but you're paid to do that

Another week, another rejection from a literary agent. Nothing new there.

(You could, at this point, tut angrily to yourself and use phrases like "pearls before swine" and "just like those guys who rejected the Beatles" and so on. Feel free. But I don't think I should.)

However...

"With regards to your picture book ideas, the children’s picture book market is an incredibly competitive arena and a debut needs to have a really unique, charming voice with distinctive characters and a strong message – I’m afraid your stories aren’t quite what we are looking for at the moment to add to our list."

I didn't send any picture book ideas, words or pictures.

I sent novels for children - an extract from a 60,000 word novel (that's Timestand) and another extract from a 40,000 word novel (that's Feargal Munge).

So many manuscripts

The life of a junior employee at a literary agent must be hard. So many manuscripts to plough through, desperately trying to find the needle in the haystack, the diamond in the rough, the wheat in the chaff, the Wolf Hall in the reality television, the original phrase in the stack of clichés.

Personally, I can handle rejection. If someone reads a page or two and decides it isn't for them - fair enough. (Obviously a chapter or two would be better but I know you're busy.)

I'm not going for global domination here. I'm not trying to write for absolutely everyone. But I know that my books are publishable and that there is a healthy-sized market for them. (Or, to use a more pessimistic angle, I feel that a lot of books far worse than mine are published.)

But sending out a rejection without actually reading the manuscript (or noticing that it isn't a picture book) - that's unforgivable.

I know - there are so many manuscripts - but you're being paid to work through them.

If you don't like it, you can reject it in ten minutes. Authors spend years writing books. Yes, years.

Can't you spare ten (paid) minutes as a sign of respect to the (unpaid) years spent creating the work?

Hello? Just in case this is read by the person who should be on the naughty step...

You've said you don't want to represent me - and that's fine. I respect your opinion.

But when I replied, simply, briefly and politely, to point out that my novels are not picture books - a short apology would have been an appropriate reply. Or a long apology. Or any sort of reply, frankly. (And I have checked my spam folder - it's not there either.)

P.S.

Over to you, dear reader. Should I forward this blog post to the company in question? Let me know in the comments below. Or email me.

on casual selfism (and other terms I'll make up as I go along)

It's not just that I think the word 'selfishness' is ugly and clumsy - although it undoubtedly is.

Being selfish implies a conscious choice to further one's interests (however trivial) regardless of the impact on others (however severe).

Whereas casual selfism contains extreme self-centredness (another ugly word) - not only not caring about the impact on others, not only not thinking about the impact on others but not even being aware of not thinking about it.

It's not psychopathy because a psychopath genuinely wouldn't be able to consider the feelings and needs of others, whereas a casual selfism-ist could if it occurred to him.

But it usually doesn't.

Too abstract - give an example

Casual selfism is a state of mind whereby it would be totally honest to throw hands up in horror and say, "I never thought of that," when, for example, a fit and able-bodied man is told why he shouldn't have parked in a disabled bay because it's slightly nearer to the coffee shop. (More on that later.)

More trivially

Last night I watched the first two episodes of the BBC's dramatisation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

(Yes, it started six weeks ago - but I've been saving them all for a more convenient time, which turned out to be last night.)

If it hadn't been for the need to be up at a sensible time in the morning, I could easily have watched all six hours of it in one sitting. It was my sort of television - intelligent, warm, compellingly acted, gracefully written, aesthetically fascinating. Oh, and I could hear everything the characters said.

(If I really had to think of a criticism, I would wonder why there was quite so much of what sounded to me like Spanish guitar on the soundtrack. But it was probably Tudor-style lute playing and I'm probably just showing my ignorance of the period. And I liked it anyway.)

And then...

I saw that next week's Radio Times had printed a letter from a concerned viewer who was despairing about the very two episodes that I had just watched. Oh, the pain in his writing.

"emperor's new clothes", "agonisingly slow", "particularly tedious", "characterisation thin", "all stare and stance", "a 'thinks' bubble above his head a lot of the time", "disappointing"

I don't agree. But I don't just disagree with what he wrote. I disagree with his feeling that he should write to the Radio Times and tell them that he watched a programme which wasn't for him and then didn't like it.

It's casual selfism.

He's presumably disappointed that a programme has been made which wasn't right for him. And him being a licence-fee payer and all.

(Yes, I'm ascribing thoughts to this person which may or may not be his. That's part of the reason why I'm not putting his name here.)

But what's a viewer to do?

Using today as an example, BBC1 runs from 6am - 12.30am, BBC2 from 6am - 12.50am, BBC3 from 7pm - 4am, BBC4 7pm-4am, CBeebies 6am - 7pm, CBBC 6am-7pm.

(I should also include S4C, BBC Alba, seven national radio stations, many local radio stations, BBC News, BBC Parliament and the website. And there's probably other stuff that I've forgotten.)

