August 8, 2005

Today's comic is a true story, more or less.

Nowadays, nobody sends unsolicited manuscripts tdirectly to publishers. That almost never works. What you do now is get a literary agent to do that for you. They have "in"s with the publishers and can get your stuff published. The problem is that everyone wants a literary agent and they don't want you. So the trick now is to get a literary agent. You send them a manuscript or synopsis or whatever they want, and hope they like it.

When they reject you, they will often tell you waht they didn't like. And that's what happened to me. One of my (many) rejections mentioned that they though the story could use more characters. And I pondered how I could add a character when I jokingly came up with randomly adding "Bob was there, too" throughout the story.

This spawned a running joke within my group of friends and a fun activity. Take a book you like, open to a random page and read a paragraph. At the end, add "Bob was there, too." This can be particularly entertaining if you end up reading a paragraph from a sex scene.

-ATW