All Hail Spider Jerusalem, President of My Attack Ovaries

A Brief Look At ElleVee's Week:

• Distribute roughly 1,000 books throughout the office.
• Check the contact information for over 600 independent bookstores
• Read 175-page manuscript and write reader's report
• Read and edit 251-page manuscript and write reader's report
• Handle slush (need I say more?)
• Have meeting with president of imprint to discuss Dean Koontz project
• Write flap copy for children's book (and edit it)
• Attend meeting on OTHER manuscript to determine if it goes to publishers.
• Have ANOTHER meeting with president of imprint to determine whether or not to purchase entirely different manuscript, which I just finished commenting on.

People keep giving me manuscripts to read. Which is a nice change from reading slush (one being written by published or soon-to-be-published authors, the other being written by the same people who flash you on the subway). But it's a lot of pressure.

I have decided that this is punishment for last week. The Gods of Publishing saw me sitting at my desk, whining about slush, playing around on LibraryThing.com and Amazon.com, and judged me unworthy. I have sinned, and this is my penance. Stupid Gods of Publishing.

I'll keep you updated on these projects as they occur. All I can say so far is that nobody needs to worry about Barnes & Noble or Borders taking over the bookstore market. In fact, maybe they should buy a few more bookstores. CRUSH THE LITTLE GUY! CONFORM!

I can't decide if I should go to the Strand today or not. Because, you know, I have so much free time. So, so much free time.

In other news, Warren Ellis is now the God of My Brain. Hurrah to him, and may he be a benevolent god.

For some reason the evil 'Title' part of this page is not obeying me, so here is the title I intended for this post:

"All Hail Spider Jerusalem, President of My Attack Ovaries."

Yeah. Think about it. DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?! Read Transmetropolitan, and all will make sense. In your ENTIRE LIFE. I need to go home.

EDIT: Now the title is where it belongs. The world is where it should be. Sort of.

moreless

My Desk Is Very Messy, And Will Probably Be The Reason I Do Not Get Hired Full-Time

Dear Would-Be Writers,
Please stop sending me your submissions. They are making me angry and twitchy. WHY CAN NOBODY SPELL? I have a theory it’s all the same, demented person with hundreds of different personalities, sending me increasingly crappy stories. Send your stories to other publishers. Just for a few days. I need a break. OR AT LEAST CHECK YOUR SPELLING DEAR LORD THE SPELLING!
Love and Kisses, ElleVee

There’s been a lot of slush today, none of it good. Paying somebody to publish your book does not mean you are a good writer – it means you have enough money to publish a book. THAT. IS. IT.

The Fourth was boring, because I was too lazy to do anything. I slept in, which I enjoyed, then spent most of the day sitting on the roof in the cold, cloudy weather reading A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, which was great. Probably my favorite of his books.

Then I watched Notes On A Scandal with my crazy roommate, who didn’t ‘get’ the movie. I made egg in a basket (the only thing I can actually cook that will not kill me or make me throw up), and went to bed early.

Tonight I’m meeting up with my old journalism class in Union Square for food and drinking.

It’s a slow day. Can you tell?

moreless

My Sweater Has Poofy Sleeves Like A Pirate And I Do Not Like Them

At the risk of sending my readers [all two of them] running screaming from their computers in disgust, I have a very painful zit right at the entrance of my nostril, and I think it is trying to take over my brain. It’s certainly big enough. So if I suddenly start discouraging washing your face, or scream out against Neutrogena, call the paramedics and tell my roommate she’s psychotic.

Anyway. The zit thing is kind of the biggest piece of news I have to offer at the moment. Work is astonishingly dull, mainly because everyone is on vacation. I sit here and read slush. I check my Amazon wishlisht. I post on LibraryThing. I’d look for writing gigs on craigslist, but unfortunately Gmail is blocked on our server, and our E-Mail can be read by supervisors at any time. So much for that.

Got bootleg copies of Grindhouse, Knocked Up, and 28 Weeks Later...

Bought way too many books this weekend, and am now on a spending freeze.