Add all that lot up. I reckon it's around 100 hours of television per day. How many hours of television do you want to watch from the BBC every day? One or two hours?

Okay, then you need 2% of their output to be for you. It'll be there. The other 98% won't be for you - it'll be for someone else.

How about you stop criticising the 98% that's not for you and, in return, I won't criticise the 2% that is?

Can't fathom

Returning to our disabled parking bay hog - he has points in common with the man so disappointed with Wolf Hall.

(Yes, it's a stretch, but go with it for a moment.)

This is a man who has just taken his child to school.

He has been doing this journey for several years - so he knows where the coffee shop is, and he knows where the disabled parking bay is, and he knows that the school is only about two hundred yards away.

Yet he chose to drive those two hundred yards and to use the disabled parking bay because it was right outside the coffee shop.

I can't fathom this. Personally, I wouldn't be able to take that space. If the bay could hold two hundred cars and no one else was parked there and there was no chance of getting a parking ticket - I couldn't do it.

And neither could most other people - which is lucky for this guy because it means he can park right outside his coffee shop and go in to buy a cup of coffee and, frankly, his day would be a nightmare of near-biblical proportions if he couldn't get his coffee where he wants, when he wants and without having to walk for a minute.

But I don't think any of that passes through his head. I don't think he even considers that maybe he shouldn't do it. I think (here I go, ascribing thoughts to others willy-nilly again) that he sees his shop, sees the space, thinks, "that's what I need" and goes for it.

Casual selfism - textbook example. And I bet he thinks every television programme should be to his taste too.

No one leaves comments any more

No one leaves comments any more.

There's a link, just down there at the bottom of this entry. See it? There you go.

It might say 'post comment' or it might say 'no comments'.

Or it might say '753 comments' by now.

Click it. Write a comment.

Prove that there are people out there. And that they've got keyboards and fingers.

to paraphrase Joni Mitchell

Not so much "you don't know what you've got till it's gone" as "you don't know what you weren't given until it's too late to go back and ask what happened to that important bit".

As a lyric, it needs a little work.

Theatre

I went to the theatre recently. A big production at a major west-end London theatre. (Sorry, am I showing off?)

We booked the tickets in advance - but not enough in advance - so the choice of seats was limited.

(As an aside, isn't that a ridiculous phrase? It's similar to the commonly used 'limited availability'. What they mean is 'little availability' or 'get your skates on there's not much left'. Because, unless the show is going to run to the end of time, or the venue stretches off into the distance and beyond to the stars and thence to eternity (yes, even bigger than the Dome, or the O2 if you must) - then there will always be a limited number of seats. Thank you. Sorry. As you were.)

The friendly booking dude suggested going to a preview, well into the second week of previews, just a few days before the official opening night, minor blips possible but the show should be all tickety-boo by then. And we went for it.

Not because it was cheaper, mind you. Oh no. Because the date suited us and the seats were in a good location.

The evening arrived. We filed in, all excited as one would be when about to watch a play. We were let into the auditorium a bit later than expected, only five minutes before the show was due to start, almost as though there had been some technical problems (surely not?)

To say there were technical problems would be true. Set malfunctions, prop malfunctions, special effect malfunctions, serious looking people purposefully using power tools all over the stage during the interval.

And then, as we reached the climax, it just all sort of ended very quickly. Tension lost, resolution slammed into place, cast bowing, lead actor looking very annoyed and everyone goes home.

Some time later, I flicked through a copy of the play script and realised that a long and structurally important scene from very near the end hadn't actually happened that night.

Yes, but it's a preview. No, but that's not good enough. I think. Am I right?

Lesson learned - never buy tickets for previews.

Books

Far be it from me to refrain from jumping on bandwagons to do with books. Today is no exception.

Wonderful news that Harper Lee's first novel, 'Go Set A Watchman' will finally be published.

(For those who missed the news story, she wrote that book about sixty years ago and was advised to write a different book, set when the main character was a girl. So, fifty-five years ago, she published 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. And the manuscript for GSAW was thought lost...)

But...

Once and for all, this could have shown the pointlessness of the publishing industry. Except she appears to be using a mainstream publisher.

And so she will collect pennies from each copy sold while the publishing house and assorted retailers will rake in many multiples of what she, the mere author, only the person without whom none of this would exist, will receive.

What does she need?

• A printer - these are not hard to find. For a hefty print-run, I think we can assume a good price could be negotiated.
• An editor - again, she could take her pick, pay a generous flat fee for their time and move on.
• A cover designer - see above
• Retailers - as long as the printer was hooked into the global book distribution system, any retailer could order it, if they wanted to. But they'd want to, right? As long as they knew about it because of the...
• eBook selling - see editor and cover designer. Get someone to format, beautify it and load it up. Pay them a flat fee for their time.
• Marketing - are you kidding? That's already started, free of charge, in the world's media, and will continue to publication day and beyond. Even if the original seed was planted by the publishing house's PR department, I suspect it would have spread even if Harper Lee had just phoned her local paper and told them the good news.

