How goes the book Lance?

As I sit and wait for the last few publishing companies and literary agents to reject Merciful Flush I can’t help but wonder what it was like back when you had to mail everything instead of e-mail it. Imagine mailing in a manuscript and then waiting weeks and months to hear back. These days I can throw it on as an attachment, bung it off with a quick click and typically be rejected by the time the dinner bell tolls.

Progress.

Now some of you might think I would be distressed by the fact that my writing has been so roundly rebuffed at every turn but obviously you’re new to this game. What kind of heroic story starts off with the hero in question getting welcomed into the fold right off the bat? You have to accumulate rejection from every part of the globe before you can persevere and pop through at the other end of the tunnel no worse for wear. This new technology makes everything go quicker so although my book has only been out a month I’ve gotten my mitts on the kind of rejection that it takes some writers years to pile up! I can say without fear of being corrected that in some circles my name is disparaged with the same bile and disregarded with the same wave of the hand and curl of the lip as some of the least successful authors ever to grace the page.

In only a month mind you. I’m trying not to get a big head.

Now what can the prescription possibly be to put my writing career on the fast track to fame and fortune? Listen to the feedback and make the necessary improvements in my craft? Take more time in writing, paying special attention to spelling and grammar? Explore other more interesting sources of inspiration before beginning a new story?

Now you’re talking complete foolishness and when I enlighten you as to the plan I think you’ll see where your thinking went astray.

The answer, of course,  is  more  of  the  same!
That’s right, just keeping cranking out this stupid shit. I’m already 2/3rds finished with the next book and I’ll be damned if I’ll change a note. If something is broken it’s all well and good to fix it but there is another option. Just find someone to buy it broken. Far less work. Especially with today’s technology. I’m going to roll out of bed and throw down on the computer the first dumb thing that comes into my head and there isn’t a damn thing that anyone can do about it.

Now reading this I might have gotten your hackles raised, whatever your hackles are and however you intend to go about raising them, and you might feel like reminding me that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Exactly.

All the best artists are considered mad at some point or other. Go ahead and read about one, I defy you to find a single instance where they weren’t considered a bit off and either dying of syphilis or cutting off body parts and sending them to loved ones. Just goes with the territory.

You see, I know something you don’t. Heady stuff actually, the kind of stuff that makes all this rejection and indifference easier to take.

In 100 years my writing is going to be considered brilliant.

Really.

Right now it’s pearls before swine but in the future, long after you and I have shuffled off to Buffalo, it’s going to get ladled out at Universities and the name of Lance Manion will be tossed around in the same heaving breaths as Shakespeare and Hemingway. That’s right, long after all the current stable of NY Times Best Sellers have been long forgotten the masses will be still eating up the stuff I was thinking as I climbed out of bed and reminded myself a blog was due in 20 minutes. With a spoon.

Makes you look at me a bit differently doesn’t it. I know it does me. Sometimes I even catch a little blush on my cheek as I’m shaving.

I’m sure even as I type this my mailbox is filling up with publishers trying to get in on the stampede of apathy and make sure to count themselves as fully outside the Manion camp. It’s sort of like the chicken and the egg, publishers won’t take your work seriously until you have an agent and you can’t get an agent unless you’ve written something that somebody might want to read. A vicious little circle-ish thing.

In the future circle-ish will be a commonplace word… at least in the cool circles-ish.