It's a love-hate relationship. On the yes side, one of our greatest joys is getting out and meeting people. We live cooped up in a house that's seven miles from the next closest house. So meeting people is a wonderful thing for us. On dealing with the literary agents, literary agents exist because there are some things that even lawyers won't stoop to.
Agents are a very unpleasant part of the business.
Except we had a very pleasant agent. But they are very, very rare. And very necessary to an author's work. If authors, as a group, have one failing, it is their refusal to accept that writing is a business. And we are very good at the business part because we spent 25 years selling archeology to oil companies.