by Michelle Brower
I have a weird brain disorder where it is very difficult for me to edit in Track Changes, and of course I do a lot of editing. For some reason, I just can't get my best editrix thoughts out unless there is a pencil or pen in the middle of the equation instead of a keyboard. So I had to come up with a solution that kept me or my intern from having to manually enter all of my illegible scribblings back into a document that I had already printed out. I went out and bought a tablet PC from HP, which seemed like an elegant solution at the time: the screen is a touch screen, and it turns around, and you can write on it with a stylus right on into 'ol track changes. Besides the occasional glitch where it just couln't understand that I was writing "Gowanus" and not "gowns", it was great.
UNTIL IT BECAME INTERMINABLY SLOW AND DIED.
Apparently, especially in the olden days of two years ago, that touch screen makes the computer get really hot and helps all the innards and juicy important bits inside degrade faster than a normal computer might. I might want to get one of these again some day, when the technology has caught up to my needs and price range, but now I am back to a regular PC. But what happens when an agent switches computers?
For starters, ALL of the slush that I had properly read and (mostly) rejected has somehow come flooding back in. Not to mention the 387 new submissions I had gotten after properly cleaning out my inbox and answering every unsolicited query on January 1st. (This wasn't quite a New Year's Resolution, but I closed myself to queries through the holidays so that I could get to the state known as Inbox Zero. It was brief, but thrillling all the same). So now I have to wade through quite a few old and duplicate emails and delete and organize them. There's one cool little benefit: I can now see the the original query letters of the people I requested and took on and sold, which is kind of like looking at baby pictures. So cute, itty bitty query that turned into 5 months of editing, a nail-biter auction, and a book deal! Coochie coo!!
So now I pretty much know that I will miss one or two or five emails, and my fingers are crossed that they are not important ones. Poor Intern Maggie will have to go back to trying to figure out what I mean when I scrawl "this rape is too rapey". Or "I just hate the word "moist", can you use something different?". Luckily my calendar has made it over ok so I won't be missing any editor lunches or conference calls or author meetings (I hope. Apologies to any editor or author who I accidentally snub. I love you, really and please don't hold it against me!). But we agents rely so heavily on our Internet that it throws a real wrench in the works when something bad happens. When I first started, we actually sent out paper manuscripts with special manuscript boxes that I hand-stamped with our logo. Now that seems just silly. In fact, besides the face-to-face meeting factor that is really important in getting to know editors, I could send a submission from Abu Dhabi or Timbuktu or my favorite place to visit, East Jabip. It may be a far journey, but I am going to get back to Inbox Zero one day. Just watch me.
