bohemian season: Raise a glass to improbabilities

I have heard many stories of successful writers who collected their rejection letters. Piles and piles of them. In folders, framed, tacked and taped on bulletin boards, mementos of the humiliation they had to wade through, defiantly, always believing someday they would get where they intended to go. It's become a mythology. It's a story meant to show the naive writer what daunting task awaits. It's a story meant to scare the waverers away.

Instead of rejection letters, I suppose I could collect negative blog posts I've read about the sorry state of the publishing industry and the horrible odds of writers having any form of success - monetary or otherwise. For all the giddy PR about the one-in-a-million Amanda Hocking, most of what I see are gloom-ridden posts about agents drowning in query letters, publishers laying off passionate people and bookstores going bankrupt.

It's all very sad if you love books and if you are a writer with any sort of logic chip, this would be enough to make you pack your suitcase of dreams and run away to brighter shores.

But if we all did that, wouldn't all the words and stories go away? Isn't it up to all of us to hopefully write on? And from that, some stars will eventually shine. Maybe mine. Maybe not mine. Who knows? But I do know that for now I am sticking my fingers in my ears and writing on.

Success as a writer might be improbable. But at present I'm just foolish enough to keep dreaming and trying.

So raise a glass to improbabilities, my friends.