WRITING PAINS(Humorosity #48)By Honeydew Zubari7 by Honeydew Zubari

WRITING PAINS

(Humorosity #48)

By Honeydew Zubari

Okay, so you wanna be an author. To see your name under a title in some magazine or e-zine somewhere. Or on the cover of a book. I have some advice for you, learned after a lifetime of toiling away as a wordsmith.

Forget about it! Find a more gratifying hobby like breeding racing snails. Becoming a successful author is easy as growing a third arm from your forehead. On a daily basis I tear my hair out, stomp around the room, cuss out the computer and throw slippers at Doofus the cat. (I don’t want to hurt the little guy, even if his mere presence is enough to scare away the muse.)

And that’s just in the first fifteen minutes.

“So why do it?” I hear you wonder aloud, thus the use of quotation marks.

Well…let me tell you a story. Once I had a mother who was a teacher before I was born. About 2 ½ to 3 years after my springing into the world, Mom got bored and taught me to read. Then she got border and taught me to write. So, the first thing I did was write a story; what else did I know? Dad never took me in the garage to play with the car engine. My first story was about a dog who chased a squirrel until they decided to become friends. I even illustrated it, although the squirrel looks more like an elephant who lives too close to a nuclear waste plant. That’s why I’m not an artist right now.

Anyway, since the tender age of however-old-I-was, I’ve been writing. Everything. When I have writer’s block, I try to remember song lyrics, just to have my fingers moving on the keyboard. Or I make lists. My favorite, and longest, is the list of all the embarrassing things I’ve ever seen people do. Snicker. I wouldn’t write my own embarrassing things down; imagine how humiliating it would be to have someone read it. Even if the reading occurred after my death, I’d cringe all the way from heaven. And yes, I’m going there, Ian.

Sorry.

Um, my point is what? Oh! Here’s what to expect if you write, say, a short story. A euphoric jotting down of the story. You’re brilliant, it’s brilliant. Editors will line up, checks in hand, begging you for it. Overnight your name will become synonymous with Hemingway. No…the world won’t even remember how to spell “Hemingway” after they finish reading your story.

Then comes the first rewrite. Well, maybe this isn’t all that great…yet. A couple of tweaks and you’re brilliant again.

Now, you put the manuscript aside for a couple of days and come back to it with a fresh perspective. OMG! Who messed with your story while you weren’t looking? What a nightmare, what a disaster of volcanic proportions! But you are the confident sort and you tweak it here and there, then send it out and sit back to wait for fame to come flying through the window, as if attached to a brick.

The only thing that comes flying is a rejection letter to your inbox. Now here we separate the mice from the potentially obnoxious. The mice give up immediately and go hunting for snails. The potentially obnoxious set their jaws and send the story out five more times. (Author intrusion: The change from potentially into straight-up obnoxious happens when the p. o. person sends submissions to the same editor more than once. Please don’t do this, or she’ll have to visit you while you’re sleeping and cover you with paper cuts.) And if you receive five rejections, you take them in stride, rewrite the story and send it out five more times.

On and on the cycle goes, until you either give up or get that story published. And if it does get accepted, that’s a day you’ll remember forever with a little glow of pride. Too bad you’ll come across the story tucked away in a computer file years later and read it, and immediately crawl under the rug from utter and total embarrassment. How could you write anything so beginnerish and horrible? But look how far you’ve come since then!

That’s the secret of writing. No matter how much you do it, you’ll always be better a couple years from now, so you can never stop. If you aren’t willing to commit for the rest of your life, then I have a snail infestation in my lettuce patch. They look like winners too, big ‘round as quarters.