Dear Authors,

Please allow us to let you in on a little-known industry secret: when you receive a form rejection letter from an agent, and it says "your work is not a good fit for my list," what that really means is that we didn't like your book but are too polite to say so. Like how sometimes your friend has a new sweater in a particularly awful shade of puce that makes him/her look quite bilious, and when your friend asks, "How do I look in my pleasing new sweater?" you respond, if you are a well-bred person, "What a striking color that is!" We are guessing that you would prefer not to receive a rejection letter that says "please query us again when you learn to construct a grammatically correct sentence" or "your proposal is so bizarre/hilariously terrible/deluded that we passed it around the office and emailed it to all our friends, who are still laughing hysterically" or "please, just keep a journal. PLEASE." So when you look up our boss's listing on justfindmeanagentalready.com and reply to our form rejection with a cut and paste of said listing and the following statement: "Your listing on justfindmeanagentalready.com says you represent books about apocalypse-averting sea mammals with supernatural powers and my novel, The Dolphin Who Saved the Entire Universe, clearly fits in that category," it makes us HIT OUR HEAD AGAINST THE WALL AND WONDER WHY IN GOD'S NAME WE DIDN'T GO INTO HEDGE FUND MANAGEMENT LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. Okay? So knock it off. Thanks.

Also, you'd be surprised how many people title their novel "Syzygy." Don't do it.