Publishing, Part I

I mailed my first book contract today.  It took all of 30 seconds and a few dollars for the transaction to take place.  I watched the postal worker grab the manilla envelope like it was "just any other parcel" and began to put it in the basket with all the other unimportant mail, and I just had to stop her.  She looked sideways at me when I asked her to put it back down on the counter so that I could make the moment last longer.  For good measure I took out my camera phone and and took a picture.  This really made the lady nervous, so to put her at ease, I said, "This is a watershed moment in my life."  And when she didn't respond, I muddied it even further.  "My life is about to change with this package."  When she was sure I wasn't going to say anymore, she snuck my contract into her bin and I walked out, surprised that theme music wasn't playing in the background, cause it sure seemed like a magical movie moment to me.  To quit at these words would be to clarify it for you as much as I did for the lady who obviously thought I was one weird duck.  Let me clarify things: this was the final step in a long, arduous journey that started in 1997.

It was a week before Christmas and a few college buddies and I had free access to a timeshare in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.  I was about to embark on my first fly-fishing trip ever, but secretly I had another plan.  I had spent most of that fall in a coffee shop a block north of Alva, penning what I deemed to be a future world-famous sonnet sequence about a cottonwood tree.  Yeah, riviting stuff.  That was when a professor of mine told me that poetry doesn't sell.  He told me that if I want to make the big bucks, I had better pen the "Great American Novel," whatever that was.  So when we got to Pagosa, I planned to fish the San Juan River by day and pen this novel by night.  By the time I left Pagosa five days later, I had a paragraph to my name.  Quite humble beginnings.

Well, that paragraph turned into a chapter, and that chapter turned into two chapters, and before I knew it, I had 100 pages...FOUR YEARS LATER!  The fact that I was typing it on a 1991 Macintosh should have clued me in to the fact that things were going to go wrong.  Then one night, the computer died.  Picture toast in a toaster.  That puppy was smoking before I got it unplugged!  I quickly pulled out the floppy disk (remember those?) and saw the metal cover rip right off!  I got absolutely no sleep that night.

That next day I took a personal day and called in a favor from a teacher who was more computer-saavy than I.  She called in a favor to a former student who in turn took all his fancy equipment and toyed around with my disk, handling it as a paleoentologist would handle a raptor tooth.  In six nervous hours he was to recover most of the document.  Every twelth page was filled with asteriks instead of words.  I still praised God.

One year and a new computer later, I finished my first novel, and the angels sang, and golden light shined forth from my big computer screen.  I just knew I was on the way to stardom.  I had no idea whatsoever that it would be ten long years before I was going to be able to make a sale. 

I'll be getting to that shortly...