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like James Patterson, welcomes us with pints of mead
and promises of immortality.
It’s all an illusion, of course. There is no Valhalla.
It’s more like a dusty Barnes & Noble. And whatever
shelf space we have can dry up in an instant. As General
George S. Patton once put it, “All glory is fl eeting.”
I think my most joyful writing actually came before
I was published. Partly it was ignorance—I didn’t know
how much I didn’t know, and was just having fun put-
ting down a story, letting it fl ow.
So happy was I that I wrote in my journal that I
would always write, even if I never got published. Even
if I had to print out copies at Kinko’s and force them
on my family at Thanksgiving and on perfect strangers
outside Safeway.
Well, I did get published and it turned into a career,
but that does not mean it’s all roses, or that it might
not go away sometime. No writer is fully immune from
such thoughts.
So the question becomes what to do if it happens, if
the publishers’ doors slam?
I hope I would respond like one of my favorite writers,
Preston Sturges. He was a blazing comet of success in the
early 1940s, writing one great fi lm comedy after another.
He considered the possibility that all he had might be
taken away and said, “When the last dime is gone, I’ll sit
on the curb with a pencil and a ten-cent notebook, and
start the whole thing all over again.”
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