Being a Writer

My daughter tells me that to be a writer, all you need to do is write. “If you tend a garden, you call yourself a gardener,” she has said, “so, if you write, then call yourself a writer.”
By her definition I am a writer, because since I retired five years ago, I have made writing the central focus of almost every day of my life.
I have created short stories about my motorcycle rides through forty-nine of the fifty United States, and seven Canadian Provinces. I’ve written several three to four page pieces on important lessons I have learned in my life, like how not to kill a snake, but they have been but a small diversion from my main focus, that of writing novels.
I have completed two novels; both nestled in close to what some would call a science fiction genre, neither yet published, and totaling more than 200,000 worlds. Over a million characters typed, all using a two-finger approach.
Both stories were started decades earlier, then put aside, because I made the excuse that while working for a living I had no time. “No time to be creative,” a thought that seems silly to me now that I have matured a little more, but that foolish thought kept me from the practice of novel writing for over thirty years.
More than three years ago, my first novel was finished for the first time. I sent out eight or nine query letters, a two-paragraph description of my work attempting to convince a literary agent that I was ready for my name to appear in the New York Times book section within a few months. I used the term “finished for the first time,” because after receiving, four form letter “no thanks,” one hand written “not for me,” and silence from the others, I spent another year rewriting it. It now sits there on my shelf, read only by a dozen family members and friends.
It sits there awaiting its future because I finished my second novel before completing my rewriting of the first. My second novel is shorter than the first, a story about some of the dangers we will face when the computers on our desks reach an intelligence level rivaling our own. I love the story. When I finished editing it for the fourth time I was confident it was a novel that would attract a literary agent and then be published. That confidence has been strained during the past year.
I have heard so many stories of how difficult it is to find an agent. “I submitted my book to over a hundred literary agents before it was accepted,” seemed to be a general theme for all those writers that did not start as a recognized national figure. And so I began my quest for recognition by putting one hundred pennies in a jar, each representing a query package I would send to an agent listed in “The Guide To Literary Agents.”
This books theme, which I made up over two decades ago, is about the destruction of the US Banking system, and after twenty or so query packages sent out last year during the time the US economy was imploding, my wife wisely suggested I wait for a little while.
I did, and when the first glimmer of hope of economic recovery began, I launched into sending out the next seventy query packages, each consisting of a letter, a three-page synopsis and the first four chapters, about four bucks a pop with postage and mailer.
I have received a lot of nice comments and encouragement in the sixty-three “no thank you” letters so far. Fourteen more never acknowledged my efforts, and nineteen more are out there, still within that time frame where there remains a chance for a yes. Four more pennies remain before my jar is empty.
My reason for this blog is not to bemoan my miserable fate, because no one that loves writing fiction can be miserable for a long time. We are given the privilege to create within our minds and put it on paper, and when you realize what a privilege that is, it sort of makes you smile.
Tomorrow I will send the final four of my hundred queries out, but I will not quit. There are a lot of pennies still waiting in my penny jar.