No Rhyme Or Reason

Did you know that the path to publication is skewed  and that if you want absolute clarity on how it worked out for other writers, the answer would be as different as each person you asked?

It’s true.  Oh, we love, love, love to read stories like this.  (Thanks for sharing on FB, Janet Reid)

Or, maybe not.  I mean, how lucky can one girl get?  Then again, I’m sure luck didn’t have a thing to do with it.  It’s obvious she wrote a great story.  Period.

Anyway, there was also this great post by Writer’s Digest and it got me to thinking – once again – about the path to publication.   I felt better after reading it.  No.  Seriously, I did.  Why?  Because it meant anything can happen.  It proved there are scads of writers, very talented writers, with very savvy storytelling, yet, they haven’t been whisked through some magical publishing door as soon as they presented themselves on an agent/or editor’s doorstep.

There really is no rhyme or reason to it.  If there existed a golden template called “PUBLISHING GUARANTEED IF YOU DO THIS AND THIS = BOOK DEAL,” we’d all be published by now.  But that’s as likely as the Haley Bop comet passing us by again this year.  (orbital period: 2,537 years and we just saw it in 1995, don’t you remember???)

In a way, I like this uncertainty.  Let me explain why — because I know you’re wondering.

It makes us bleed over our pages, rip them to shreds, pull our hair, and begin again, because it’s just – not – good – enough.  It makes us worry ourselves to the point of making everyone else around us miserable.  We push for word perfection, sentence perfection, paragraph perfection and on and on.  At first, we swear to God we’re going to get the story right even if it means we don’t eat, sleep or shower. As soon as our manuscript is out of our hands, we then pray to God, asking, is it good enough?  Please let it be good enough.

We are never quite sure during the process.  Therefore, we can always have hope.

I like the uncertainty of it all because I want to have hope…., don’t you?

 

Oh!  By the way, have you bought this yet??

 

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