Hip-pocketed? Hip-checked!

It's official. I've been dumped. Not romantically (thankfully), but professionally.

A while back I took part in a pitch festival here in Vancouver. I wasn't really looking for anything other than experience pitching (I actually quite like pitching, but that's another story entirely). I went in with a couple of pitches for television pilots, met some cool people, had some good (and some ugly) pitches, and basically thought that was that.

And then The Agent called (well, emailed actually). This was off one of my better pitches. She wanted to see the pilot. I send it off. She reads it. She loves it. She asks me to come down to talk about my "future."

Hot damn, right? An agent's interested! I'm on my way!

Yeah. Not so much.

She spins some song and dance about how she likes to rep her clients on a "project by project" basis. No overarching contract, but she'll step in if and when one of my projects gets some traction.

Now I'm a newbie writer, but I'm not a complete rube (at least I like to think I'm not). It's not like a just fell off the turnip truck. I knew this wasn't the way things are usually done, but after giving it some consideration I couldn't really see a downside to it.

So time passes. I check in with Agent every month or so, don't actually get any meetings out of it (in fact the only meetings I attended were ones I managed to set up my own damn self), but I'm still thinking that "Hey! I have a sort-of agent and that's better than nothing."

And then the it starts taking longer and longer to return my calls. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and all of a sudden it's six months later. Not a peep.

Talked to an actor friend of mine last night who astutely pointed out that I'd been hip-pocketed. Agent was interested in one of my projects, but not interested in spending the time to break a new writer in. If the project got some steam she'd be there, otherwise I was on my own.

Back to square one I guess.

Sometimes this business frakkin' sucks.