Name: Verlin Darrow
Book Title: Blood
and Wisdom
Do we all
pester agents and publishers because we’ve got problems, or is it just me?
At first, I was desperate for
meaning. That’s what got me started. I began writing books in a campground
outside Naples, Italy when I was nineteen. My waiting-for-my-potential-to-manifest
girlfriend and I were trapped by a solid week of rain in an awful campground
just outside the city limits. Whores burned tires on the contiguous sidewalk to
attract customers. I was cranky, bored out of my mind and broke.
As a depressed young adult, fraught
with existential angst and across the board over-thinking, I was never
satisfied by life. I wasn’t in direct contact with the world, so I couldn’t be
fed by it. When I created a manuscript, I introduced something into my
experience that mattered to me—a new element that penetrated the layers of
insulation I’d gathered around myself to stay safe.
However therapeutic, this era of
writing was marked by a distinct lack of expertise. When I eventually began to
build a skill set, I added in another motive—making money without having to
work a regular job—you know, getting all sweaty, being bossed around, and
having to keep regular hours. Not surprisingly, I failed to manage anything
close to making a living writing.
Maybe, I thought, I could at least
get validation that all my time and effort had produced something of value to
someone else. I worked hard at ignoring
all expert advice, classes, etc and simply churned out manuscripts, eventually
learning a bit of craft. Well, my mom liked the result. Somehow, that didn’t do
the trick. A life of enticing agents and publishers was born.
It’s like a weird, unpleasant hobby,
really. I queried over five hundred agents for one novel. Talk about a
stubbornly held (grandiose) notion. Even that didn’t convince me I should move
on. Why would it? My quest for recognition by a professional overrode all
common sense. Really, the most challenging writing task in that era was keeping
the neediness out of my submissions.
I let go of writing while
I focused on avoiding work and trying to convince the world that it was fine if
my unrealized potential remained unrealized. Then I became a psychotherapist so
I could sit in a chair and talk/listen for a living. It turned out there was a
bit more to it, but at least I didn’t have to deal with yet another rejection
from someone one-up in publishing.
I came back to writing. I
guess I needed someone to lash me to a mast (and shipmates were scarce.) But
now I was older, more emotionally mature, and more willing to pay a few dues to
gather skills.
Nonetheless, like a lot of
writers, I still fought reality and reality won (sung to the tune of I Fought the Law and the Law Won.) I remained
opinionated about my books in a manner that wasn’t always supported by hard
evidence. Or soft evidence, for that matter.
Eventually, I had something to say,
and the tools to say it. Then the early motives dropped away and Blood and
Wisdom fell out of me. Where did all this attrition leave me? Back to
square one. “Please represent me,” “please publish my book.”
Is the process less tortuous now?
Absolutely. Getting published is a wonderful thing.
However lowly, crazy, or exemplary
our motives might be, here’s my advice. Stick to it, regardless. Why not? Have
you got something more meaningful to do? I don’t.
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