Rita Rosenkranz
Rita Rosenkranz Literary Agency
440 West End Avenue, #15D
New York, NY 10024-5358

Your web site says you don't accept submissions for screenplays, poetry, fiction, children's, or YA books.

My book contains all of those, if you let your YA choose what she reads.

I'd call ON ASSIGNMENT a memoir about writing and the writing life, possibly a how-to book, possibly a guide for the parents or loved ones (including children) of an underground writer, who want to know how their significant other can be so crazy, self-motivated, and irrational, in the economic sense.

Here's how I describe the book.

ON ASSIGNMENT is about combining writing, work, and family. For 38 years. Raising children, now enjoying the grandchildren. Being a presenter at a writers conference. Speaking on publishing as a business and self-publishing as an alternative. Combining fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and a movie script in the same book. Posting it online, daily, as I write it (the second half anyway-for the first half I had security issues with the defense contractor, at work). I think back to the old mail art correspondence novel David Zack was doing with his dog Bleeto out of the Immortality Centre, in Tepoztlan, Mexico. Copier art. All literature is world literature, Goethe said. What's it like to be a writer like Herman Melville in a culture that wants the books it sees on Oprah Winfrey or in a large pile at Wally World, big-box-discounted. Melville worked for the Customs Service. When he retired, they gave him a gold watch, and wished him luck. "I'd prefer not to," he said. A Story of Wall Street. Wall Street is too big to fail. I failed. I botched my book. It is a final hash. From hacher, to chop small. To mince. I don't mince words. That's why I have to work as a technical writer, from time to time. I'm 70. ON ASSIGNMENT, my temporary assignment ended and I was reverted to my permanent rank: househusband. Now I can write GULF COAST STORIES, on money I saved while on assignment. This is the underground writer way.

I enclose a pamphlet from the book, They, or dem.

The book is also of interest to people who want to know why the books sold in bookstores aren't like they used to be, back when they were in college. What happened?

May I show you the manuscript of ON ASSIGNMENT?

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404