How to Schmooze your way into the Literary Hipster World without even trying!

1. Come up with a spicy, classy pen name. Either something with four or five syllables, or simply two initials and a foreign symbol for a flourish.

2. Set up a blog online, separate from your personal one. Call up any friends who once created zines, wrote poetry, even who got published in their school paper. Ask for copies of their work and review it using at least five multisyllabic words you haven’t seen since high school or college English. Transcendence, Gestalt, Post-Structuralist, Absurd, and Postmodern Social Critique are all good choices.

3. Grab a clipboard and a stack of books from your room. Preferably ones without covers or visible titles so they’ll be whatever’s most faddish at the moment. Or anything in a foreign language, even comics or popular fiction.

4. Print business cards for yourself. Title yourself a Freelancer or Manuscript Consultant. Deduct the printing costs as a business expense.

5. Cruise on by any signing or event in the Castro, Valencia Street, or anywhere in a college town. Make a point of introducing yourself to the author and remembering his/her name and pen name. This will come in handy when later on you meet editors and publishers and can name drop. Or when you’re comparing acquaintances with other schmoozers!

6. Coffee is your friend! A cup or two goes a long way to keep you awake during any and all interminable discussions of someone’s perenially unwritten heartfelt personal tale of navigating the complexities of postmodern society. Drink it black, like the Beatniks, to show your fortitude, or Irish. Frappuccinos are for amateurs.

7. Make friends with agents’ and editors’ cats. People may have heard of your book idea a million times by more experienced authors…but a lot can be overlooked when they remember that Fido or Fluffy came to you and let you actually pet him or her!

8. Adverbs and adjectives are not your friends. Reduce your writing down to the bare essentials, kill any darlings you may have left. Even if it means breaking with syntax and grammar. Incomprehensibility is often only a step away from profundity.

9. Locate an exotic research topic. Something which has never, and will never again, exist within the entire pantheon of world history, and which can only properly be studied by yourself on an expenses-paid grand tour of Tuscany, the French Riviera, and the Caribbean.

10. If all else fails – or even if you succeed beyond your wildest dreams – come here and comment and participate with the Synchronized Chaos community! This site is a virtual free open-source writers’ conference, where you may ask writing-related questions of other writers and editors, request and offer manuscript and proposal mentoring and critique, provide writing instruction and advice, advertise local writers’ groups, and locate talent for representation and publication. Always designed to be more about the interactions among people here than our behind-the-scenes showcasing and publication work.