A week into May, nine letters left my house. Some were one-page queries, several included 3 short chapters, and a couple packed the whole 87 pages of the breathtaking work of fiction Breakfast of Scallywags.
Ok, I’m overstating the breathtaking part by a sizable margin. Truth is, it’s a pretty silly little yarn. More of the truth is, that if it weren’t for encouraging words from a couple of the girls around here, those nine letters might never have happened.
Completely truthfully, I only cranked out the full 87 pages by dint of stubbornness. There was the one of me who didn’t believe in the project at all--the me who wholeheartedly loves the cast and crew of my completely unsuitable-for-commercial-publication first book, The Legend of Logjam, and has never felt the same level of devotion to Fay LaFarge and Barnaby Hootsman--hero and anti-hero of Scallywags.
So, that I submitted at all is due to the prodding of the me who knew very well that, regardless of my personal “belief” in the project, there was value and integrity in seeing it through to completion.
So I completed it. And those nine letters were more or less an ethereal offering to the Universe. An offering. Not something from which you expect a tangible return. Maybe some kind of karmic harmonious (but undefinable,) return will cast a beneficial glow on some aspect of my life sometime somehow.
The first envelope, immediately recognizable because it bears my own handwriting, came today. Surprisingly fast, but Clarion is huge and can process thousands of submissions deftly and efficiently.
I was curious at how little I cared. Maybe I’ll care more as the other eight trickle in. But I might not. It was a little heartbreaking when I had to acknowledge that Logjam was unfit for the market--because I cared so much about it, and wrote it with a sense of destiny and conviction. A sense that was missing as I wrote Scallywags. Scallywags is an offering. May the Universe treat it kindly, and may I continue to feel completely zen about whatever form that kindness takes.
