DJR (1/12/07): “I’m afraid to fail, don’t handle rejection well, and am not willing to part with many creature comforts to see where it all might lead.”

DJR (12/15/06): “I am going to begin ruthless enforcement of [me] as punchline phenomenon… Ahhh, I’m just fucking with you. Mock away. Do you fuckers think I would speak, write, and act like this if I gave a tenth of a fuck what people were going to say? I mean, seriously.”

it’s at this point my inner hippiness leaves me. There is plenty of evidence to suggest the folks making a living in our fields of interest are not necessarily the best or the hardest working. Talent and determination may be required to succeed, but they alone don’t guarantee the success. It’s at that point that it all starts to feel akin to playing the lottery and other than one day in August six years ago, I don’t feel all that lucky.

And then there is the part of all of this that’s a copout. I’m afraid to fail, don’t handle rejection well, and am not willing to part with many creature comforts to see where it all might lead.

Seriously shutting up now.

here i will admit that what holds me back is the fear of failure…at a macro level. meaning that i’m not particularly afraid of a rejection letter, or even handful of them. what truly scares the crap outa me is the idea that i dive into this full on, work on it for years….and nothing happens.

i suppose i should just tell my inner neurotic to shut the heck up and get down to business.

You see, I am a creative psychotic. I am crazy enough to truly believe that I am a 2-percenter, more so than I believe in a higher power or the integrity of the country in which I live. If I just have that focus of a goal, then I will stop at nothing to get it. Thus, you see why I have to decide on one thing… and then it’s all balls to the wall from there.

I think you two both sell yourself short. Do you think any of the 2-percenters in each of your “dream” fields of choice knew that they were such before they were able to find success in it? Nope, they were working stiffs like you and me… just trying to put it all together.

Believe me, I get the idea of wanting to do something you love and making a living at it. I guess it comes down to how high a priority profit is in your creative endeavors and we all judge that differently. I gave up on being profitable in my pursuits before I even tried because I assumed I wasn’t in that 2 percent. Now the only compensation I get from this is the joy of doing it. Some days, that doesn’t “pay the bills.” Other days, you say I ain’t worth a dollar but I feel like a million bucks.

I keep a manila folder of rejection letters near my desk. They are like jokes now to read, even if they hurt when I first got them. The point: you may fling queries into the wind, but should you by chance encounter the type of wind that can throw a bamboo shoot through a 2×4, then your future could be set.

You never know until you try.

ya, ya…write that book proposal. ya, fling query letters to the wind. nice ideas, unforuntately still just concepts in my addled head.