An Unknown Novelist

                                        

 An Unknown novelist

 

When you’re eight and your third grade

teacher tells you: “You’re a writer.”

You proudly take the mantel and

wrap yourself in its warmth,

having discovered your identity-

You know who you want to be!

 

Your third grade teacher recognizes

your talent, but is not astute enough

to inform you about the marketing piece

Totally naïve, you blissfully

fill notebooks with stories and

poems and dream of

your future  fortune and  fame

 

And why shouldn’t you?

You read constantly and your

Idol writers like Laura Ingalls’s Wilder

and Mark Twain are in print-

And even though they are long dead,

you feel like you know them

 

But you don’t, and you do not know

their publishers, either

However, you read about sending

your stories out, so you do

and the sting of rejection

shocks you!

 

Nobody warned you that there were

certain steps to becoming a published

writer, or that there was marketing

and luck involved

 

So, for years you just keep writing

because you know you’re good and

it makes you happy and

you bought that struggling artist BS

Then, you stop sending your masterpieces

out because you don’t like rejection

 

And you become a person of a certain age

and you realize that you want to see

your work in print before you leave

this earth, so you self-publish

like so many others who’ve gone

before you- Like Walt Whitman

 published “Leaves of Grass”

 

Finally, you remember, Walt travelled

far and wee, reading his poems to

whoever would listen and guess what—

That was the marketing piece

you missed in the first place!

 

So, there you are and here am I

Get it out there, oldster,

before you die!

 

 

Found on yellow note paper amongst a plethora of

Unrelated papers…