When I was growing up, my mother seemed to hold a profound faith in the goodwill and active involvement of a just universal power–be it God or the fates or what have you (she was never big on labels). After overcoming a great many significant challenges (cancer, poverty, divorce, and numerous and sundry injustices), my mother was ready for a payout. Thus it was that her retirement plan, investment portfolio, and future well being were all tied up in lottery tickets. I think my mother considered the lottery to be a morally guided institution bound to the laws of karma rather than a voluntary tax for people who were bad at math. Our life of financial struggle and hardship would find meaning on the day the lottery gods finally smiled upon us and judged us worthy to be millionaires. It was only a matter of time, a waiting game. Now…I doubt this is a perfect (or even remotely fair) description of my mother’s outlook, but it’s the outlook that translated to me in my impressionable youth.
Determined, with all my teenage gumption, to strike out from the nest. I decided I would not be a lottery thinker. I had wanted to be a writer since at least first grade, but after years of hearing how stacked the odds were against my success, I figured I would pursue a much more respectable and stable path first and then, after making my first billion, retire to a writing career in the comfort of my plush, walnut-paneled study.
Perhaps you haven’t guessed, but I do not have a plush, walnut-paneled study. Indeed the only walnut in my house is edible. I’m saving it for protein should our mountain of debt ever erupt, smothering our meager earnings in a river of hot financial lava and forcing my family and I to consider nuts and berries less as ornamental complements to neighborhood bushes and more as a second job.
The trouble was, as I grew into something resembling an adult, despite my stern disavowal of longshot lottery thinking, I continued to imagine that some mystical power afoot in the universe would grant me salvation in a single stroke when It decided I was ready. Throughout high school and college, I dreamed up countless businesses and started a few. Out of college, as the Internet boom peaked, I began installing the granite foundations of my debt mountain whilst trying to start an Internet business of my own. Over the next few years, I tried countless other schemes, some political, some entrepreneurial, all of them bound for disaster.
As I see it, there were three reasons for my persistent series of non-successes: 1) my mostly-unconscious faith that some divine moral hand guided my future led me to believe that if I got a rejection, it was simply not God’s will that I succeed in that manner. In other words, I gave up easily and often. 2) Most of my schemes involved relatively miniscule investments of time and experience, compared to the quite massive hoped for rewards. The world does not often favor such schemes. 3) Indeed, the odds against building a truly successful business are no doubt nearly as formidable as the odds against getting published, particularly if the entrepreneur in question lacks the hard-earned experience or contacts necessary to ensure success. I suppose I just thought that in America, this thriving entrepreneurial promised land, business was easier. I also thought, perhaps a wee bit foolishly, that since I didn’t really want a career in business, I would more easily achieve one–(my version of “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes, you’ll get what you need.”)
In other words, when all was said and done–the blind faith in cosmic kindness, the minimal investment for maximum return, the ridiculous odds–I was betting my future on lottery tickets. Sigh. Stupid hindsight.
Anyway, all these years, as I have been playing the longshot lottery, I have hacked away in the background, slowly and deliberately, at my writing. I tried a couple of queries at various points and allowed the rejections that came through to disillusion me, as though the gods themselves had ruled me unworthy. Finally, however, this summer, inspired about how to write a halfway-decent query, I decided to abandon the notion that divine interference had anything to do with querying and I grabbed Kristin Nelson’s list of agents who accepted online queries (a copy is in the ‘07 PPWC Handouts packet) and, each week, I would research some of the agencies in that list until I found three-to-five viable options and then I would customize three-to-five query letters and send them out.
(A note on customization: for every agency I would read through their list of authors–ideally finding one or two I’d read. If I hadn’t heard of any of the authors, I’d research them until I found some who seemed to write in a similar vein to mine. Then I’d include a line like “Given your representation of so-and-so, I hope you’ll enjoy my…” Through this process I actually found several authors I ended up Amazoning, some of which I really enjoyed. If none of the work represented by a particular agency seemed even remotely similar to mine I wouldn’t waste mine or the agency’s time on a query.)
As I’ve said in prior posts, it took quite a while to hear back from some of the agencies (in fact I just received a form rejection from an early summer query a couple of weeks ago), but when the good news came it was good enough.
It’s possible that all the doubters who’ve tried to dissuade me from this path are still right. Perhaps writing is a mostly impossible dream, a lottery for romantics and the verbally incontinent, but I’ve decided I don’t mind the longshot thinking my mother gave me. I also appreciate the faith she inspired in me. One thing I neglected to mention above: when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, the doctor gave her wretched odds of surviving and only if she underwent very aggressive chemotherapy that would leave her sick and exhausted for months. She rejected the doctor’s treatment plan and decided to cure herself by changing what she ate and how she lived. The doctor called her a fool and told her she’d almost certainly be dead in six months, but she worked hard at her healing day-in and day-out. Twenty-five years later she’s healthy as can be. And, of course, still playing the lottery.