I tried the young genius writer path but that didn't really work out (supposedly, once you turn 40 you are no longer "young"), so now I'm trying the honing my craft path. I have two book length manuscripts and over 80 rejection letters to prove my worth, so I should be well on my way to glorious author success! Right?
Anyway, I found this article in New Yorker magazine that made me laugh while giving me a strong dose of inspiration to keep going, even if neither of those books are published for another ten years (too bad they're fiction. I don't publish fiction. Now that's what you call ironic!).
From the article:
Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
As my school work increases, my blog posts decrease, but that is also partly due to the increase of work at Medusa's Muse. With one book about to launch and another celebrating its one year anniversary with a big promotion and sale (more on that later), my schedule is extremely tight. Speaking of time constraints, I'd better end now. I leave for class again in a couple of hours and I still have two more tasks to finish for Medusa before I hit the road.
Read the article, then promise yourself you'll keep doing the work, no matter what the return might be. Your Muse expects nothing less.
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