ARE WE KIDDING OURSELVES?

The light of my writing is my heart. I give it freely.

Publishing is a business. We are writers, basically creative souls with little experience in the world of contracts and predators wearing business suits.

Reading for pleasure is becoming a lost art in a video game/TV world.

Publishers are downsizing.

The surviving editors are gun-shy of taking chances.

Purchasing agents for said publishers want a guarantee-return for their advances.

Ebooks are illusionary. Three hundred dollars is a lot to spend for a devise that gives you teeny-tiny books with no color and few graphics with less illustrations.

The odds of any of us getting an agent are atrocious :

.04%

And when you do, you will have no say over the all-important title and cover art. There is the horror story of Allison, a client of sage agent Rachelle Gardner (who, by the way, will not even look at queries for the 1st quarter of 2011) :

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2011/01/when-publishing-dreams-become-nightmare.html

Many literary agents are so fearful of offending the all-important publishers, who are the source of their livelihood, that they will not challenge outrageous behavior on the part of said publishers.

And no, we are not the source of the agents' livelihoods. Would-be authors are a penny a dozen. Publishers who are still open to looking at unpublished authors on the other hand are getting fewer and fewer.

Ebooks are an option, of course. But with limitations. Go to Raquel Byrnes excellent post to see what they are :

http://nitewriter6.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html

And read what her agent says about the drawbacks of Kindle here :

http://cowboymusing.blogspot.com/2011/01/books-published-on-kindle.html

So are we kidding ourselves?

Why do we write?

I write because I enjoy the art of crafting a suspenseful, lyrical, fun read. If I ever get published that will just be the icing on the cake. But even I get weary of the sound of one hand clapping that I receive from queried agents. How about you?
***

TO THOSE OF US NEVER TO BE PUBLISHED____EMILY DICKINSON, GHOST, HERE_GHOST OF A CHANCE Interlude

{"Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man."

~Emily Dickinson.}


That fabulous scamp of a gentlemen, Samuel Clemens,

asked me to write in this "computer newspaper," as he calls it.

The dear somehow knew this date was important to me.


“Success is counted sweetest” was published anonymously in an anthology titled A Masque of Poets on this day in 1878,


the last of the handful of my poems published in my lifetime.


Though I remained firm in my decision that “My Barefoot-Rank is better,” this poem does reflect my continued mixed feelings about publishing:


Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.


Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory!


As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

**

I wonder, struggling souls, what would it mean to you if you were never published?


To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
***

How long would you continue to write should publication elude you? Are the words burning within you to find life on the page?


For me, I never stopped writing :


HOPE is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.

Will you stop writing if the years pass, leaving you unpublished? Why? And if you would continue, why? This tender spirit would like to know.
******