Towse: views from the hill

There’s an interesting discussion continuing on over at MissSnark’s that was triggered by someone asking whether they should be using read receipts when they send something off to an agent.

Miss Snark hadn’t realized such a thing existed. Her mail client, obviously, doesn’t provide that annoying “The sender has asked to be notified when you read this e-mail. Do you want to send a read receipt?” message.

So the comments are flying about how annoying read receipts are and other people replying well, how else are you going to be able to tell whether someone got your mail? Tech types say that the read receipt means nothing. Doesn’t mean the person has actually read your mail.

Someone said, Frankly, I’ve never had this problem of lost email, and if I were to lay received email end-to-end, they’d extend into the thirtieth century.

That may be true, or he may just not know he has a problem with lost e-mail.

I get more e-mail than is good for me. I’ve setup my e-mail so that sal@ sally@ self@ go to my Comcast mail account and everything else — all the e-mails from timemag@towse.com or tribune@towse.com or pge@towse.com — goes to a gmail account.

I recently discovered that things that should be showing up at the Comcast account weren’t. Sure, I’d had some inkling. His Nibs would ask me what I thought of something he’d e-mailed from work and I’d never received it. Something quirky from his end, we thought. Maybe the corporate e-mail mavens were hijacking his notes.

His Nibs and I share an office with facing desks when we’re home and one afternoon he said, “I’m sending you an interesting URL.” Well, the URL never arrived. This happened a couple times in a single afternoon. I even went online to check my spam folder at Comcast, nothing.

So I changed my mail settings to send the sal@ sally@ self@ mail not only to my Comcast account but also to a separate gmail account from the one that all the general mail falls into.

Surprise. Surprise. Comcast was dropping mail on the floor. The mail wasn’t getting to me. The mail wasn’t caught in their spam filter. Nothing.

I’ve set things up with Thunderbird now so it picks up the Comcast mail and tucks it into one folder and picks up the gmail for sal@ sally@ self@ and tucks it into another folder. My rough estimate over the last few weeks since I made the change is that Comcast is dropping at least 10% of my incoming mail.

And there’s been one mail that came to Comcast and never made it to gmail.

Go figure.

Update:Found it! I was looking in the wrong gmail account’s spam folder.
[end: Update]

I still hate read receipts — don’t return them and don’t ask for them.

If someone tells me they never received something I sent these days, I don’t automatically assume that something happened in transit or the mail got caught up in a spam trap. Could be, I now know, that the mail servers at the ISP end might just be dropping the incoming e-mail into /dev/null, never to be seen again.

Added Update: I just counted. … so far Thunderbird has picked up twelve e-mails from family members today from the gmail account. Comcast only had seven of those e-mails.

Has this always been going on? How much e-mail have I missed out on?

Miss Snark asked why I just didn’t change ISPs. I told her that Comcast has a sole source franchise deal with the cool, grey city of love. If I want broadband, Comcast is the only game in town. And who’s to say that other ISPs don’t have similar issues with e-mail?

How many people are really so cockeyed they’d start forwarding their mail to two different servers to see if there’s a difference in throughput?
[end: Added Update]

Lovely stuff at Ephraim Faience Pottery.

Now, if I could just convince myself that $198 for a vase that looks like this, isn’t a lot when you’re buying something that you’ll keep forever.

I liked nearly every piece they had on their Web site, some more than others. Oh, would that I had the wherewithal and the space to pickup a handful of these.

Beautiful, eh?

New Brand Agency, founded by Mark David Ryan, has a collection of queries and proposals for work they decided to rep. Check out their submissions section to see what successful queries/proposals look like.

The agency bills itself as “an innovative management firm for authors of bestselling fiction and nonfiction.”

New Brand Agency only takes e-queries and promises a response within 48 hours if they are interested.

Ah, San Francisco’s real estate market. Ain’t it grand?

Listing description: “This is a major fixer (contractor’s special) suitable for contractors only. Property to be sold in it’s present AS IS condition. Property needs lots of work from brick foundation to roof. 2 vacant units and one being occupied by tenants (Please do not disturb tenants).”

