Authors Electric

We start off with triumphant roars and finish with glorious and grateful gasps. It's middle time that lays us low and sometimes begging for mercy. Wouldn't be it cool, though, if we could triangulate, maintaining a strong, joyous spirit throughout? Joyous when we're panting and wondering how to go on? Joyous when the middle's taking months longer than we'd thought? Exactly. Marathons of any kind--a novel, a movie, a painting--are filled with strong beginnings that peter out into sputtering and desperate rushing finales. But there's no need to rush for the finish when other marathons await us.We need to be strong through whatever exhaustion or pratfalls await.                                                                         *****                ...

As I packed for the move to Seattle this fall, I made decent progress on all but one front: a, mountain of personal papers. Imagine 3000-5000 pages--everything from old love letters to leases, poems, resumes, professional correspondence, contracts, published articles, ancient receipts...Okay, now imagine all of that thrown into a barrel with 600 rejection letters dating back 20 years--picture all of this shaken wildly, then removed in handfuls and tossed pell-mell into boxes. I faced something like that. And I suppose I could blame it on a half-dozen cross-country moves...or on a crushing divorce. But I think the truer answer may lie in the staggering number of rejections received over the course of two decades (after I'd published four novels preceded by twenty more years of rejection. Or to put that another way: twenty plus twenty years of failure with five years of success in between). I believe I numbed myself in ways I never knew. As I started to sift through the wreckag...