OLD MAN SHAKES FIST AT CLOUDS - competition
Competition. I don’t seem to have the competition gene in me, and that’s probably a good thing, as I was on a Lutheran basketball team that went 1-14, and I had a wrestling record in high school of 1-43. Victory was probably sweet, but I refused to think about it. That is, until I started trying to get published.
I wrote on the school newspapers, from junior high all the way through college. I wrote for the Ohio State Lantern, the school newspaper at Ohio State. I almost became a journalism major, but wound up graduating with a double English major, a degree that was almost equally as useless.
However, after college, I still called myself a writer, but I never had anything published. I’d write a book, send it to at most five literary agents, and when the passed on my work, I figured the hell with it and started something else. It wasn’t until my mid-fifties that I got a little serious. You call yourself a writer for thirty years and can’t get anything published, it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.
So I wrote another book, edited it, proofread it, re-wrote it a few times, and when it was all ready, I sent it out to over ten agents a week, and eventually contacted over a hundred of them. When you do this, you have to be prepared for a relentless, cold rain of rejection that is sure to follow. I had email rejections every day, and almost every day, there were more rejections in the regular mail. But I kept going at it, and after a few months, a literary agent in Northern California said she liked my book and wanted to present it to some publishers. She was so optimistic about my chances, I almost felt sorry for her. But she was as relentless in her job as I had been in contacting agents, and soon enough she found a publisher who was a perfect fit.
I still have cringey memories of putting up a basketball and having it fall a foot short of the rim. Or putting up a shot and having it rejected back in my face.
Failing at something doesn’t make you a failure, even if you fail at a thing a hundred times. Giving up on a thing does.
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