Just A Bit Of Housecleaning

Hate to say this but I still get enough letters about these three things that even responding to each one is really time consuming, so I unfortunately have to post this every once in a while.

There’s a couple things I can’t really help with, for time or legal reasons.

1) I cannot read your unsolicited pitch, story, or springboard, legally. I still get maybe twenty of these a week. I CANNOT read them. It is sadly just a waste of your time to send them to me. I wish you all the success in the world, I am happy you are creating, but I can’t read it, under any circumstances.

2) I cannot help you with your homework/thesis/school paper, etc. I just can’t. I get up to thirty such requests a week sometimes, a day never goes by without one such request. I would like to help, but it is simply far, far too time consuming and believe me, the VAST, VAST majority of questions these folks ask me for their papers are topics I have covered endlessly here and elsewhere, which makes me a little impatient anyway. If you value my time so little that you can’t look up and see if I’ve covered a topic endlessly already, odds are we have started off on a bad footing.

But the thing is, it takes hours to answer these questions well, and a tiny number of people would see it and most of it is redundant. If I can’t do it for one person, I have to simply flatly say I can’t to it for anyone.

I try to answer as many questions as humanly possible, but I have to do it where lots of people can see it or I end up answering the same question endlessly forever, and I can’t do that. I’m sorry.

3) I can’t really help you become a writer. I can answer SPECIFIC questions of craft and the industry, sometimes, here where it can hopefully benefit more people than just one. But I can’t find you an artist or an editor or an agent, I can’t tell you what your next step is. I do have an article that I link to every so often here, and it might help. Please read this and if you still have questions, go ahead and ask.

http://gailsimone.tumblr.com/post/4654769851/brutal-tips-on-breaking-into-comics-warning-long

Thank you, really sorry I have to keep posting this to those of you who have seen it before.