Journal

8/19/2020

I have a feeling that at the end of this process I'll have a new expertise. I can list it on my resume, brag about it over hors d'oeuvres. Oh, you code? I'm an expert in rejection.

I realize as I write this that it's been a long time since I've faced real rejection. I've been at the same job for seven years, I got divorced a few years ago but that wasn't so much rejection as a slow hemophiliac bleed, where I didn't realize what was happening until the relationship was already a corpse. I online dated for a little while after that, and I suppose there was some rejection there, but it was the impersonal kind, and I wasn't particularly invested in it.

But this is different. A putting yourself out there and asking, "am I good enough?" This week I've been told twice that, no, I am not good enough. I've been told it in impersonal form letters that say things like "you have a good story to tell, but..." There's always a but, at least so far.

I am surprised by the emotional reaction I am having. Logically I know, or knew, that getting published is a hard process, that every year millions of people finish a manuscript and send it off to the desks of agents and editors. I knew that even if my manuscript is a masterpiece it is bound to wrack up a heavy score of rejections. Hell, Harry Potter was rejected six times and accepted once.

But the problem is that I don't have the objective experience, and the distance from my own work to be able to say with confidence, "yeah, this is pretty fucking good." I think it's good. I'm pretty sure that I've read plenty of stuff that is worse. The ending payoff is pretty boss, and my mom thinks I'm handsome.

But I am picking it apart in my mind. Is the beginning fast enough? Does this scene have enough change? Am I tying plot in with character? Am I good enough?

I desperately want the answer to be yes.

But why does it matter? Even if my first book is never picked up, I'll keep writing. Every day I'll set my alarm early and squeeze out a few hundred words before logging into work. I'll keep dreaming, and plotting, and composing. I won't stop. I'll still be a writer; my stories will still be told.

But still, I desperately want the answer to be yes.

I think what it comes down to is that I have unrealistic goals. Or more so dreams. I have this image in my mind of a house upstate, with a mountain view. I sit with a cup of coffee, a blanket on my lap, and a dog asleep at my feet. I crack my knuckles, and look off to gather my thoughts. My fingers are the rap of a tommy gun on the keyboard. I'm transposing thoughts and images as quickly as I can imagine them, like an old picture real it flickers as it takes shape. In this moment I don't need to worry about the mortgage, about whether my hedges are leaving me long the wrong factor, what securitization volumes will be in six months. I am free of the shackles of the world and able to earn my bread through the stories I tell.

Maybe it's not so far-fetched that someday I will reach that state, either through a successful book, or frugality, or a few decades and then retirement. But I am impatient. I want my magic beans to grow overnight, and to climb the beanstalk on the morrow.

But I can't control time. I can't control the cogs that turn behind the scene. All I can do is focus on myself. I must become an expert. An expert in rejection, but an expert in other things as well: patience, perseverance, characterization, suspense, drama, language, metaphor, and god forbid punctuation.

I need to step back and be open to the process, to know that someday I will reach my goals, and to accept that all I can do is put one foot in front of the other, is set my alarm at 5:30am every morning, and sit down with my cup of coffee and with a dog at my feet and lose myself in my writing.

Maybe my dreams aren't as far off as I think.

8/5/2020

The sun is beating down heavy on New York City. I know it’s heat well as I walk my foster dogs (Ollie and Fitz) from shade to shadow, and contend with the itch of anxiety that they might burn their paws.

The streets are always hollowed out in August, and this year they’re nearly deserted. The summer crowd fled months ago, and travel bans, pandemic, and recession hold the tourists are at bay.

But, New York is missing more than the crowds. There’s no summer smell of hot garbage to rouse you on a morning jog. There’s no margaritas on the pier, no roof-deck parties in Brooklyn (at least not among my friends),and there’s no street fairs that are only worthwhile for their mexican corn.

It feels like a new world foreign and familiar at once, and I find myself thinking of CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce (only brighter and hotter), and the doldrums of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (again, only hotter and brighter).

Maybe the Lethargians had it right - days filled with daydreaming, dawdling, loitering, procrastinating and lounging. At least August in New York seems to call for a bit of that. Especially this one.

But there isn’t the respite that I hope for. Cooped up in an apartment with a makeshift desk and two screens filled with spreadsheets and pdfs, I plot my escapes. And that brings us to the kiddie pool. On a whim we ordered it last summer, and a few weeks ago I filled it with thirty seven thousand lungfuls of air, and about five times as much water.

It’s sitting on our roof-deck now, calling to me with the promised embrace of cool water, best enjoyed with a cold beer and a good book.