Year End, Distant Mountains

Would you believe I completely forgot to update this blog since my last post?  My teaching and writing and household responsibilities have driven just about everything else from my mind over these past weeks.  I barely finished my Christmas preparations, and I mailed my Christmas cards only today!

Still, the deadline for this book is always in my sights, and any breaks I take in writing it are  amply paid for with the stress I feel when I think my looming winter deadline.    Can I do it?  And after all this work--the hours of painstaking research, the long moments of staring at my screen, the stark fear of writing from the inside of a life that I understand only from the outside--will it even be publishable?    Once  I submit it, the manuscript will go through an editorial and acquisitions team, and it can be ultimately rejected, despite the formal contract binding us together.

Rejection seems unthinkable at this stage, but the truth is that writers have to expect it at some point.  Most dedicated writers will experience it often, in fact.   Rare are those who don't experience it at all!  In fact, along with honing the necessary creativity and writing skills, every writer must forge an unbreakable weapon if he or she is going to ever find success, and that is a backbone made of iron.  Like most authors, I've received more rejection slips than I can count, and almost all of them--maybe literally all of them--were for manuscripts I'd already finished, not just proposals.   Not only that, most of my rejections were over a period of years unbroken by any success.  Those who aren't willing to experience this kind of rejection should keep writing as just a hobby, and there is nothing wrong with that!

That doesn't mean I don't care about rejection, though.  There is always a sick fear behind my shoulder-shrugging that my best efforts  may just not be good enough.   It takes some stern reminders to myself that my worth does not depend on a successful outcome.  When all is said and done, I have been given a duty, and God expects  me to fulfill that duty to the best of my ability.  That's all He asks of me.   The results  are another matter.

So, as I approach the New Year, I  feel a sense of both relief and dread. I know I am quickly descending the side of one mountain, which fills me with a sense of triumph, but another looms straight ahead.  Whether I will   ultimately  reach the other side is part of the next chapter of my own life story--and only God is the author of that!