The Long Road Behind Me

I finished "The Chosen of the Light" back in May of 2008, and I never dreamed it would take this long to find a home. I say "dreamed" because that is exactly what it was. My dreams told me I would be published within a couple of months, then the checks would start rolling in, and before I knew it, the movie deal would be made and I would be able to sit back and just concentrate on my writing for the rest of my life.

What a wonderful little dream that was.

Two years later, I am no closer to finding a publisher (or an agent for that matter). I have been met with rejection at every turn. I have tried different versions of my query letters, a variation in my prologue, I even chopped my original manuscript up into three separate novels to hopefully bring the word count down to a respectable amount.

Nothing seemed to help. The rejections continued to pour in.

In my mind, that left one other detail, one last defect that might need fixing.

My writing.

Is my writing really that bad that I can't find anyone to even glance at my work? Is the story too tired, is the genre dead, or is the writing itself so mediocre that no one would dare read more than a page before throwing it down in exasperation? For the longest time now, these questions have plagued me. Because this is my first novel, I feel that a lot is riding on it, namely my future as a writer. If I can't make this piece of work succeed, then I should just give up a resign myself to some unwanted job for the rest of my life.

Or so I thought. I am looking at things a little differently lately. What changed is that I began thinking of all the books I have read in my life, especially the countless stories I read in college. How many times did I pick up a book with no inclination to read it other than to pass a class? How many times did I judge a book by its cover, or even by the first twenty pages? How many times did I fall in love with a book that others hated, or hated a book that others simply raved about?

My answers to these questions varies a lot, but ultimately, my answers made me realize that there are A LOT of stories out there, and thousands of different ways to tell those stories. There are stories that are terrible, yet they are published and they sell, and there are stories that are great, yet they are found only in college bookstores or only online for the Kindle.

I'm not saying that my novel is among the greats. I am saying that the fifty, or a hundred, or even a hundred-thousand rejections that come my way means nothing to the people who will pick up my novel and fall in love with it. My whole purpose in becoming a writer was never about raking in millions of dollars and retiring at 27 on some Hawaiian island. Since I was a kid, my purpose in writing was to simply share a story, to lend to someone else that same feeling of wonder and magic and belief, and maybe even to inspire someone much in the same way that I was inspired.

Nothing has changed now. My purpose is the same, even though it was detoured a little by my dreams. But that is all a part of the long road behind me.