An Agent’s Day of Unstructured Time

'what does an agent do all day anyway' I wait for your emails

I drafted this post on a Monday, looking at a week with only a handful of meetings: a couple lunches, a client meeting, an after-hours zoom for film people in LA. Great, I thought, lots of chunks of unstructured time. I think that querying writers suspect agents will fill this time with reading manuscripts & queries, which, true, is ideally what I’ll do with the time (or, admittedly, if I’ve spent the weekend reading or have meetings before/after work hours that week, I might Go Touch Grass for an hour.)

But realistically, those hours are going to be filled with Situations. If I have nothing scheduled on a Wednesday after a lunch, by Tuesday morning I’m going to have a call during that block of time by something that’s come up on Monday.