-me shoes, we used to call them) and you spend hours and hours practicing your pitch line, trying to sound confidently sexy but a little off-hand, never desperate, and getting your hopes up, up, up only to be told yet again and not in so many words that well, you’re kind of cute but there’s no chemistry here (meaning, you’re too old, too fat, too dated and most importantly you can’t make me enough money because frankly my dear, we’re all gold diggers.)
I once had an agent but we broke up, amicably, like mature adults (unlike my first ex-husband who held a gun to my head when I tried to leave him, but that is another story altogether.) I am considering joining “E-Lit Luv” an on-line dating site to find another pimp, I mean agent. You see, this whole thing feels kind of greasy and sordid but here I am, blushing and batting my eyelashes, looking rather too obvious in my fuck-me heels, trying once again to find Ms. or Mr. Right.
Seriously, I have just signed onto Agent Query Connect. a real on-line dating site for authors and agents. Already I’m hyperventilating, I’ve got cotton mouth, those little white flecks of dried spit collect at the corners of my mouth. My armpits are drenched and I am sitting in my pajamas in the privacy of a hotel room!. Yet in my imagination I am back at the erstwhile Maui Writers Conference giving my pitch to Wendy Lipkind Black herself after my manuscript won the grand prize that year, way back in 1996. Actually that year there were too grand prizes awarded, the contest was declared a tie.
Alas, that interview came to naught, although Wendy would have been a dream of an agent. She sent me a book one of her clients had written to show me what it was she was looking for. I believe if I had landed Wendy Lipkind she would have been my agent for the rest of her life.
It took nearly 40 years to get lucky at love but when it comes to my lit-lover, the agent-of-my-dreams, I’m still looking! And yes, I’ve got something in the works, I am pregnant, so to speak, another kid on the way. Knocked-up and single — yet ever hopeful. All I need is the right pair of shoes!
