My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.
Coming from a standing background in striking, I couldn't catch up to the guys with 20-plus years of training on the ground. I had to learn submissions. I found out it wasn't an easy road. I had six losses in a row, but I still felt I was the best fighter in the world.
Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.
My strength is my wrestling, but I don't focus on it as much. I try to focus on a lot of different things like knees, elbows, submissions, and submission defense - just a lot of different things.
The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.
Now I have to have the biggest P.O. box in the entire post office to get all the manuscripts coming in.
I win by submissions, knockouts. There's guys ranked above me, but no one's interested in seeing them fight. They want to see me fight.
Not too many people present a good ground game from the bottom. They survive a little bit, and it's kind of boring. But not too many people are attacking from the bottom, hurting with elbows. They don't bring that kind of game because it takes a long time to develop.
I have a great jiu-jitsu game and I'm awesome at submissions.
We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.
Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
I didn't go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn't pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn't even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.
I know I have great grappling myself, and I know how I do with submissions.
Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.
Tor.com has been a venue for original SF and fantasy since 2008, but we've never formalized our process for submissions. Indeed, for a long time, we were totally winging it.
For every issue, I send four pages of finished marginals and they select the ones they need.
I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal.
Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.'
There's guys like Daniel Bryan and CM Punk that incorporated mixed martial arts submissions and moves into professional wrestling. I feel like the way it was incorporated was really good, but there's not enough people doing it.
