Ted couldn’t imagine being told 121 times that his book was no good and continuing to seek out someone who felt otherwise. He didn’t want to do it. He couldn’t go through it again. He didn’t know how Robert Pirsig, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling and others could just keep submitting their work, rejection after rejection. The system was broken. The same thing applied in music. Ted wondered how it felt to be the man who turned down The Beatles. Or one of the 33 people who told Jack Canfield that “Chicken Soup for the Soul” would never sell, before it sold over 80 million copies.
Ted tried to tell himself that maybe it was just a matter of time. Maybe this time, someone would realize that his story was good and people would at least like it, if not love it. Maybe he wouldn’t be rejected this time. He tried to convince himself to go out and buy some envelopes and stamps and go through the motions once more of submitting to the all of the publishers he had addresses for. But he couldn’t do it.
He imagined yet another editor reading the first paragraph of his unsolicited manuscript, tossing his ten months of mental labor into the trash, printing off a pre-written rejection letter and giving it to his secretary to place in the next day’s outgoing mail. He couldn’t go through it all again. Each rejection letter was an invalidation of his ability as a writer.
He started to feel depressed and thought maybe he wouldn’t even bother this time. He’d just write for himself. But that didn’t make any sense. Stories were meant to be told. If he was going to just write for himself, he might as well not bother letting the stories out of his head and on to the page. He couldn’t stop writing even if he wanted to. He didn’t choose to be a writer. It’s just what he was. Ideas came to him. Characters were born in his mind, unbidden. Plots formed, tensions developed, love and betrayal happened.
A writer’s mind is like a small universe where a Big Bang happened and worlds go hurling through it, waiting to observed and communicated to others. No one chooses to have this burning passion to create characters and bring them to life just to have them float around in their minds forever. A writer writes because he’s a writer. Not because he wants to, or to make money. Whether it was a blessing or a curse, it’s what he was.
If he couldn’t stand another rejection letter, he conceded that there was one other option. He could self-publish. But then he remembered a man who lived down the street from his childhood home. He had a garage full of boxes containing copies of a book he had printed by a vanity publisher. He probably still had all of them decades later. Ted did not want to be that man. But he decided to see what his options were these several decades later.
One week later, after studying self-publishing every night at work, and reading every blog post that JA Konrath had ever written, Ted felt sufficiently knowledgeable about the process to self-publish his latest book online. He felt confident that he could have this book online and available for purchase by the end of the weekend.
By Sunday night, his book was “live” on Amazon.com, but no one in the world but him knew it was there. He didn’t know what to do next. Now he had to find a way to let people know that the book was published. It existed now and could be read anywhere in the world. It felt great not having to rely on someone employed by a publisher to allow him through the gate and become a published author.
But, he wondered, was he an author now? Did self-publishing count? At what point could he distinguish himself from someone who typed “poop” on a page and uploaded it to the internet? How could he gain recognition as a serious and talented writer when he was unknown to the world?
Would he only truly become an author once he made it onto a best-seller list? Or was he already an author because he had written several books – whether or not they were published by himself or anyone else? Ted thought about this for a while and pondered the question: what is an author?
The dictionary said he was an author because he had written books. Society would more than likely only see him as an author when they saw his books on shelves or on tables in bookstores. He could describe himself as a self-published or “indie” author, which did not have anywhere near the clout of a traditionally published author – not until a traditional publisher picked up the indie and put the publisher’s name on the book.
Ted continued thinking about what an author was and eventually concluded that an author was a storyteller, no matter how the story was told. The dictionary said that an author was the writer of a book. But what about in the time before there were books? Before there was such a thing as printing. Before there was even a form of writing by which a story could be recorded? Well, there had been storytellers long before the printed word existed.
Storytelling went back to the dawn of time. Ted snickered as it occurred to him that his craft was the true “oldest profession.” He was a modern day man engaged in a craft that boasted a legacy older than just about any other in the history of man. It was ancient, and uncommon. There were seven billion people on the planet. The percentage of them who could conceive a story idea and then have the necessary skill to put that story into words and entertain others with it was relatively small.
For the sake of the argument he was conducting with his own internal monologue, he decided to pick a practical number. If there were 100,000 authors in the entire world, that would mean that they made up only 0.00001% percent of the global population. If a million authors existed in the world, then they were still only 0.01% of all people. Ted saw clearly that he belonged to a very special and elite group of people on the planet. Not everyone could be a storyteller.
Ted didn’t know what the future held for him as far his storytelling went, but he was proud of himself for being one. It was a gift that he was born with, and through his effort and dedication, he had honed his skill and made it better and better as he aged and practiced his craft. He felt it was definitely something to be proud of.
