Mark: You are clearly unaware that most writers are inept when it comes to minding the store. Hence, the whole agent thing. Like the church and state-like separation of advertising and editorial at a magazine, the agent ensures that the writer can carry on writing his novel without concern for how it might sell. For that is the agent’s business. If the agent is good, the agent will understand the writer’s temperament, work very hard to maintain a scenario in which both agent and author benefit, and figure out a way to make a manuscript marketable. Just about everything out there has an audience. It is not the writer’s concern to care about the scope of that audience, but to simply write as true as he can. It is the agent’s concern to translate what the writer has offered into something that the publishing industry requires: namely, a salable book. The current literary agent system creates a protective buffer, unless the writer is avaricious enough to write for the lowest common denominator and take matters into his own hands because he may have a perfectionist impulse. Chances are that such an individual is not really a writer, but is probably an agent incognito. You have obviously had some bad experiences with agents. Perhaps like other writers, you cannot mind the store. This is your problem. And you need to stop playing the blame game and take responsibility. The world does not owe you a living.

Scott: What do you think about Rick Moody thinking about the unfair reputation given to prog-rock concept albums?

Edward: Well, that’s a cynical attitude to have. Are you really going to give up so easily? You and I both know that you are a stubborn mule when it comes to living the good life, even if the good life brings its share of penury and isolation. But here’s the thing. I think what you’re really upset about is having to abdicate your joie de vivre for a supporting role in a humorless office. But this does not necessarily have to be permanent. And it does not mean that you have to sacrifice your vivacity. While the obituary is by no means final, maybe Segundo isn’t what you’re meant to do. There are these novels that you’re writing. Two unfinished. And what of the polyamory play (also unfinished) that you did all that research for? Or those radio plays you wrote? You’ve been grumbling about being so caught up with work and saving Segundo that you’ve had no time at all to write fiction. Maybe you’re just postponing the inevitable. Because you know they’ll go after you once it’s out there.

Details on the Save Segundo campaign will be announced here very soon. In the meantime, there is this matter of advancing one’s chronological meter. (Many happy returns to The Other Ed too, who shares the day in question! Today, the Literary Eds will conquer the world! Tomorrow, we’ll all just go back to being taxpayers.)

My review of David Deans’s The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash, III appears in this morning’s Sun-Times.

It also appears that my byline has been mysteriously reduced from “Edward” to “Ed.” I presume that my name has become too long for ever-shrinking books sections.