I've been pondering this post for a while now:
Janet Reid, Literary Agent: Getting Ready to Query? Clean up your social media.Based on what I know of Ms. Reid, I doubt she's screening for anything other than really egregious asshattery. (As, indeed, she has clarified in
a follow-up post.) But I also think it's a terribly dangerous precedent: once you ask creatives (or anyone, really) to self-censor the big things, the not-quite-so-big things will look bigger for the lack of contrast, and when they're gone the medium-sized things will loom larger, and so on, until ultimately you're running scared from people who might get offended by the word "the". And of course, as people get more and more bent about smaller and smaller things, tomorrow's cancel-culture shitstorm is today's perfectly innocuous remark. So maybe you'd better not make that remark, or any remark at all, eh? Just sit silently and let the right-thinking people dominate the social narrative.
And to explicitly link cowering from the torch-bearing mob (because that's what this is, really) to one's chances of finding representation, of having a writing career...? I know publishing is a business, not a moral crusade, but I expected better, I really did.
I recommend reading both the post and the comments. There are some eloquent objections in there to sanitizing one's entire persona out of fear of cancel culture overreactions, not to mention the intractable challenge of trying to guess what someone, somewhere, some
when is going to take exception to.
As for my own journal, I really doubt there's anything all that exciting in here anyway. But after reading those comments, I feel the need to take my tiny little bit of a stand, so:
Dear agents: I am not scrubbing my social media. This is me. If that's not going to work for you, best we find out now, eh?
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