Rejected Writers Rendezvous!
HARK!
I hear the mad tapping of keyboards …
Anouncing the HARK Valley Rejected Writers Rendezvous group, with calls out to Arizona Writers, The Mighty Central Phoenix Writers Group, Alliance for Literary Writers, Writers Group, Writers Corner, Latinx Writers, Writers for Writers and anyone who has poured soul onto paper ... only to have some "editor" crumple up your paper/soul and shoot it into the waste paper basket of hell.
First, some “cheerful background” on the patron saint of rejected writers:
While working on his philosophy dissertation in the early 1960s, my father was teaching at Dominican College, a small, all-female Catholic school in New Orleans. My dad remembered the day a fellow teacher was walking down the hallway, booming out “Rock of Ages.” The casual bystander might have observed, “My, what a reverent young professor …”
But my father knew the campus was plagued by hypocrisies of the sisters running the show, and acknowledged the song as subtle satire on what could be called a confederacy of nunsense.
The singing professor: John Kennedy Toole.
Though they were casual friends, Toole didn’t share with my father that he was working on a novel he started while in the Army. After finishing the comic novel about a pompous, slovenly critic-of-everything ruled by a domineering mother, in 1964 Toole sent the manuscript to Simon & Schuster.
The ms climbed to the desk of superstar editor, Robert Gottlieb, fresh off midwife-ing Joseph Heller’s screamingly brilliant debut, “Catch-22.”
Gottlieb was intrigued, recognizing the extraordinary talents Toole possessed … but he had problems. For two years, Gottlieb and Toole exchanged letters, with the editor begging for major revisions and the young dog of a writer attempting to please the master.
No luck.
As Gottlieb wrote, at one point, “with all its wonderfulnesses, the book—even better plotted (and still better plotable)—does not have a reason; it's a brilliant exercise in invention, but unlike CATCH [22] and MOTHER KISSES and V and the others, it isn't really about anything. And that's something no one can do anything about.”
Toole did something: He killed himself.
After Toole’s 1969 suicide, his mother -- bringing the book’s caricature of her to life -- succeeded in her mission of having the manuscript her son left behind published.
“Confederacy of Dunces” went on to win millions of fans, who alternately chuckle and roll their eyes over the extremely-inappropriate adventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, the hot dog vendor (his own best customer) who lands a job at a pants factory, where he plots a revolution …
As biographers have noted, Toole’s suicide -- like, probably, almost all suicides -- was the result of complex issues; exclusively blaming Gottlieb and Toole’s inability to publish his novel is simplistic.
Still … who knows what would have happened, if Gottlieb or another publisher would have stopped being dunces and published it.
Thelma Toole found another manuscript her son wrote as a teenager, and “The Neon Bible” was published in 1989. More grim than hilarious, it shows a striking depth to Toole’s talents.
Bottom line, here: If you’ve been rejected, don’t kill yourself! (If you are having thoughts of self-harm, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a United States-based suicide prevention network of over 160 crisis centers that provides 24/7 service via a toll-free hotline with the number 1-800-273-8255. It is available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress.)
For one thing, it’s almost ridiculously easy and fairly inexpensive to publish your own work. At the least, you’ll have presents to hand out at the holidays, to grimacing friends and relatives.
Of course, every unknown writer tapping away secretly dreams of the courtship of a New York publisher.
Having one of the big-timers publish you is like making love to an almost unbearably attractive, witty, spectacular movie star, who whispers how great you are; self-publishing is like fantasizing about that star, while you whisper how great you are …
Join the Rejected Writers group, and/or, email a synopsis of your work, a rejection letter -- and a snappy comeback (even if you haven’t and perhaps wouldn’t send it) to: tomscanlonsblog@gmail.com.
And don't let the "bad taste of that editor/publisher you pine after get you down.
As Ignatius, that curator of taste, sneered to one of his many enemies: “I really don't have the time to discuss the errors of your value judgements.”
Then again …
“It's not your fate to be well treated," Ignatius cried. "You're an overt masochist. Nice treatment will confuse and destroy you.”