I'm still taken aback when people tell me the book is depressing, but I've come to accept that that is the book I wrote and have to live it. But many, like my agent and editor, see the humor, and the humanity. I take solace from comments likening me to a later day Dante offering a tour to a later day hell in a style that combines Marcus Aurelius and Jerry Seinfeld. We writers live for those types of reactions even though they won't pay us to live.
Without humility, I like to say that if Mark Twain had worked in a nursing home, this is the book he might have written.
How you readers out there will respond, remains an imponderable. Given the economy, I'll have that rationalization if my book tanks. But I remain cautiously optimistic. Against my nature, I pretend I'm a pessimist, because optimists are always disappointed, while pessimists are sometimes pleasantly surprised.
So am I a later bloomer? Only in the sense that I am publishing later in life. To be blunt, I don't think someone could bloom into a new, artistic profession, if the raw material isn't there. But that would be true at any age.
I plan to keep my hand in as a psychologist, and one of the advantages of the profession is that as long as you can sit upright in a chair and be sensible you can keep working at it. Another advantage is that you can work a reduced schedule--as I have been--leaving time for writing. But I hope to go on and spend my dotage as an author--fantasizing an obituary, if one is written, about my transformation from psychologist to writer.
More than three-hundred years ago, my hero, Thomas Hobbes, wrote that life is "nasty, brutish, and short." My book wonders whether life is still nasty and brutish--only longer. As a later bloomer, I may lack the time to wonder indefinitely, but I surely won't lack the material.
In one of my favorite movie scenes--a dinner party--the host cuts some flowers and places them in a vase without water.
"Why no water?" asks a guest.
"It only prolongs their agony," responds the host.
Me? Despite this. I hope to keep on blooming.
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More on Rejection
Given that we writers are obsessed with rejection, here are some sites that underline this preoccupation--sort of like the car crash where you don't want to look but can't help it.
The Rejector--"I don't hate you. I just hate your query letter."--is a blog written by an assistant to a literary agent. Her role is to reject 95 percent of submissions, placing the remainder on her boss's desk, who goes on to reject more than 95 percent of those.
Literary Rejections on Display is a blog by a published, award winning author who, like the rest of us, experiences many more rejections than acceptances. The author's own multitude of rejections are on display, along with those submitted by readers.
Here's a link to the Wall of Rejection of author-blogger Stephen Hines. He sleeps under a wall papered with his many rejections.
Finally, there's The Rejection Show, originated by Jon Friedman, which is a theater piece where writers, musicians, comedians, and other artist-types can present their rejected material. Many of the rejected participants are otherwise quite successful. The show became so successful that they reached a tertiary level of rejection, and displayed material rejected by the rejection show. And in an archetypal example of making lemonade out of lemons, there is the just published, Rejected: Tales of the Failed, Dumped, and Canceled. (When you buy my book, you have my permission to get this one too.)
