"No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work."
-- Mark Twain
A fog lies before me. I've been climbing for many years now. I thought I had reached the top upon completing my first novel - a mistake I'm sure many authors have made. Every writer falls for the false metaphor. We like metaphors. We're suckers for them. When we find them we pounce like house cats. Many are false; dangled before us by some unseen purveyor testing our tenacity to tackle and explore their innards. From these false metaphors, we find only stuffing. When we are kittens, we rifle through the stuffing intent on finding the meat. When none is found, we admit defeat but are optimistic about our next encounter.
Sometimes the unseen purveyor infects the metaphor with a dose of authornip - an intoxicating substance which anesthetizes us to the reality that the metaphor is just a stuffed toy. It dulls our senses and in doing so, propels us to further explore its nutritionless cotton fibers. We labor only to return to it in the light of sobriety revealing the emptiness to which we had dedicated so much effort. Here, a choice is faced: To give up and assume all metaphors to be false and let them wash over our now-willful blindess, or to keep at it with the idiotic hope that some day we'll find a real one to nourish our curiosity and bring us comfort in the darkness we insist on exploring. I count myself among this demographic of fools.
Many of us think of metaphors as small things...but they are not. Every story that has ever been told or written is ONE metaphor. Sure it may consist of several smaller ones - but all of those smaller ones add up to one large one. Many make the mistake of hoping for the revelation of a metaphor. The dedicated author hunts for them. The experienced author comes to know the good ones from the bad. The accomplished author has caught at least one. The successful author has caught one large enough to share with friends and family. The commercially successful author catches one large enough to share with strangers.
Many of us confuse plain success with the potential for commercial success. To us, we equate finishing our first novel with climbing a mountain. We get to the top, we set up camp, we rest, and we bask in the ether of our accomplishment. But when the fog clears, we see that we still have to get down. Getting to the top was only half the journey.
I had considered beginning this maiden post with a quote from famed Everest conquistador, Sir Edmund Hillary, which can be paraphrased thusly: It's less important to reach the top than it is to get down again. While there is a certain wisdom in this, it's rather rude to discount poor Sir George Mallory. We'll never know who first made it to the top of Everest. Did Mallory meet his end before or after reaching to top? And if after, was he foolish or just unlucky? Does Hillary deserve recognition as the first if only fortune separates his success from Mallory's failure?
Surely not...but let's face facts: Only the fortunate survive. And fortune must be met halfway by diligence. My novel is entitled Love in the Age of Dark Energy Accelerated Expansion. That's the metaphor I climbed and - so far - only my friends and family care. I've sent out nearly fifty queries to literary agents and the only responses received thus far have been rejections. But like I said, I count myself among the demographic of hopeful fools. Instead I chose the leading quote attributed to Mark Twain by his daughter, Clara. It consecrates my hope with the solace that commercial success just depends on finding the right stranger.
