Thoughts on Fame and Discouragement
Jim September 6th, 2009
I was taking a stroll with my golden retriever, Lizzy, today before it got hot. She was once a leash-tugger and a runner. Now at age 8 she is arthritic and we stroll around the grass while she reads the latest canine news with her nose. If I try to move faster, she will stop when it begins to hurt her joints. But overall, she seemed pleased to have an outing on her terms. It was good for me too. I was discouraged by the latest statement from my publisher on the sales of my novel, Maggie of Long Hollow. I have even been toying with the thought of hiring a publicist, but it’s too pricey and my novel is too close to being self-published. If Maggie were a ho-hum sort of book, I guess it wouldn’t matter so much. But I sent it out to 40 plus publishers in the 1990s and one editor really loved it, though she couldn’t get her editor in chief to take it. So close and yet so far.
Still, it’s not so much I want a parade, but when you produce something good, you want it to get out there. I also paint watercolors and I can frame one up and give it away. It will go on a wall and achieve its purpose. But books require the publisher and the marketer and the agent to get out there. I can sell a few to friends and family, but in the end, well, it’s not much of a fate for something I believe would have sold well had it been on the market twenty years before.
John Keats, the poet, was lambasted by his critics all his short life and lived off the goodness of his friends as he had no income. He died in Rome thinking himself a total failure. On his headstone he permitted only to be written, “Here lies one whose name was writ on water.” Only a century or so after his death was he discovered and proclaimed a great poet. One creates art and sends it blindly into the world. Still, it would be nice to know it hit its mark. Unlike Keats, Dickens was a roaring success with his first effort and never lost his edge. Still, there is a quality in Keats that Dickens never touches.
Ultimately, I leave the last word to Eagles co-founder and drummer, Don Henley: “I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free.”