I just happened to come across this as I was researching something else; it has a number of pithy quotes for aspiring writers. (And al writers, no matter how successful, aspire to something. Remember that.)

Jeff Sanford once accused me in a backhand fashion of being wordy, and asked me, in a rather cross, harried moment, what I would do if I didn't turn out to be "the next Virginia Woolf."

Fortunately, that never came about, for I am. I didn't have much of an answer for him yet, though: blogging had not yet been invented. I was thinking, "literary genius, or maybe beach bum." I hadn't yet decided for sure. I still haven't.

And yet Jeff and his wife Midge, their daughter Kate Sanford, and the Matthews family (Kerry, Scott, Joan, and Don) did something for me that I will never be willing to fully acknowledge, much less able to repay, in this lifetime: they took me in for months at a time when I was in high school/college and my mother "went violent."

Had it not been for the Sanfords and the Matthews (and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Perrys, Turleys, and Goldfarbs) I would have ended up on the street.

So when one discusses "the tender side of agenting," one hasn't even scratched the surface of the Sanford "mizvahs." Having a crazy teenager under your roof—coming and going at all hours—is much, much harder than holding any writer's hand through the dark tunnel of creative troughs.

I've done both. Writers are awful, but teenagers are worse. Teenaged writers? The mind reels.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:59 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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