Publish or Perish

Sorry for the lack of updates, but that’s pretty much what I’m getting, too.  Not rejections, and certainly not offers, but an oppressive, maddening lack of response.

Radio silence.

Feeling very foolish, at the moment, that I ever thought someone might be interested.  But I try to remind myself about all of the authors who tried and tried and tried, only to have their book finally picked up on the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth submission.

One can dream, right?

So, in pursuit of dreaming, I submitted again today.  This time it was to Suzie Townsend of New Leaf Literary, who seems spunky and sharp.  Hopefully she’ll be as excited about my sample pages as I am about her…it’d be nice even to have someone request a partial (or, most untold of joys, the full manuscript). 

It occurred to me that writers face the same danger as academics: they must publish or perish.  While academics will merely lose their jobs, however, writers will lose some essential part of themselves.  Not the desire to write; I don’t think that ever goes away.  But perhaps some piece of their confidence.  Not just in themselves, but—more devastatingly—in their work.  I see them: sad, withered creatures that once decked the world in prose, winking at it with the glowing eyes of their similes and dazzling it with the long, flowing language of their glossy coats.  Retiring from the forest of coffee shops, bookstores, and pubs to their dark, hidden dens, where they can practice their shameful art in secret.

I feel this way, more often than not. 

My cousin saw me on my computer when I visited for break.  He broke out in smiles, and plunked himself next to me to try and get a glimpse of my screen.

“Are you working on a book?”

I wasn’t.  My screen was littered with job applications.  I wanted so desperately to say “YES!  Yes, I am working on a book!  The sequel to the one I was working on last year, which has now been picked up by such-and-such an agent and sold to so-and-so publishers.” 

But I couldn’t.  So I just said, “No, not right now.”

I want to work on Damnatio Memoriae.  Maybe I’ll focus on that the rest of the week, now that I’ve applied for another agent.  I’m also thinking (as I may have mentioned) of trying my hand at romance…simply because I think I could write something tawdry enough to pay the bills.  And maybe if I could establish myself in that genre, I could make the contacts I needed elsewhere to find someone to represent my poor little pet project.  So it goes.

Anyway, in the time since I last wrote I’ve been assigned two additional departments and another director at work, so I’m swamped and overwhelmed.  As such, I should run and try to finish all the heaps of work I have yet to do today.

Allow me to close with a thought from Langston Hughes:  

“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.”