This Too Shall Pass

Every week for the last few months I have wanted to start my blog post with “What a week!” or something similar, and the world continues to become increasingly disjointed. I feel as though reality is passing away, and I am living in Seinfeld’s Bizarro World! (For those of you not familiar with the classic Seinfeld series, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld wrote an episode where everything was reversed. It was based on the concept of Bizarro World from DC Comics. In the Seinfeld episode George starts to tell the truth about his unemployment and his life as a thirty-something, living with his parents, and instead of rejecting him, women are intrigued! His former bad luck in the universe gets transferred to Elaine. The lives of Jerry and Kramer are reversed.) In my Bizarro World, almost everything I have ever valued about the society I live in has been overturned and is now suspect. Compassion, empathy, and loving your neighbor are now values for “losers”.

But, as someone wise once said, “this too shall pass”. Or if not, I too shall pass, and that’s OK as well.

Writing my sequel to “Bound by an Oath” is a task that has been set aside for a while. Instead, I have been doing a lot of editing of previously written works. Two novels that I wrote in 2020 about the daily travails and joys of a female Episcopal priest living in the late 1990’s in south Florida have been edited down to one called “Laughing at the Time to Come”. Cutting back from about 150,000 words to 110,000 was quite a task, but I was ruthless, and I killed a lot of “darlings” in the process. I think the work is better for it. We shall see.

I’ve submitted "Laughing at the Time to Come" to one agent and a couple of publishers who accept unrepresented manuscripts. From past experience, that is just the start. I will need to submit the manuscript to at least a dozen more publishers before I get a bite. But then again, I am now an author of international reputation, (thanks to my two dear friends who bought my book in the UK! You know who you are!) so I might get picked up more quickly.

I’ll get back to my sequel eventually, but finding a publisher is a mammoth task and takes a lot of time and energy. You don’t get many actual letters or emails of rejection these days, just a cold, empty silence, and the gradually dawning realization that no one wants your cherished work!

The other work I polished up and sent out to some agents and publishers is a middle grade novel I wrote for my granddaughter. It was so much fun to write, and at only 25,000 words it came together quite quickly. I’ll publish that under the name A.M. Harris, since the genre is so different.  On the back burner is the middle grade novel I wrote for my elder grandson in 2021. That has been out to MANY publishers, so I have to find a new list. But, as I said, I wasn’t a published author of international reputation back then!

One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that I can withdraw into my own world at any time, take some deep breaths, and block out reality for just a little while. And in my own world, people who show compassion, empathy, and love for their neighbors are celebrated and rewarded. May it be so in the real world, one day soon.

PS The observant among you might be wondering why I have not sent my other work to the publishers of “Bound by an Oath”.   I may do so, but I am not contractually bound to them, and my experience with them has been mixed. So, we’ll see. Ideally, I’ll get an offer from a new publisher and will be able to compare that with whatever my current publisher can offer.