Crossroads

There comes a time for writers like me (unprofessional, inexperienced and only mildly talented) to choose a path. One leads down a long brambly dirt road where cars pass you at 90 miles per hour and leave you covered in dust. Ideas are as rare as black republicans and tend to make about as much sense. Your only reading along this path is a Uwe Boll book about a movie about a game he once played. Written in crayon. With no pictures. This path leads to utter disappointment, despair and complete agony.

The second path leads to your demise.

The choice is easy, right? Not so fast. Before you get gunghoe about jumping in front of the next bus, you should know that this was all just a metaphor. Yes, it seemed real, what with all the vaseline on the lens. It was, in fact, describing a common writing issue. Whether or not to abandon a novel.

So you have your Magnum Opus, all 450 thousand pages, sitting in front of you on cinder blocks because it broke your coffee table. You've been rejected by well over a million agents. You have submitted to everyone you can imagine would ever handle a novel in any way and all you received for your troubles was hate mail and restraining orders. Maybe a book about a park ranger struggling to overcome his fear of squirrels isn't worth the trouble, right?

I suppose you could consider my predicament indicative of the fictional mental struggle posted above. My book is not nearly so clever, though I may now have to write such a book (Squirrelocalypse, I'll call it), but the struggle is the same. I've unleashed my mental Indiana Jones into the Lost Temple of Literary Cliches, but he comes back with cuts and bruises and stomps on his hat. So what now?

Only hind sight will ever reveal the best path. There is no surety in our world, only discovered perspective. So I'll make my descision, right or wrong, based on complete stubborn bullheadedness. In a few years I'll look back, tilt my head slightly to the left and say, "Ah, crap."