Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Guest post by mystery author Verlin Darrow: "Do we all pester agents and publishers because we’ve got problems, or is it just me?"



Name: Verlin Darrow
Book Title: Blood and Wisdom
Website/Blog: www.verlindarrow.com 

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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