Johnny Carson to Art Garfunkel, circa 1981: “What would it take for you to work with Paul Simon again?”

Art Garfunkel: [thinks for a moment] “Hmmm. Yaknow… All it would probably take is a deep and abiding need for more pain in my life.”

It’s no secret that I’ve been hobbling along in a major crisis of faith for a long time. Long time.

I’ve been public in saying that Selfie is my eighth novel and I would pitch Selfie to the 142^nd agent repping YA. If it went nowhere, I was hanging up my spurs. It just isn’t worth losing five months of writing and editing hours for no reason other than some deep and abiding need for more pain in my life.

Mixing my visceral revulsion for rejection with the hobby of writing makes about as much sense as a hemophiliac janitor working in a glass factory. It’s a bad mix.

I’ve kept a lot recent query drama out of the blog for reasons that will be forthcoming in a later post. Suffice to say, I’m hurtin’ at the moment. There were a series of teetering close calls that just wouldn’t tip my way. I’m heartsick. More on that subject in the coming weeks.

Again, an inability to handle rejection does not pair well with either white wine or Shawn’s twenty-year quest for self-validation through publishing. Two percent of authors seeking an agent will find representation. One fourth of those who sign with an agent will see their manuscript published. Seeing your name on an outward spine in Barnes and Noble is a moonshot. Long, long, long goddamn odds.

Back in my blathering post about God and faith, The Quantum Deity, I wrote that our predisposition toward a belief in God can be quantified by the answer to a single question: “How many coincidences can you string together before they stop being coincidences?”

Crimeny, I’ve been peppered under a barrage of “Don’t quit, keep going!” Triple-A fire lately. Here I am, gathering up my unopened beer and looking for my coat as I hug my goodbyes to the hosts at this party for publishing wannabes and…

Gah.

I log on to Twitter for the first time in forever and Demian Farnworth has a link to this article by Jane Friedman: You Hate Your Writing? That’s a Good Sign!  For you non-link-clickers, Ms. Friedman’s thesis is: “Your crisis of faith is an indicator that you are about to break through. Keep going!”

Ms. Friedman crosslinks to Ira Glass’s Storytelling Tips on YouTube.  There are four short parts to Ira Glass’s series. Four vignettes of approximately five minutes each. By far, Part Three has the most views. What is Ira’s lesson Part Three?  “Don’t give up. Don’t quit. Keep making crap until you break through.”

Sigh.

While cleaning out my Father-in-Law’s moving mess this past weekend, My Beautiful Wife was tossing old  newspapers into a burn barrel. Her eyes fell on a USAToday interview with Joe Hill about his crisis of confidence in his writing. MBW knew I was a ersatz fan of Joe Hill and kept that article for me to read. I was slow to get around to reading it, but when I finally did, it was a punch in the gut.

In response (I think) to my whining on Facebook about my intentions of turning into Quinton Quitter McQuitterson if Selfie didn’t break through, David Lucas, President of St. Louis Writer’s Guild followed my post with his own saying (and I’m paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to look it up), “I can’t quit writing. It’s what I do. It’s who I am. I can’t not write.”

I don’t know if that post was directed at me personally or not. In my world it’s all about me, so I’m going to pretend it was.

Of course David is right. Of course I am full of shit. I can’t not write any more than I could make the decision not to eat ever again. Of course I will whine and stamp my feet like a four-year-old and pout and rail against the gatekeeper agents and the unfairness of it all. Of course I will throw the most elaborate of that which my wife has come to call “A Scottish Fit.” I will spit venom. I will blame everybody but including myself.

And then I’ll open my USB drive and create another folder and start typing another short story that will become a novella that becomes a novel. Yes, I will write. I can’t stop it. I’m already 18,000 words into a new novella/novel.

But… I don’t think that I’m going to walk through the rejection gauntlet of representation and Big Twelve publishing houses again. Maybe it’s time to just package my wannabe crap gems up into tightly edited Self-Pub packages, fold them into paper airplanes, and one-by-one sail them out into the Grand Abyss that is Amazon digital. People will find them or they won’t.

I think I could be good with that. I really do. After a lot of frustration, I’m ready to find some Zen. I never wanted the money (there is no money in publishing). It was all about validation. I wrote an anonymous novel that is floating around the interwebs. Every two or three months an effusive email filled with complements and kind words shows up. Those dribs and drabs of validations mean so much to me. I think that may be all the validation I need going forward.

I don’t have the option to be Quinton Quitter McQuitterson, but perhaps it’s time to become Randall Really O’Realist.

Make a place for me at the table, Dane! The prodigal wannabe is headed your way.