Phooey

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Not so bouncy today.  Last night, I spent hours in a sort of bumbling nightmare: turns out when you upgrade to Snow leopard, Photoshop doesn’t work anymore.  Well, it does, but it keeps crashing over nothing.  Like making a simple stroke.  Or saving or opening a file.  And it won’t let you change fonts or sizes in a text box.  My whole life started passing before my eyes.  Every little thing got tough after that – I needed a flashlight and went to the flashlight hook, which usually holds three of the dang things.  I picked up the only one still there, and it was dead.  How could Apple do this?  How could they make changes that would kick out one of the most powerful market-share tools in the universe?  Why didn’t they warn us first?  But if they had, would I have sprung for an OS that shorts out my eyes, ears and brain?

Then the Quicken 2006 on my laptop ceased to function.  Same problem.  New operating system.  I’ll tell you what – my personal old operating system isn’t doing so hot today either.

Today would have been different, except I could never get the engine to turn over; my own personal alternator also seems to be on the blink.  I got rejected again.  By an editor. Someone please remind me why I keep doing this to myself.  And what makes it worse, this was Chaz’s book, too.  Her first rejection.  Yay. Let’s go out to dinner.

I say rejected again, because that’s just the process: it would be like a miracle to approach a house blind and find just the right match in the editor who happens to end up with your work. Most people pile up more rejections in a lifetime than they ever do acceptances.

The nature of the business is this: lay your soul on the line for someone who blinks down on it with some surprise, smiles kindly, shakes  the head and simply goes on to the next booth.  You stand there, blinking yourself, wrapped in your own arms—then eventually unwind yourself, pull the soul off the floor and sadly shake it out.  Different people have different ways of reacting in this situation.  Some people walk away from the soul and leave the room, shutting the door behind them.  Some go to bed, covers over head, pretty much meaning to sleep for the rest of their lives.  Some dust the thing off, maybe run it through the washer and lay it out again.  The crazy, stupid ones pack it up briskly and philosophically and send it all over the place.  Multiple rejections don’t hurt hardly at all if you get even one acceptance.

But today, I am of the going-to-bed mind.

You do know that there are Pulitzer prize-winning books that had been rejected twenty, twenty five times (125 times?) before somebody loved them and kept them and put money into them.  And you also know that there are really wretchedly crafted books that tap the market seductively on the shoulder and immediately get taken home to bed and riches.  Rejection or acceptance is not the measure of a book.  Or of an author.  It is the difference between a story that might end up circulated in quarto and one that basks in the blessings of Gutenberg.  Every editor is an audience of one and publishing is a strange grafting of business and art.  The single audience is a tough sell.  Money, of course, is what everyone hopes for.

But the author hopes for even more.  The author hopes somebody will read her. Somebody will care about her characters. Somebody will feel something, then feel something more, and finally close the book ever so slowly, reluctant to leave a world that lingers in the soul.  But an editor is a formidable hurdle to all that.

I wish I could leave it alone.  Or I wish I had an agent who loves me.  And I wish the world wasn’t so flipping quick and electronic and sensational.  I love books.  I love the smell of them.  The feel of them.   I love shelves full of them, the backs lined raggedly up, the titles winking and smiling at you over their shoulders – I don’t want them to disappear.  I wish there were more good ones.  I wish I was brilliant.  I wish sexual tension didn’t cover a multitude of sins.  I wish somebody said yes every single time.

Anyway.  When they say yes, you dance wildly around the house; when they say no, you bite back all the “but didn’t you read the part where—are you kidding?—No, really, are you sure it was MY book you were reading?” stuff, and pasting a graciousness you don’t really feel over the terrible embarrassment that you have wasted somebody’s time, you thank the editor.  Then you hang up and crawl under the couch and howl and feel old and tired and discouraged.

It can make you a thousand years old in five seconds.

And maybe you stay old for a couple of days.  Maybe for weeks.  But eventually, you give in—because you can’t help it, and you put yourself on out there again, hoping this time, somebody swoop you up and start the party.  And then you’re young again.  At least, until you get your edited manuscript back –

So today I’m kinda bummed out.