2134 Steiner (at California). Built 1900. Three units. Two parking spaces. ~2880/sq ft.

Asking: $1,490,000
Price/SqFt: $517.36

And look down there at the bottom of the listing!

Contingent! Someone’s made an offer!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We saw a house on Marina Boulevard last Sunday. Probate sale. Needs loads of work.

Listing description says, “Location, Location, and Views! Sensational opportunity to restore this Marina Blvd. gem, originally built for the Gump Family.”

What the listing doesn’t say is that there is obvious dry rot and leaks as well as damage from 1989 that was never repaired. A front balcony had signs warning not to open the door to it.

We walked through. Loads of work to be done to fix damage caused by neglect over the years. If the house were in good condition, it would be a gem. Nice spaces, antique front door, other classy features.

The views, such as they were, weren’t spectacular. Fairly nice view of the Marina Green and the yacht harbor. No sweeping Golden Gate views or anything like that. The partial view of the bridge could only be seen from the front living room window.

After we got back outside, we were walking to the crosswalk so we could get back over to the Marina Green when I saw something odd.

I walked down the east side of the building to check it out. Yup, there’s a real nice bulge or two in the east facing wall that look like souvenirs of the 1989 quake.

Looks rather serious.

I’m sure whoever owned the building decided after 1989 that if the place wasn’t red-tagged, it was safe enough for them and rather than go through extensive rehab work, they’d let the heirs and assigns worry about what to do with the place later.

Well, now it’s later.

I don’t know how much the neighbors would squawk if you wanted to take down a building built 76 years ago for the Gump family to build something new on the lot, but they’d probably squawk a lot. This is San Francisco, after all.

Buyer may be in for lots of fun repairing bulgy, cracked walls in situ.

Fixer-upper for $2,450,000!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And last but not least this one:

599 Vallejo & two other contiguous lots — just a block or two from The House on Grant, one of our favorite nosh places.

“Development opportunity with soon to be approved plans. Three lots 559 Vallejo St.(APN: 0145 036),567-569 Vallejo St.(APN: 0145 035), & 66 Fresno St.(APN: 0145 027),total lot size 4,616 per tax records.Plans for five residential units plus parking, & separate enclosed parking lot included with sale. Top floor unit:2200+ sq.ft. 3BR/3BA,1400 sq.ft. terraces,Lower 4 units: two 2,100+ sq.ft. 3BR/3BA, & two 1,900+ sq.ft. 2BR/2.5BA. Permits have been thru Planning, Building, & Telegraph Hill Dwellers.”

$5,900,000 for three lots with a combined total lot size of .10167 acre.

BUT! There are plans that are “soon to be approved” and those plans have already been vetted by Planning, Building, AND Telegraph Hill Dwellers.

Shoot, that approval from THD is probably worth at least an easy million in value add-on.

Just make sure you don’t decide you want to change the plans.

Here we go again.

Jennifer Sexton gives us yet another attempt to show that the work of a genius (the nation’s [Australia's] most lauded novelist, our only Nobel prize-winning writer, twice a winner of the Miles Franklin award and three times the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medallist) wouldn’t be picked out of the slush if his award-winning work was re-submitted anonymously today, thirty-three years after he wrote it.

The work? Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm.

What’s wrong with this experiment?

Why wasn’t White’s genius recognized?

Here’s a clue.

Nicholas Hudson, of Hudson Publishing, found the work perplexing. “What I read left me puzzled. I found it hard to get involved with the characters, so it was not character-driven, nor in the ideas, so it was not idea-driven. It seemed like a plot-driven novel whose plot got lost through an aspiration to be a literary novel. It was very clever, but I was not compelled to read on,” he wrote.

First problem?

Inquirer submitted the third chapter of the work to the editors and agents. Sure, the editors and agents might have failed to recognize good writing or maybe they recognized good writing but just couldn’t make sense of the chapter as a stand-alone.

Wouldn’t the first two chapters help make sense of the third? Is it wise to just leap directly into the third if your Nobel-winning author had himself thought the first two chapters were needed?

