My Pipe Dream

I have a pipe dream.  And I was so close to it this week that I could almost taste it.  Which leads me to the question:  Is it better to come that close and have it slip away, or not to come close at all?

My pipe dream is my mystery novel.  I wrote a book, a mystery.  I finished last spring, and I've just started to put the feelers out for an agent.  I started with a couple of inquiries to New York (over the summer, while we were stateside.)  But upon returning to Belgium in the fall, it made more sense to focus on the agencies in London.   After all, I'm living on this side of the ocean, London is a cheaper postage stamp.

I sent off a couple of inquiries in September.  September 9, to be exact.  A couple of weeks ago, I got a really good rejection letter.  (Yes, there is such a thing as a good reject.)  The email said that the plot was strong, but the writing was weak.  That made me laugh, because the first good rejection letter said that the writing was really strong but he didn't care for the plot.  All in all, a perfect example of  the subjectivity of this whole process.  I feel as though I may as well point an arrow into a dark room and hope that I hit something eventually, somewhere resembling a target.

In any event, it inspired me to send off another batch of query letters.  This time, the date (coincidentally) was October 10.  And thus a superstitious process was born.  You can bet I'll be sending my next round of queries out on November 11.

October 10 was a Monday.  On Thursday (one week ago) I got an email.  From an agency requesting a chance to read the full manuscript and they wanted a summary of the next book as well.  This agency was not just any agency.  This agency, was Harry Potter's people.  After dancing around the kitchen and basking in the glow for an evening, I sent them off an email with the several requested attachments, one of them very large.

I've been waiting, holding my breath for a week.  I've tried not to let my overactive imagination think ahead to how my life would change if this pipe dream became a reality.  I tried not to imagine what it would look like, feel like to see my name in print on the cover of a book that I wrote.  It was hard.  There's that aforementioned overactive imagination at play.  I told myself that even if nothing came of it, it was still really cool that the Harry Potter people wanted to read it.

So now that nothing has come of it, it's hard to remember that part.  It was a good rejection letter, the best yet, actually.  But at the moment, the only words that are registering are "....but we don't wish to represent you."

Sigh.  The disappointment weighs heavy.  And yes, even a tear or two has welled.

At the end of the day, I have to go back to my personal writing mantra.  I don't write to get published, I write so that I don't explode.  I write because for me, it is like breathing.  If I don't do it, something in my life is missing.  If someone somewhere along the way wants to read it, then I guess that's just a bonus.

So to answer the posed question, it's better to come close of course.  Even though it has slipped away, eventually (when I'm done feeling sorry for myself) I will be able to remind myself that if I could get this close once, maybe the next time will be a bullseye.

An Illegal Alien...Temporarily

Thanks to a snafu with the work permit paperwork, for a week or two, I was an illegal immigrant.  Interesting enough, they renewed the children's permits without realizing it, so they were fine.  John had a trip to the U.S. so he expedited his paperwork to make sure he'd be able to re-enter the country after his departure.  That just left me.  

Here in Belgium, they often have random checkpoints.  Police blockades.  These occur at various hours of the day (not just at night like a DWI checkpoint.)  It's my understanding that these are employed to look for illegal immigrants, driving under the influence, and other various infractions.  

This is another one of those times where I've noticed the absence of the constitutional protections offered in the U.S. that I would normally take for granted.  There is no probable cause requirement here.  

I have never been stopped at one of these checkpoints, although I've seen them often enough.  I figured that it would be just my luck that I would get stopped at one of these while I was carrying an expired i.d.  It didn't happen.

I did however, happen upon a checkpoint a week or so after I had my shiny new i.d. card in hand.  In the past, any time I've gone by one of these checkpoints, it so happens that the police officers are all busy with other cars and I zip on by without being stopped (and usually avoiding eye contact with the officer in charge of pointing the cars over to the side of the road.)  This time, I looked the officer right in the eye as I slowed down in accordance with the orange cones he was using to filter cars past one at a time.  I practically dared him to pull me over.  (Might as well show that shiny new card to someone, right?  And my curiosity about what happens at these random stops has been peaked.)  He peered into my car and waved me by. I was a little disappointed.

It made me think that racial profiling might be standard practice here as well.   If my skin had been a different color, I wonder if my day would have been interrupted with an impromptu police interview?