Downpour

Nearly every morning of every day, before the sun comes up in the east kitchen window, before the coffee machine is done spitting and sputtering, long before I get dressed, I am at my ibook, pitching, querying, hustling.

I email editors and agents with painstakingly crafted queries. I send essays around to anyone who publishes them. I solicit advice from people with connections and experience. I stand at the edge of a chasm flinging bits of my soul into the void, and listen with breath held, for a plink.

The plinks are as rare as desert rain.

I tell myself to just keep going. Not to take it personally. But after a while, the silence starts to whisper things to you. Things like, not good enough. Things like, who cares?

Did you think you were somebody? Oh, my dear.

Most days I can shout down those voices. Oh yeah? I list my publication credits, my loyal blog readers and wonderful commenters. I point to all the people in the world getting paid to write their stories, from the barely literate to the sublimely talented. Somewhere, in between, there's got to be a place for me. Why not? Why not me?

Pffffffttttt, I say.

Lately, I'm finding it hard to stay defiant, not to take it to heart. For a cluster of reasons, personal and circumstantial, my tank has gotten very low. There isn't enough gas in it to muster a pffffft.

In addition to trying to get more of my essays published, I've begun a memoir of my relationship with my father and my place in his world. It's about growing up as a girl in the midst of male artists. About casting off their projections and escaping the seductive role of muse, to claim my own voice. That surely has something to do with my feeling so vulnerable and desperate. I read once that every writer has a book they are afraid to write, and this is mine.

It's deep mining, and I don't know that I can do it in between work and kids, the way I hammer out the essays. I'm afraid that our financial circumstances will soon dictate that I get a full-time, outside job, and that writing will have to be relegated to hobby. I could probably continue to blog from the sidelines, and I personally know people who have written novels in the hour between waking and driving to the office. But I'm not one of them. It's not just about time; it's about interior space.

You know that commercial for Disney World where the kids wake up in their beds, hearing the approaching hoofbeats of Cinderella's glass coach? I saw it last night, and tears welled up in my eyes. Because I want so much to believe that my dreams are also speeding toward me, through this dark night. And even as I confess this to you, I'm afraid for you to see the childish nature of my fantasy, my wild hope that someone will see something worth nurturing here, and give me all the time, money and guidance I need to bring my ragged and homeless stories to the ball.