Yay for literary matchmaking

I'm not a huge fan of romantic matchmaking in my own life, but platonic and literary matchmaking I adore. Though sometimes I feel kindof odd when people ask me if I know of any agents, since I've worked on 13 books that I "negotiated" on my own (read: signed the papers the publishers gave me), hence I really don't know all that much about it except that I talk to people all the time cause I'm a nosy busybody journalist, it still makes me feel good when something good comes of it (and, you know, if it's not too much to ask for a little karma, a book deal for me sometime before I turn 31 would be fabulous).

Anyway, this one's kinda funny - my friend Kathleen Warnock said "you have to meet Ben Salmon." So I did and we hit it off and I regaled him with many tales of woe as well as my book ideas, and he was awesome and encouraging and knows many publishing types I know, and let me blather on and on and on and on. I already have a wonderful agent, but I've been sending tons of friends Ben's way, and interviewed him for Mediabistro as well. One of those friends, Diane Mapes, I met via email via Judy McGuire. I had just reviewed her excellent book How to Date in a Post-Dating World, so her name was familiar, and I was super honored when she invited me to submit to her Single State of the Union anthology she's editing for Seal Press (fingers crossed that my single girl ramblings make some kind of sense). Lo and behold, it's now officially official, via the site I'm most addicted to and that's most likely to test my idealism about not being jealous, Publishers Marketplace:

Journalist Diane Mapes' THE DIRT ON DATING: The 100-Year History of the Rocky Road to Love, a pop history of dating, offering highlights and horror stories from the frontlines of dating in its short but tumultuous past, from "petting bandits" to man shortages to dating scams, to Christel Winkler in her first purchase at Wiley, at auction, by Ben Salmon at Rights Unlimited (world English).

What I pointed out to Ben and Diane today, though I would imagine they already know this, is that there is already a book out there called The Dirt on Dating. (There's also The Dirt on Sex and The Dirt on Breaking Up. I totally have to read The Dirt on Sex at some point, but I'm plowing my way through a bunch of books, including Hating Women [by Shmuley Boteach, not to be confused with Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin)[and many others, but at some point I shall get to it.) I know this because in the course of my research for my fake wannabe book Sexual Freedom for All, I've been reading books like Hayley Dimarco's Sexy Girls and The Technical Virgin: How Far is Too Far? I shall be posting about "the cleavage situation" (which I totally think would make a great band name) at some point soon, once I dig out from under a little.