He was a beautiful fiction

I have a temp job for the next few work days.

Jobs applied to: Too many.
Jobs heard back from: THE ONE UNPAID ONE.

The bright side is hooray literary agency internship (Okay, nothing is set in stone. The interview is not until over a week from now)! And they do a lot of Young Adult, double hooray! I'm back to my favorite market in publishing of all! And they got back to me almost immediately even though it has been a month since they posted the ad and have likely gotten dozens of applications. See, this reaffirms my belief that I actually have a really strong publishing resume for somebody that's two years out of high school.

The down side is no money.

If I get the internship, I have no idea how I will juggle that and a job. But I am terrified of slipping into some nameless clerical job and letting my hopes and dreams stagnate. So, onwards to having two jobs and full-time classes!

Anyway, I am super excited about this interview.

My goal for next semester/next academic year is to get an internship with a publishing house since I have been exclusively working for literary agencies. My top choice is Bloomsbury. I visited their offices once and I loved their environment best of all the publishing houses I have been to. Really, by I want to intern with them I mean I want to work with them in an editorial position.

Oh my god, you guys. Trying to be a successful adult is terrifying.

DEAR BLOOMSBURY USA,
PLEASE HIRE ME! YOUR BOOKS ARE AWESOME. YOUR PEOPLE ARE AWESOME. I'M AWESOME. CLEARLY, WE ARE A PERFECT FIT.
FAITHFULLY, YOUR HUMBLE ADMIRER.

I am figuring out that my unhappiness and hopelessness are directly related to my tiredness and sleep deprivation on any given day. So on that note, good night!

ETA: I need more Eli Bradley in my life. Anybody have any recs for fic? (bonus points for backstory!fic or Eli/Kate) Also, icons!

So I am working for a literary agency this semester. First, I have to say that all of the people I work with are so amazingly kind and helpful it astounds me. I suspect that whatever work I do for them doesn't balance out the effort they're putting into training the interns and the attention they shower on us, so I am sort of floored.

Anyway, I love the work that I'm doing for them. I used to constantly hear things like "98% of what we get we automatically reject" and I would despair. But reading the manuscripts and seeing the kinds of things that live in the slush pile I am incredibly surprised by the low quality of the writing that gets submitted. Hundreds of manuscripts, thousands of hours, billions of words... I am almost saddened by how much time and effort gets spent on writing that really isn't fit for consumption.

I've also learned some other things. All the nice stuff your editor or agent tells you at the beginning of their correspondence is just padding for when they rip into your writing a paragraph later. I am torn between flinching and laughing my arse off. (Yea that's right, I just used a British-ism)

And I don't know about other people, but in my experience a surprising amount of time is devoted to mocking the writing that gets submitted.

You know, just in case any of you were thinking about getting published...

Well, it looks like this semester is shaping up to be pretty good.

I have four classes this semester.
Japanese - I am sure I will cry over but I really love the language and it's so exciting that I'm actually learning how to speak it little by little.

Writing Seminar II: Writing the American South - I wasn't very excited about it when I signed up for it- it just fit my schedule, but I really like the teacher. It just takes a good teacher to make a class interesting. Plus I enjoy writing, even academic writing, so it's a bonus.

Fire and Blood: The Art-Making and Mythology of Mexico - This is both a lecture and a studio. So every unit will be divided into 1. a lecture on a particular mesoamerican culture 2. a studio in which we paint/sculpt/whatever something that relates to the art and myth of the culture we have just talked about 3. everybody presents their pieces. It's mad cool.

The Monster Under Your Story - This is basically a writing workshop. I love it because my teacher acknowledges that the line between genre fiction and literary fiction is more or less obsolete nowadays. Plus he is a fountain of advice about selling your stories, readings, bookstores, and magazines that cater to particular interests, so on and so forth. Oh and he writes for DC and Marvel. Yeah. He's that awesome.

And I have an internship at Firebrand, a YA literary agency. And it's not just sorting the deluge of incoming manuscripts. It's actually reading manuscripts they're interested in and giving the agents feedback and occasionally working with authors that have already signed with the agency.

Yea. My life is awesome right now. Except for the part where I don't have a paying job. That part is sort of worrisome.