And then she could have kept a far greater proportion of the earnings from her work. But we'll never know how that experiment might have turned out.

In this case, I (and now you, hello!) know what didn't happen here.

If I'm ever in that position, I hereby guarantee that I will try it and report back. So keep buying my books and one day I'll get there.

http://www.petertarnofsky.co.uk

Did I mention I've got another book coming out within the next few weeks?

Running headfirst into a wall

A long, long time ago, I had a job deciphering and explaining a marginally antiquated computer system.

Never mind the obscure programming style or the total lack of helpful comments left by the programmer. The biggest disgrace was the experience of the poor users.

Failing to cope

In some circumstances, the computer system failed to cope. This, of course, is a common occurrence with computer systems. Users type in stuff the system can't handle, data gets corrupted, bugs in the code lead to situations that make no logical sense - there are many reasons why a system will end up unable to finish what it started.

A decent programmer (even a half-decent programmer) will expect that this could happen and will try their utmost to ensure the system handles it gracefully.

This computer system didn't. It put a very techie-style error message on the screen and did nothing else. The poor user was stuck with a screen that made no sense and no obvious way to get out of it. (This was mainframe-based - so no mouse, no windows - just a box where you could type stuff, which was ignored.)

(For those who care, the way out for the user was to press the 'clear-screen' button and type 'CESF' and press enter. Not many users were going to guess that.)

Yes, but why?

I contacted the original programmers to ask what they were thinking.

Ah, they explained slightly patronisingly, if it's got to that state then we have to 'abnormally terminate' the program in order to force a 'rollback'.

(Rolling back is when the system puts all its data back to the way it was before the whole sorry business started. In theory, that should be consistent and stable. Oh, the user's work is lost but that's better than the whole thing going up the Swanee.)

Sadly, an 'abnormal termination' leaves the mess on the screen (as described above) but, hey, that's part of ensuring the data stays safe.

Except there's a command called... wait for it... ROLLBACK. It does the thing I just described. It allows the program to stay in control, put a helpful message on the screen and return the user to a menu they can actually use.

This team of crack programmers apparently hadn't heard of this.

Yes, but why the history lesson?

Bear with me.

That story is about sixteen years old. But looking after the user experience is one of the big keystones of computer system design. Leaving the user out in the cold, twisting in the wind is one of the worst things you can do.

You get the system to handle the error and do something useful. It's really not hard. No, really, it's not hard.

Yes, Apple, it's really not hard.

Don't tell me you're having a go at the most profitable private company in history?

Yes I am.

We have an iPad, from back in the days when it was just 'the iPad'. The first one. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it except the problems caused by Apple's software decisions.

The Safari web browser has a lovely quirk. Give it a website that has an element that it can't handle and it simply crashes. Straight back to the home screen.

For example, http://theguardian.com - try loading it on your original iPad. It won't take long. The webpage appears, the text appears, the pictures load, then it freezes for a second and then you're crashed back to the iPad home screen.

It's probably a fault on The Guardian's side. Some dodgy Javascript or newfangled dynamic whatsit is asking Safari for the impossible.

It's asking Safari to do the equivalent of running headfirst into a wall. Certainly, the website shouldn't be asking. But, equally worthy of blame and derision is the fact that Safari dutifully obeys.

Here's what I'd do

If I were designing a browser, I would arrange it to ignore impossible instructions and carry on with the next thing.

Funnily enough, that's precisely how browsers used to work. You could write all manner of garbage in the webpage and the browser would just display what made sense and bypass the rest.

Instead, we have a computer system that is being instructed to run headfirst into a wall. So it does. Boom bang crash and down it goes.

It's all Apple's fault

I neither know nor care what the underlying fault actually is.

But I know that it's Apple's fault that it's not being handled gracefully. I just wanted to read an article. But they decided that if I couldn't have every last pixel precisely as intended - then I was to get none of them at all.

Any fool knows that's the wrong approach. Wrong, wrong, very very wrong.

Unless, of course, you'd rather encourage someone to buy a new shiney machine. Then knobbling your own hardware begins to sound very sensible indeed.

Surely this can't be the case

If you wanted to encourage people to upgrade their expensive hardware then you could follow this roadmap to becoming the most profitable private company ever in the history of private companies that are profitable:

1. Make expensive stuff
2. Write the software so it handles new developments in data (or webpages) badly.
3. Wait a year or two for those new developments to start to become common.
4. Fix the software so it can handle these new developments.
5. Only make the fixes available to people who have the latest version of your expensive stuff
6. Go back to step 1

And, of course, in the event of an error in that six-point system, run headfirst into a wall. But make sure the wall is made of paper and you've already got your bonus for the year.