I'm a Substitute For Another Guy

• Lauren Baratz-Logsted guest stars at Book Angst 101 to examine why she's been through five literary agents in just over a decade, including this sterling behavior from Agent #2: "For the next few months, I sat on my hands, even though I was dying to know what was going on with the film deal. But finally, unable to contain my anxiety any longer, I called Two to get a status report. That was when I was told it was actually Two’s partner who handled the Hollywood end of the business; that said partner had to be in the mood to talk to Hollywood; and that said partner simply hadn’t been in the mood lately..." And that's not even the worst horror story.

• Here's an update on last week's Philip K. Dick robot story: Tom Deja drops by Dana's Number One Hit Song after visiting the 'droid and files this report: "It had been loaded with every word that PKD had written or said in an interview... It was fitted with face recognition software too, so it scans the crowd looking for faces and looks you right in the eye when it talks to you. That was creepy enough, but the fact that you can tell exactly how much it hated the fact that you, unlike him, were alive and not on display was didn't help."

• John Scalzi is taking July off from his blog, Whatever, so he can finish his next novel. I'll be one of seven authors picking up the slack for him, so if you head over there for the next couple Wednesdays you can see me natter on about science fiction even more than I do when I'm here.