He closed the lid of his laptop, grabbed his clipboard and keys and stepped outside into the cold, windy night to drive around the facility. It was boring, and no one ever trespassed or tried to break into the chemical plant, but that was his job so it had to be done.
He got into his security vehicle and started the engine. He thought that he should go back in and give the car time to warm up, but he decided to just brave the cold. It would take longer to warm up the car than it would take to drive around the entire property at five miles per hour.
He sat there watching his breath for a minute and was thankful for modern technology. In a few minutes the vents would begin blowing warm air into the car. He imagined a time before technology, when heaters didn’t exist. He thought all the way back to how the first people must’ve gathered around a fire to keep themselves warm. His smile was lit up by the dashboard lights. They probably had storytellers back then too.
It occurred to Ted that he was keeping the flame of creativity and entertainment alive by telling stories in modern times. His book on Amazon may not ever reach a million people. It might not ever appear on a bestseller list. But some people would read it. If it entertained those people and they had joy in their lives for some small measure of time, then he was glad to be the author who gave them that joy.
His was a special calling. He decided not to tarnish it or belittle it based on such modern measures of success as, number of units sold, or published by so-and-so, or two thumbs up by John Doe of the Daily Blab. Just being a storyteller was sufficient. The only difference it would make if a million people bought his book instead of ten people, is he’d be able to quit his job and write full-time. But then again, he laughed to himself, being a night watchman with nothing official to do for 55 minutes out of every hour, he was already getting paid to write his books.
He shifted the car into drive and slowly cruised the property, smiling and thinking about the plot of his next novel.
###
Devon’s Last Chance
Devon was trolling; just drifting along at cruising speed and taking in the scenery while keeping an eye out for particular sha
des and intensity of light. His altitude was lower than that of the average small plane, but not nearly as low as a crop-duster. The landscape looked to him as it would from a low-flying plane at night but with a layer of dark cellophane between him and the ground. He could see significant sources of light and he could make out shades of color.
The light that Devon perceived came from human energy. It was created by a sort of friction that was the by-product of a spirit dwelling in a physical body. Devon was looking for a particular kind of light; one that glowed more intensely than most and with specific color variations.
The brighter the glow, the better, because that meant the spirit had more strength or power. Devon was looking to convert a significant source of white energy to dark. Not only was this his job, but it also provided him with the energy he personally needed to sustain himself and to conduct his operations.
Sometimes, when he wanted a challenge, he would select one of the pure, white emanations and see if he could turn it dark just for fun. But this was very time consuming and required a lot of energy. When he needed a serious dark energy infusion, like now, there was no time for playing around and risking the loss of his dwindling energy reserves. He had to use his remaining energy to acquire more. If he failed and ran out of energy, he would cease to be Devon.
As he cruised, he passed over many of the typical white glows. The small, intense, pinpoint spots of pure white light came from happy children. Small, bland, weak points of grey light were from their unhappy counter-parts. Devon almost never selected a child. It was easy to turn them dark and to feed off them, but it was a waste of time and effort. Sort of like going to a restaurant and ordering a 5-hour Energy drink when what you needed was a big steak and a baked potato.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the emanations that were most challenging and yielded the largest bounties were the large, white ones infused with gold. These were happy people in true love with someone - or even worse – genuinely, happy-on-the-inside people with a compassionate love for everyone; nearly impossible to turn. Sure, you could screw things up for them, make things go badly by way of people they were connected to who had less power; but the mere act of dark interference with these special people would alert reinforcements and you could find yourself in a big, taxing battle. Lots of fun if you had a limitless supply of energy and really liked a challenge, but definitely not something to take on when you were running low and needed a good, solid conversion.
Devon was looking for something in between. Not a naturally happy child, and not a bloody do-gooder. A nice, strong, greyish-white glow with streaks of red marbling through it would be the perfect catch. He needed someone with sufficient output that they could turn bright white if things worked out for them, but who could also turn dark if things went very badly - someone teetering on the fence – ready to fall to either side. Light or Dark – depending on what happened next in life. Filled with potential for good, but so worn out from the struggle that they lacked the reserves to brave just a few more serious downturns in life. Someone who’d been pushed just a bit too far and could be convinced it’s just not worth it anymore.
People had it all wrong. They thought dark beings like Devon only fed on dark energy from hate and anger, fear and jealousy. It was true that those things gave off dark light that attracted beings like Devon; and yes, he could skim off that, others like him did just that routinely. But the actual consumption that took place (which was really an absorbing – an infusion) came from the conversion of energy. It was turning the source of the white and all of its potential for white into dark. That process was like fission taking place. Like being there when an atom splits and sucking up the resultant power and radiation. It was like eating a small sun.