Got stuck on one side of the Gay Pride Parade, with my friend Kay on the other. I had one of those moments where I was sincerely proud of where I live: watching people celebrating who they are [gay, straight, transgender, republican], while others sat on their roofs and joined in. Of course, I almost immediately felt a momentary twinge of extreme loneliness when I realized I was quite possibly the only straight single girl on the block. There were a lot of heterosexual couples. At least nobody called me a breeder.

Relax, I’m not going to suddenly start howling about my angsty single life. Mainly because it would be a horrible, clichéd lie. Yes, there are times I would like to have a boyfriend. But at this moment, a relationship would only be a nuisance. Of course, if Hunter S. Thompson came back to life and demanded I be his bitch, that would be another story. Also, I imagine my posts would be much more interesting.

It is blindingly hot out. The heat hits you like a wall, knocking the wind out of you and, with it, the will to be a constructive human being.

I’m getting to the point in slush reading where a few spelling errors on a cover letter is enough to send me into a rage.

For those of you who didn’t read my comment on an earlier post: it was brought to my attention that perhaps I shouldn’t be airing people’s inability to write on my website, as other publishers might be insane enough to like them. Or, to be more diplomatic, it would be very hurtful for a random person to see me openly mocking their hard work on my arrogant and admittedly self-important website. Therefore, I will no longer be doing the slush coverage. Weep over its demise. However, I WILL continue to comment on the stupid/insane things people do when sending in their stories, so hopefully it will balance out.

I love me some Starbucks.

moreless

On Monday, I Was Hit On By A Midget

Rather than bore you with my mundane, excessively trivial worries, here are the daily highlights from the slush pile:
* A woman who rhymed ‘friend’ with ‘dead.’ The friend was dead.
* Another obnoxious submission from a former SNL writer. Nobody should spend that much time and energy decorating an envelope.
* A vaguely depressing tale about a boy who could fly, but found out that if you want to have friends, you must be just like everybody else.
* A picture book about a little girl who is too fat for her mommy to love her.
* A pre-schooler stripping in class when she is bad.
* A deformed husband and wife who give birth to an angel that stops the war in Iraq.

moreless

Technology Hates Me So Much

I spent about three hours today destroying people's hopes and dreams [read: reading unsolicited manuscripts]. I no longer have faith in humanity. Nobody should ever write anything. Ever. Including me, writing this. They were that bad.

My personal 'favorites':
* The woman who dedicated her book to Oprah.
* An ABCs book based on diseases.
* The magical adventures of a bubble.
* This girl whose father dies tragically, then spends nearly a chapter complaining about how she's in sixth grade, and STILL hasn't gotten her period.
* Poems about cerebral palsy.
* Poems by a woman who had a seriously creepy fixation on her son.
* Poems about stone bunnies. The bunnies don't do anything. They're fucking stone.
* And the winner: the delightful story about a little boy who dies and goes to heaven. But he misses his mommy, so an angel takes him to her, and he gives his mother the kiss of death. She dies. That's the end of the book.

Most popular topics: autism, death, dragons, balloons, bugs, bunnies, and amputees.

One woman sent us eight stories. So I sent her eight copies of our guidelines, which is basically a rejection letter, only nicer. I hate people.

It's weird, though. I'm a writer, and have experienced the trauma of rejection letters. But the stories were SO FUCKING BAD.

In other news, I had no internet yesterday at work OR at home, the toilet in my apartment was broken, and now the bathtub is.

I am done with the words now.

Josh: You see what you do? One night, just one night, I ask you to help me and you ruin it! You know how important this dinner was to me because it was my last chance to impress Mindy's parents. I spent like two hours on this dinner, one hundred dollars on an ice sculpture, and three hundred dollars on a dumb harpist, who at this point SHOULD STOP PLAYING! And I don't even care what you think of Mindy cause she is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I can't date her anymore because you ruined it! You wrecked my dinner, you wrecked my one hundred dollar ice sculpture, and you wrecked my relationship!
Drake: You spent one hundred dollars on ICE?
- Drake & Josh

moreless