By Hook or Crook

One of the things I've held off on talking about for the past few days (because of "cloning" problems) is an auto accident my boss's daughter was involved in last Thursday morning. She sustained severe head injuries and remains in critical condition on a ventilator in the Neurological ICU. SC hospital personnel believe she will recover (meaning, she will survive), but full recovery will take at least a year and there is no way of predicting how much impairment will remain. Obviously, this is a very difficult time for their family.

Moving on -- there are watchlists that collect complaints and other information and maintain databases for perusal by the people who need them for purposes of checking trustworthiness and making informed decisions. Of specific benefit to those with an interest in writing and publishing are those sites which oversee and recommend (or not) publishers, literary agents, publicists, freelance editors, etc., who work with authors. Anyone who's read this blog from the beginning knows my opinion of, for example, PublishAmerica. It's not without good reason that PublishAmerica heads up many a publishing watchlist -- or provokes contentious posts on lots of Web sites. There are, likewise, a number of literary agents who don't make the grade and who top watchlists and make it to the forums for dissection. I'm not going to name them; I don't need the headaches which would be sure to follow. You can do your own checks; there are a number of Web sites listing pertinent information. Among them are the Bewares and Background Check section of Absolute Write and this one, Writer Beware; there's always good, up to date info there.

http://www.sfwa.org/beware/


I think that it would be a good idea for the watchlist sites to also include listings for PR people/business managers inasmuch as more and more authors are apparently contracting with them. I'm told that some sites will include such information forthwith. Just to point out one example situation for which such readily available listings would be helpful, there's a publicist who believes that creating phony (and slanderous) online profiles parodying real people and using them to "comment" on and help attract traffic to his/her clients' Web sites (and sell books) is an acceptable business practice. Personally, I find such an appalling lack of professionalism repugnant. Such a new category of listings will help stop this kind of outrageous conduct, or at least prevent serious writers from signing with them and damaging their own reputations by association.

Since I've already found a sizeable collection of Twisted Linguistics, I might as well go ahead and get today's Storytime with Anti-writing over with.

The motley crew:

mothing
conern
holywood deals
baffoon
I was leary
deceided
coraspond
in her sted
irregardless
remunderation
lawsuites

There was a young lady named Irvina who went West, hoping to get herself one of those holywood deals. Well, what she had thought she was getting herself into was sales and distribution of wooden religious relics. Instead, she ended up in the movies.
At first, this was of great conern to her.

"I was leary," she wrote home in coraspond to her mother (whose name was Cora, which made her Cora's spawn), "but then I caught the acting bug and irregardless of my big nose, I deceided I'm going to be a star."

Alas, after her second film, the casting director, a Mr. Will Shire, hired a cute and perky girl named Perkyg Irl in her sted and Irvina was out the door. She felt conerned, like a used and abused baffoon, and there was mothing she could do about it but threaten Shire with the attorneys in the law suites on the corner for remunderation.

Irvina won her case, kicked Miss Perk to the curb (after mothing off at her and giving her what-for), and sent Will Shire to Bankruptcy court. She was no longer leary of her Holywood future now that she owned the biggest studio in town.

Moral: Be leary, be conernd, and always remund yourself to coraspond with law-knowing guys in good suites.