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A few days ago, I watched the entire 5 or so hours of the A&E Pride & Prejudice (so awesome). You know how Mr. Collins is always talking about how condescending Lady Catherine is?

Granted, in truth Lady Catherine meets our current understanding of the word, but at the time, condescension wasn’t an offensive description. Quite the opposite.

In America and most of the modern world, the term condescension is quite an insult. It means that the condescending person seems to think so highly of themselves that they have to lower themselves to our level. And that’s offensive to suggest that we’re at a lower level.

But think of when there was such a thing as rank. A social system where your rank dictated what you could wear, what you could do, your power in society, how you could marry, and so on. In a social system such as that, for a powerful person to condescend to the lower level was the utmost in gentility, kindness, thoughtfulness of those in a lower status than they. Not that it could never be considered an insult- a person of equal or lower rank behaving as though they were condescending from a higher rank would be the ultimate of fools. Which is why we use it exclusively as an insult today- after all, no one is higher than anyone else now. Even the President is the servant of the people- perhaps we should condescend to him?

But the truth of the matter is, we are still impressed by those who seem to truly condescend to us, even if we don’t call it by that word. Now we say “S/he’s just like a regular person” or “They’re so normal!” or “They’re just like us” and count it a compliment. Think of all the stories you hear of someone meeting a really pleasant Hollywood star, a rock god, or famous politician? How about when you work at a company where the boss is just “one of the boys”?

Rank still exists, condescension in the original still exists, but we’ve used it so much as an insult that it can no longer be considered a compliment. It’s just a shame that unless you write historical fiction, even writers are constrained by modern society’s norms. Oh well.

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Yeah, I thought you’d like that….

Or really, fiction writers of all sorts, but mostly for novelists.

I’m not sure what’s been going on for the past few days, but lately I’ve been meeting more and more publishing industry pros and aspiring novelists on Twitter. And along with that comes the influx of linkage.

Ok, so the single most important website for an aspiring novelist is Miss Snark. That’s a given. If you’ve never read this viciously wonderful agent, you need to. Go back to the very first post and read all the way up to her last (she’s hung up her stilettos for good) post. Take notes. Bookmark the Crapometer for when you’re getting ready to query. Read through it again. Take more notes. Follow all instructions and consider all advice. Just do it. Besides, it’s fun!

Now, Miss Snark I’ve known about for years, and have read almost every post on her site. However, #QueryFail is brand new. And it’s not a site; it’s a hashtag. In other words, it’s a stream of tweets from Twitter that are all on one subject, specially marked out using a hashtag. You don’t need to be a member of Twitter to read #QueryFail, but you do need an account if you want to respond to any of them.

What QueryFail is, is a day set aside by agent Colleen Lindsay for all Twitter savvy agents and editors to vent their query frustrations in the form of a 140 character tweet. Many of the tweets are actual lines from queries that the agent/editor rejected such as “Like my protagonist, I definitely could be described as overachiever, and I naturally have hair like Lady Godiva.”, “My book is about a friendship based upon mutual vomiting practices in high school.”, and my favorite- “This book is The Notebook meets The Lord of the Rings.”

You’ll need to scroll through several days of tweets about #queryfail if you choose to follow the above link to access it, but there’s a downloadable file of the actual QueryFail tweets from the actual day at that link.  The agents are planning to make this a regular thing, but no schedule has been set. And by the way? #QueryFail even got attention from The Guardian. No joke! There’s also a #novelfail, but I haven’t had much time to check into that.

And the third page that you may want to consider, is a 25 point list of why your fiction is being passed over, courtesy of Andromeda Spaceways. It’s funny, but not hilarious. Dirty, but not filthy. But all in all, a pretty good list.