[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

And this is one reason why various folks I know invested in portable generators, precisely to provide power when there was an outage like that.

We have one if push comes to shove. And of course, I have double-stacked UPSes for the "big computer," the main 'puter for the biz. Natch--we might roast to death, bygod, but the data is safe! :-)

But he also went out and got a portable generator. Power in his PA suburb was pretty reliable, but he needed always up systems and Internet connections to do what he did, so even an occasional outage was a major problem. I don't recall precisely what he did to make sure the generator would be fired up and substitute when there was an outage. (What happens if you aren't home at the time? Nothing good...)
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Dennis

We still have above-ground power lines out here. Take that, high winds and high pull (power-usage) on days when it's 106-108 (or more) and everybody's home? Oy.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Oh, she realized she needed to. She was just unsure about how one did it. (I thought a polite and professional but firm "This is not working out because we cannot agree on what I am trying to do. I formally sever my relationship with you as my agent, and will look elsewhere." was the way to go.)

It's like bandaids, in my humble opinion. The faster you pull it off...

It's more complicated when there is an existing personal relationship. Another old friend is a former Executive Editor at a trade house who is now a full time freelancer and book doctor. Her agent was also a personal friend, and represented authors whose books she bought as an editor. They parted company when her agent wasn't happy with a new book she was working on. It was too much of a departure from what she had done previously that the agent had been able to sell. The agent wanted more of the same. She bit the bullet and found a new agent who was not only willing to represent the work in progress, but represented it successfully enough that it went to auction. She said the money wasn't enough to change her life, but was better than previous advances, and having the freedom to stretch out and do things different from what she had been doing was wonderful.

It's hard to blame the agent, either. I mean, after all, the agent's job (and payment) is to SELL the book. If you've ever read Maas's "Writing the Breakout Novel...", he tells many stories about his clients who've gone off into other areas, written books that didn't sing..self-destructed their (selling) careers. Agents often consider it their jobs, their remit, to ensure that doesn't happen. {shrug}.

I have no idea whether she and her former agent are speaking to each other these days. (It's not the sort of question one asks.) But it's a risk you take when you have a business relationship with a friend, and may be faced with a choice between whether the business of the friendship is more important. (I know an assortment of folks I like, respect, and consider friends who I wouldn't enter into a business relationship with because it would end badly.)

Ditto. Nor for family. ALWAYS a disaster.

Any sort of relationship like that has that potential. Musician George Clinton, founder and leader of the black bands Parliament and Funkadelic (and later music director for one of the late night TV shows) got interviewed and was asked why he had taken control of his business dealings as well as his music. He said "I didn't deal with the business end because I thought I had people to do that for me. Then I reached into my pocket and discovered I didn;t have any money, and decides I had to do that myself." Billy Joel in an interview years back talked about what he would have done differently when he was starting out if he had known what he does now. He said "The first thing I'd do is get a lawyer. Then I'd get another lawyer to watch the first one !"

Indeed.

He believed his own fantasies.

I honestly don't know what it was. He said, more than once, that he couldn't remember anything any longer and I did wonder if it was aging. I don't know, but OMG, it was frustrating to have to actually go over the same ground with him more than once, when he'd received a rather steep publisher's discount. Salt, meet open wound.

I have watched that sort of thing for years. AT&T Bell Laboratories' Unix OS included a utility to generate indexes. But it wasn't "Press a button" It required what it would index to be in a specific format it was programmed to work with, and you had to know how to use it.

You can, of course, create a humongous concordance. And then whittle it down, but...jeeze. I do not understand how ANYONE could think that a piece of software could adequately read and analyze content enough to "decide" which references to, say, "Irish Setters" out of 50 should be included in a subject-matter index without human intervention and guidance.

This, btw, is commonplace. We're asked to "make indices" all the time, as if it's exactly that. Push a button, out pops an index like the morning's ablutions. When I explain that the cheapest way to an index is for the author to actually do the work HIM/HERself, (gasp!) by working through the book and tagging the references, (from which we could then import that to InDesign, creating the index, retaining the tags, in case the layout changes, yadda), you'd think I'd suggested sacrificing small children to Mayan Gods. URGH.

"If you know better, you are lying to me. If you don't know better, you are lying to yourself. In either case, go away!"
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Dennis

I'm still not sure that either was true. I do suspect that it was indeed aging and that he'd simply forgotten it all. But Sweet Moses on a Pony, it made for a very, very long two (lengthy academic) books!

Hitch