No, I will not read your f#@king script

[pbray]

Stolen from everyone, professional screenwriter Josh Olson hits the nail on the head.

The newest version of the trend is the folks I've never met who think I have nothing better to do than to read their self-published or micropress book and then give them a review blurb. Often helpfully sent to me as an attachment, which luckily 9 times out of 10 will land their email in the spam bucket, never to be seen again.

Comments

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Back when I was volunteering with RWA, I was amazed at the major name authors who would still volunteer to judge contest entries from unpubs, a seriously thankless task. Writers like Mary Jo Putney, Mary Balogh, Jo Beverly, etc, still took time to be gracious.

Though I wonder now with the explosion of the internet and authors being universally reachable via myspace, facebook, websites, email, blogs, etc, if the proliferation of these requests makes pubbed authors burn out on this stuff even faster than they used to.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

I would guess that burnout does happen faster now, just as publishers' and agents' slush piles have grown deeper. It takes a lot less time and effort now to send your entire poorly-formatted MS to someone you don't know, which must lead an awful lot of people who in a previous generation wouldn't have bothered to say Hey, why not? It can't hurt, right? Actually reading and critting the said MS, though, still takes every bit as long as it ever did ...