Well, John Barnes did a wonderful blog post assigning characters to the different jobs in publishing. Caution, do not drink fluids while reading this, since it is very funny and spot on the money in more ways than I want to say, especially when Edna leaves the “big house.”
Very much worth the read. He starts slow, but do get to the Aunt Edna stuff.
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has written more than one hundred popular novels and well over two hundred published short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.
Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He is now an executive editor for Fiction River.
WMG Publishing Inc. is now my major publisher of all my coming novels, collections, and short stories.
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Oh lord, that was funny!!!
Thanks for the link and the heads up about spewing my drink.
Hilarious and so on the money!!!
Dean, thanks so much for the shout-out.
Aunt Edna has been getting so much attention (and the poor old girl isn’t used to it) that I seem to have half a dozen more members of the cast of Edna’s Family showing up in my email, and I’ll probably sort those into Aunt Edna II: Son of the Revenge of Aunt Edna or some such in the next couple of days.
The point, somewhere in there (and one reason I will always be a reviser rather than a first-drafter is that I often bury my ledes so deep I never reach them) is that most everyone on all sides are still reacting more to what was (and its passing) than to what is (and its arrival). Very hard not to, and the process is something like a divorce, complete with the friends who shuttle the stinging phrases back and forth between the parties. Fortunately, as Kris points out often, we all do have some time to calm down and think things through; unfortunately, thinking things through does tend to set us all off again, and sooner or later we do need to think calmly and clearly, or at least act as if we have.
That was awesome. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks so much for this link, Dean. As well as the fluid warning! Think I scared my kitty laughing so hard.
Funny, like all crazy aunts…
And also sad, in a way…
Oh, well…back to writing!
I enjoyed this, Dean. It was interesting to see the whole business through this kind of lens. I appreciate that and it certainly made me smile too. Thank you John Barnes.
It has always been my goal in life to be the crazy maiden aunt. But not the one with the manipulative relatives. The one with mismatched socks and too many cats, whom you go to to get away from the manipulative relatives.
(checks socks) Hey, mission accomplished!
Dean seemed to start a snowball rolling … several other folk reblogged and pretty soon I had a small pile of correspondence to answer … so the saga continues in http://thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com/2011/12/escape-from-revenge-of-son-of-aunt-edna.html
I tend to be at my most serious when I’m joking, so I’m glad this works for so many people.
I can think of one missed family member. Heck, after reading Dean’s and Kris’s blog for a year now, how could I NOT think of it…
Where’s the agent? He’s the one who helped Edna find that room. Now he wants his 15% for life.
Actually, he’s probably the boarder who took up 15% of the floorspace in Aunt Edna’s lonely room in the Big House, but at least kept her company and would stand up for her when the rest of the family picked on her, and even win arguments with Ted for her, and was always after Larry about getting a look at the bank statements. But now that she’s moved out, he wants her to give up that room in town, move into his new little house with him, pay him rent, and let him handle everything …
I think I’ll call him Wayne, next time (if any) that I post about Aunt Edna. Thanks, Martin!
I see Wayne as more of a gigolo, the family has been relying on him to do more and more of Cousin Ted’s job.
So sad.
And yet, so true.
I wish I had written that post! I enjoyed it!
I enjoyed John Barnes’s “A Million Open Doors” series quite a bit, even if things did get depressingly ‘real’ at times — in the flawed and fallible human department. I think perhaps John’s skill at portraying the flawed and the fallible is what makes the Aunt Edna posts so rip-roaringly funny. Yes, this does seem to be the way the publishing world works. Dysfunction, writ large. Dare I take a bite? Well, nobody can say I wasn’t warned. (g)