It would be easy to become so hardened by life that no one would ever break through the shell, wouldn't it?
Life has a unique way of knocking us around and then laughing at us as we teeter on the brink of not only disaster but sanity sometimes.
I'm exaggerating, you say?
Just think about your own life. If you're over the age of about 40, you can probably list five or six events in your life that other people would have a hard time believing if you told them the whole, sad, crazy story.
I'm right, aren't I?
If this chronicle of my journey into the misty recesses of turning 60 a few years ago has done nothing else, it has given you, the reader, an unprecedented glimpse into someone else's life, with all its ugly blemishes and cracked veneer. Sometimes its beauty, too.
That would be MY life, of course. But I'm no different than any of you. We move through our days, we make huge mistakes, we clean up after ourselves the best we can, and we try again. And again. Often, we aren't the ones making the errors: It is others who stumble into our lives, smashing the furniture and generally creating havoc. All we can do in those instances is go find the dustpan and broom and start sweeping the mess out of the way. Or step over the broken pieces of our lives and just keep going.
Do you remember the publisher who called and "offered me a contract" on my book manuscript, the book about not complaining? Oh, the irony of it all. I researched the company, I scoured their website and their listing in my Writer's Market book, the bible for authors. I trusted the woman who called me that Sunday in early September, the one who said the words every writer longs to hear. They wanted to publish my work.
It seems the cosmic genie is dancing a jig in the padded room again. The publishing company neglected to say, or to disclose to that bible I mentioned earlier, that oh, by the way, the author has to pay for the first printing of her book.
I believe that is called self-publishing, isn't it? The very thing I was dead set against with this book. And I still am.
A kick in the gut, for sure. Deceitful chicanery at its best. The genie is dancing in double time right now.
Oh, yes....I admit it. I complained for a little over a week. Loudly. I cried. And I hated to tell all of you about how I was deceived, even at my age.
But that's why we all convene here, isn't it? The roller coaster catapults down into the depths and scares us to death. But it always comes back up.
Stand back. Here I come again.
Life has a unique way of knocking us around and then laughing at us as we teeter on the brink of not only disaster but sanity sometimes.
I'm exaggerating, you say?
Just think about your own life. If you're over the age of about 40, you can probably list five or six events in your life that other people would have a hard time believing if you told them the whole, sad, crazy story.
I'm right, aren't I?
If this chronicle of my journey into the misty recesses of turning 60 a few years ago has done nothing else, it has given you, the reader, an unprecedented glimpse into someone else's life, with all its ugly blemishes and cracked veneer. Sometimes its beauty, too.
That would be MY life, of course. But I'm no different than any of you. We move through our days, we make huge mistakes, we clean up after ourselves the best we can, and we try again. And again. Often, we aren't the ones making the errors: It is others who stumble into our lives, smashing the furniture and generally creating havoc. All we can do in those instances is go find the dustpan and broom and start sweeping the mess out of the way. Or step over the broken pieces of our lives and just keep going.
Do you remember the publisher who called and "offered me a contract" on my book manuscript, the book about not complaining? Oh, the irony of it all. I researched the company, I scoured their website and their listing in my Writer's Market book, the bible for authors. I trusted the woman who called me that Sunday in early September, the one who said the words every writer longs to hear. They wanted to publish my work.
It seems the cosmic genie is dancing a jig in the padded room again. The publishing company neglected to say, or to disclose to that bible I mentioned earlier, that oh, by the way, the author has to pay for the first printing of her book.
I believe that is called self-publishing, isn't it? The very thing I was dead set against with this book. And I still am.
A kick in the gut, for sure. Deceitful chicanery at its best. The genie is dancing in double time right now.
Oh, yes....I admit it. I complained for a little over a week. Loudly. I cried. And I hated to tell all of you about how I was deceived, even at my age.
But that's why we all convene here, isn't it? The roller coaster catapults down into the depths and scares us to death. But it always comes back up.
Stand back. Here I come again.
"If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying. "Here comes number seventy-one!" Richard M. Devos
No comments:
Post a Comment