It’s raining heavily this morning. The gutters are overflowing and it sounds like I’m living under a waterfall. I feel hammered by the rain. I can’t focus, my current story feels overworked, and I’m tired of my characters.
I’m experiencing letdown after sending out query letters for Queen of Incense. Five days later, I’ve received one very polite rejection email, but the rest is silence.
I have to keep writing, perseverance is the bulwark against the ennui and depression that follows the completion of a long project.
In his book, a Place in the Country, W.G. Sebold writes about “…the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing.”
But, here’s the payoff: “…the hapless writers trapped in their web of words sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide.”
I slog, I plod, I push my novels uphill, and sometimes I reach a peak where the story flows around me with unforced grace and clarity. Those moments are the reward that turn the struggle into achievement.
Signe Kopps 