“I found it hard to get involved with the characters,” said Nicholas Hudson. Maybe the failure to get involved with the characters was because the first two chapters were there for a reason.

Second problem was best expressed by Lyn Tranter of Australian Literary Management.

In response to the first unsolicited submission, she said she couldn’t take it because she didn’t believe in it. “I’m sure you can appreciate that an agent must be totally committed to a work to sell it enthusiastically to a publisher; to do otherwise is not in the best interests of the author.”

On being told that she’d turned down Patrick White, how stupid and undiscerning (my words, not the article’s) is she?

Tranter says Inquirer’s experiment is “piss weak”, in particular because White is not generally read and doesn’t sell today. “I am looking at one thing and one thing only: can I sell it? And the answer is no, I can’t sell The Eye of the Storm. As a literary agent my job is to secure the interest of the public.”

The article’s a good peek into agents’ and editors’ reasons for turning down an unsolicited submission sitting in their slush pile.

I was not discouraged by the reasons given for turning down Patrick White AKA Wraith Picket. I was more heartened by the commitment expressed to finding good, fresh, new novelists (just not those who write like Patrick White) than, I’m sure, the perps of this age-worn prank were intending.

Nicholas Hudson, quoted previously as finding the work perplexing, on being told whose work he’d turned away had this to say.

Hudson has since told Inquirer he recalled reading the manuscript and was being kind in his letter. “I was trying to be polite. I thought it was pretentious fart-arsery. I don’t like White”.

He could’ve added, “… and if you’re planning on sending me a proposal, send me the first chapter of your novel, not the third, you numbskull.”

[via kitabkhana]

People who hang with me know that I wander through life with folded 8×11 papers (or 3×5 notecards, depending on the day) and a fountain pen in my back pocket to jot down notes, to-do lists, wine and food notes, whatever.

Only problem is, I wind up with disorganized scraps of paper with scribbles going N->S W->E and all points in between which I then have to make some sense of when I get back to the aerie.

Check out Chad Adams’ PocketMod.

This app is one of the coolest things since butter cubes.

Needs Flash Player. Download here, if you don’t have a copy on board.

Came across Bookyards.com just now. Looks to be a keeper.

Our goal is to be ‘The Library To The World’, in which books, education materials, information, and content will be provided freely to anyone who has an internet connection.

Bookyards has a total of 10,180 books, 22,825 web links, 3,944 news & blogs links and access to hundreds of online libraries (200,000 eBooks) for your reading pleasure.

Updated link to Kate Harper Designs at Internet Resources for Writers in the Markets section.

Harper’s “Kid Quote Greeting Cards” uses quotes from children 12 and under.

“IF CHILD’S SUBMISSION IS SELECTED, THEY WILL RECEIVE a payment of $25, name credit (Author’s name will be printed on the card), $40 worth of free greeting cards, and with the parent’s permission, press releases will be sent to child’s parents. Submission ideas must have been originated by child (either written or spoken), and not from any other published source. Age limit 12 years and under”

Has a kid you know said something along the lines of the samples shown on the site? Send in the quote.

Back when I wrote about allconsuming.net. At that time allconsuming.net was “a website that watches weblogs for books that they’re talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis.” In addition, you could pop a title into AllConsuming.net and find the blogs that have referenced it. That bit of code was pretty interesting. Enter /pride and prejudice/ and the site hared off to see what titles matched /pride and prejudice/ at Amazon. Taking those titles, AllConsuming checked the blogs it covered for references.

No more. Now allconsuming.net is yet another social network where you can

1 – Catalog your books, music, movies, meals and more.
2 – Get suggestions on what to read, watch or eat from people who share your tastes.
3 – Share your excitement about a great book, album, movie, meal, or gadget.

Talk about all the stuff you’ve read or eaten or watched. Note whether you’d recommend (or not recommend) something you’ve consumed to others. Keep a list of things that you’d like to consume in the future. Ask others for suggestions.

What had been an interesting app back two years ago is now bleh.

Oh, well.

  

And Yerba Buena and Oakland behind, glowing in the sunset.