If it could be said that individuals with a common goal and purpose were members of a group, whether or not they self-identified as group members, then Devon was a member of a very large group. He didn’t quite look at it that way, any more than a garden insect viewed itself as a pest. He just knew what he was and what he did, and he knew it was good and it satisfied him while serving a larger goal at the same time.
He did not have a title or position, but if he did, he might be called a Recruiter, since each time he was successful, the total number of his group increased by one. Devon would say that his job would be more accurately described as a Converter, because that’s what he really did. He converted energy, and he did so by converting its producers - people.
He was not concerned with the larger picture – such as how every successful conversion of his brought the overall goal of his “group” closer to fruition and had rippling effects which made other member’s jobs easier. He only cared about what he did and the pleasure and growth it brought him personally. He was a total freelancer. Like a sales pro who traveled the world making excellent commissions because he was great at his job, but with no interest in knowing the impact he or anyone else had on the corporate bottom line. He just did his job. Others did their jobs. And that’s the way he liked it.
One solid conversion was an operation unto itself. It required a huge investment of time and energy with little to spare for anything that didn’t contribute to the final outcome. Once his target was selected, he would be committed and focused. A good conversion required his complete immersion. He would be connected, and to an extent, vulnerable, with his own well-being at stake. The risk was great, but the reward was greater. When he waited too long between conversions, as he had now, his resources were limited and rapidly dwindling, which limited his operational capacity.
He had briefly entertained the idea of turning a few kids for a quick spike in energy, just to get started, but being supremely confident in his abilities and impatient to dive in to a human life, he dismissed that idea and increased his focus on the glowing spots below him and shifted his frequency to bring himself more in tune with the physical plane so he could get to work.
***
Lance was looking forward to a great dinner and the company of his two favorite people – Kim, his fiancé, and Tom, his best-friend. Lance turned 28 years old at 2:38pm today. He was happy with his life and knew it could only get better. He was proud of the fact that he was well on his way to becoming a successful entrepreneur at a relatively young age. His security surveillance business was finally solvent after two years of ups and downs. His engagement to Kim was definite after a few years of her not being sure of whether she even wanted to be married or not – to anyone at all. And he had the best friend he could ask for in Tom – a man he loved more than a brother and had known since grade school.
Everything in Lance’s life was going so well that it scared him a little. One of his foster-fathers often quoted David Horowitz, saying, “If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is.” Lance had always kept that in mind when considering business proposals, job offers, sale prices, and anything that warranted a closer examination to verify that it really was as good as it seemed.
But what if it was your own life that seemed too good to be true? Surely the Horowitz warning didn’t apply then, right? Lance was so completely happy and satisfied with his life as he drove down the highway he began to wonder what part of his life couldn’t be true.
He had just completed his biggest and most profitable job ever, netting him $12,000, which he should have in the bank within a week. He would have preferred the client paying him directly upon completion, but payment had to come from the corporate office in Ohio which hadn’t caught up with the modern world yet (which was why they needed Lance’s services to begin with) and was thus sending him a paper check via the United States Postal Service. That was the only downside as far as his income went. The same client had verbally contracted to have Lance implement his security solution in all forty-two of their stores, so the future looked incredibly bright as far as his income and business was concerned.
Then there was Kim. For a long time the future that he desired with her could never be counted on as a sure thing. If Lance had met
her when he was younger he was sure that he would’ve killed any chance of their relationship turning serious. But after observing and criticizing Tom’s approach with women for many years, Lance had finally decided to incorporate the one thing that Tom always did that would make practical sense for anyone – he gave Kim as much space as she wanted; possibly even more than that.
Tom was one of those guys who acted like he couldn’t care less whether a woman was interested in him or not, and consequently he had women falling all over him. Lance guessed that this had to do with the psychology of being “hard-to-get.” Since Tom didn’t seem to care about women, they were determined to make him care. Lance didn’t know if Tom was even aware of what he was doing or why it worked, or if he was actually doing this intentionally. But he did know how Tom behaved and he knew the results. Tom’s sexual promiscuity was the one thing that Lance didn’t respect about him, but when Kim indicated that she might need a break from Lance and wasn’t sure how she felt about their future together, he realized he had been too clingy and that women never said things like that to Tom. In fact, they could never get enough of him.
So he tried to act more like Tom with her – to an extent. He stopped calling and emailing her five times a day and generally only talked to her when she initiated the contact. Meanwhile, he focused on growing his business, and he got a puppy. Using Tom’s approach worked almost immediately. Since the time that Lance had stopped contacting Kim directly, he’d been in more frequent communication with her than ever. It seemed that she was now afraid of losing him and had become the pursuer.
Undermind: Nine Stories Page 15
