Buddy Pat's Words of Wisdom

I emailed Pat about my concern that my cover letter to "She Who Must Be My Agent" didn't sell my novel well enough, didn't billboard all the reasons she should embrace my manuscript.

He replied that I was an "oddball"


in the sense you don’t fit the demographic these people expect to see at their door. The only way through, I think, is to WOW them. That is, the book sells on the strength of the writing itself. If they like it they won’t care who you are or how old you are. The idea is to get them to read it. Even a little bit. Even five pages. I would explain next to nothing about the book. One sentence.

I like that advice very much. My book is an odd book, and I'm not sure what point it makes. It may be more like a can of Pick Up Sticks, a crazy collection of many points pointing in many directions, and the pleasure is in untangling the pile.

God knows what it means, and I wrote it.

Even though I like to say that people who are afraid of Fundamentalists would like it, the book is anything but a warning. It suggests the Religious Right is silly, trivial and self-defeating.

That may not be so. It's just that so many of the Fundies I used to know were idiots. Osama bin Laden they were not.