sentences:  Maddox conceded that "a satirical magazine in New York in the late Nineties really had no function", because "everyone was being very modest and coy".In 1999, Maddox sold the advance rights to his first novel, "My Little Blue Dress", to a German publisher based on a five-page fax proposal he sent on the advice of his literary agent John Brockman.Within a week Brockman managed to sell the rights to the novel to publishers in an additional eight countries on the strength of the proposal alone.