And then we sink

Is there something in the air? For the last week I have heard from a wild and random variety of my writing friends and everybody is in some sort of funk, driving themselves nuts with unanswerable quiestions. What should I be working on? How do I get myself motivated to do it? Why isn't my agent calling me back? My publisher? My publicist? My mother?

It seems during the last few months, agents and editors - never a chatty crew, even under the best of circumstances - have become more silent than ever. Is it the economy? If an agent knows that nobody's buying he's not going to feel any time pressure to sign new people up.....an editor with zero dollars left in the till isn't going to read books she knows she can't buy....and a publicist who's been unable to scare up any publicity in this time of folding magazinses and collapsing newspapers isn't eager to tell her writers that um, no, nothing's happening.

So they don't call us or write us or even call us back and write us back. And we writers - always a neurotic crew, even under the best of circumstances - are, in the absence of any real information, left to do what we do best: tell stories. We tell ourselves and our writer friends horror stories, dreaming up the worst scenarios we can. Our agent isn't really an agent, he's a sociopath who actually works at a chainsaw factory and pretends to be an agent in order to lure unsuspecting would-be novelists to his cabin deep in the snowy woods. Our editor has read the new draft and hates it and is busy trying to get our advance stopped before it leaves the accounting department. Our publicist is in rehab - where she's meeting people who have WAY better stories than ours.

Is everybody else out there in a funk? Or is it just my own little circle?