Off the Cyber Shelf

The trip down to Topsail Island seems so long ago, though it was only two weeks past since I walked along the sandy shore and felt the heat of summer bearing down on my back.

The weather in New York was hit with a welcomed dose of autumn, after Ernesto passed through last week. within the month's end, the leaves will change their color and begin to line the curbs and iron gates in front of the brownstones. The window air conditioning units will be packed away, and a quiet calm will fal onto the streets of brooklyn, summer visitors returning home after staying in the Slope to visit the city and see friends or family who have ventured hear with dreams of someday making it.

It will have been a full cycle of seasons since the book began, and it seems like there is still so much more distance to travel. This town is big, bigger than life in a lot of ways. And the hurtles to make it hear often seem even bigger.

The first rejection letter arived yesturday in the mail. It was from a literary agent in the city, the few words scribbled on top of the query letter that I mailed, arriving in the self-addressed stamped envelope that is customary to send to agents and publishers when you're trying to sell them on your book. The self-addressed stamped envelope is such an odd part of the writer's life. after you slave for months on a project, each word a work of labor, you then try to squeeze the whole of the book into a few short paragraphs--the form of a letter which is to be sent to people you don't know, in hopes that they might like to get to know you a bit better. It's expected that you include the envelope--writer's know it well as just the SASE, just as well as they know the sour taste of the stamp's glue. And once it's dropped in the blue box, you try to get on with your life, while a part of you sits and waits. You wait to see the letter return in the mail, with the addressed you scribed, the stamp that you carefully placed, thinking that if even the stamp were in the wrong place it might turn off your prospective agent.

I knew there would be rejections. That's just how it works in this field. But there is something strange when you place the stamp on the envelope, in a sense putting the stamp on your own rejection. The envelope was simply folded in on itself, not even sealed. My own burial just lay open, for the whole world to see.

In a lot of ways, that's what the first letter feels like, a burial. And the SASE is a sort of procedure where you dig your own grave, the words of your manuscript falling like strikes of the pick in the soft earth, all 67,015 words falling to the pit of your stomach as you look at the mail sprawled out in front of the door, just below the mail slot, and see the familiar sight of the stamp that you cleverly placed in just the right position.

"Had I gotten the sesame Street stamps, would that have made a diference? Or what if I chose the selected series on famous czec journalists?"

It's important to remember that all great writers got their share of rejection letters. Of course, I'm in no way a great writer. I hope to be, and I'm working hard at it. I think someday I will be a very good writer, much better than I am now. that's what this process is about; it's about getting better at what you dream you can be. If a simple carpenter who never wrote a word in his life could rise from the dead, than who is to say that I can't as well?

I knew this day would come, the first rejection letter. It's like the first kiss, the first drink, the first funeral. Life is full of firsts. And now it's time to put the first behind you, and remind yourself that every writer, every dreamer had that first dream that came true, that kept them dreaming, that kept them keeping on.

I'm off now to listen to Baker street over and over on the IPOD and then check the mail. I just heard the bronze slot open and close a few moments ago, the sound of soft envelopes falling to the floor as the squeeking metal clanked back down on the front of the door.