The Actual Me

Back in my thirties, I decided to do something stupid.  Write a book.  But because I wasn’t a total idiot, I decided to hedge my bet.  I’d always been a fan of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, and lamented the fact that he’d never gotten around to concluding the series before his demise.  But, hey, no problem dude.  I’ll do it for you.

Six months later I had my book.  Was it any good?  Who knows?  Like the naïve fool I was, I started to shop it around.  Find a name in Publishers Marketplace, a query and first five, plus of course a SASE because this was before the Flood.  And then, miracle of miracle, someone actually wrote back.  The capo de capos at a very prestigious Manhattan agency, bearing unwarranted praise.  She said she wanted to shop the book.  Thought it had a promising future.  And all I could do was ask myself, was it really just that easy?

No, of course not.

Two weeks later, a second letter.  Bad news instead of good.  Turns out the MacDonald estate is keeping poor Travis under lock and key.  So, by mutual agreement, I took that same book, changed the names, tweaked the plot, and returned it to my agent.  She proceeded to shop it around.  And though it received its share of nods and nibbles, no one wanted the thing.  Time to regroup.  I wrote a second mystery, no beach bums this time around.  Another novel after that, this one mainstream fiction.  My aim was improving, I was learning to write, but none of that seemed to matter.  Because the target, the one I’d nicked once, was slowing pulling away.

At that point, you have a choice.  You can quietly retire from the field of battle, with your honor still somewhat intact.  Or you can keep reloading.  And based on the fact I’m sitting here, all these years later, still searching for the right words, you can probably guess which path I chose.  But at least I’m not alone.  Seems as if there’s thousands of us, blindly firing away.  An army of fools, too proud to surrender, armed with blanks instead of live rounds.