m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

If you haven’t seen her yet, Miss Snark, the literary agent is an educational and humorous Dear Abby for the publishing world. For example, in response to a reader who’d received contradictory comments on a simultaneous submission to two different agents, Miss Snark responded:

We do this on purpose. We’re alerted by your post office (all agents pay an annual fee to the post office for this service) that you’ve sent chapters to two or more agents. Once alerted we put your chapters aside for our weekly meetings on “Make the Authors Crazy” night. We draw random comments from the hat and put them in our rejection letters. Then we mail them back to you. This is also the night we burn SASEs to light cigars and cherries jubilee. It’s really a lot of fun, and pretty much the reason I became an agent.

She did go on to give a more serious, yet still snarkalicious, answer.